Cody Taylor

ivaldes3 writes in to note his post up on Linux Medical News, pointing out the severe shortcomings of the Health IT provisions of the just-passed stimulus bill. “The government has authorized enough money to purchase EMR freedom for the nation. Instead the government appears set to double down on proprietary lock-down. The government currently appears poised to purchase serfdom instead of freedom and performance for patients, practitioners and the nation. An intellectual and financial servitude to proprietary EMR companies for little or no gain. A truly bad bargain.”

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The conclusion? The Desktop. Why the desktop? Linux has already conquered the server market. All it needs to do for that portion of its audience is to continue to scale upwards and keep creating incredible, usable servers. What Linux has failed to do yet is to show the world exactly what a desktop can do for the user.

bsk_cw writes “About a month ago, in Living free with Linux: 2 weeks without Windows, Preston Gralla wrote about what life was like for a long-time Windows user trying to live with Linux. His main problems came when he tried to install or update software. Loads of people responded with advice — so he went back and tried again. Here’s what he learned, and what did and didn’t work for him.”

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Jerry had a motorcycle accident last May and lost a finger. When the doctor working on the artificial finger heard he is a hacker, the immediate suggestion was to embed a USB “finger drive” to the design. Now he carries a Billix Linux distribution and the Freddy Got Fingered movie as part of his hand.

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We can’t show you solutions for every problem that might arise, but we *can* show some of the common issues people face and, more importantly, show you how to go about identifying a problem. So here’s our guide to dealing with some of the most common problems, and some advice on how to deal with new disasters. Don’t miss it!

supermehra writes “How do you move 300 desktops, locked down with Windows ADS Group Policies (GPO), over to Ubuntu desktop? We have tried Centrify, Likewise, Gnome Gconf, and the like. Of course, we evaluated SuSe Desktop Enterprise and RedHat Desktop. Samba 4.0 promises the server side, however nothing for desktop lockdown. And while gnome gconf does offer promise, no real tools for remotely managing 300 desktops running gnome + gconf exist. All the options listed above are expensive, in fact so expensive that it’s cheaper to leave M$ on! So while we’ve figured out the Office suite, email client, browser, VPN, drawing tools, and pretty much everything else, there seems to be no reasonable, open source alternative to locking down Linux terminals to comply with company policies. We’re not looking for kiosk mode — we’re looking for IT policy enforcement across the enterprise. Any ideas ladies & gentlemen?”

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This is the first version of this list – there are probably dozens of important geeks missing. Please help us fill it out by sending a shout to @tuxradar on Identi.ca or Twitter if we’ve missed someone, and make sure you send a few words about what they do. Please also get in touch if someone listed below is on Identi.ca as well as Twitter.

The KOffice developers have released their seventh beta for KOffice 2.0. This release may be the last of the many betas. A decision on whether there will be another beta or if the next version will be the first Release Candidates will be made next week.

Al writes “A company called Presto hopes to exploit the painful amount of time it takes for Windows computers to start up by offering a streamlined version of Linux that boots in just seconds. Presto’s distro comes with Firefox, Skype and other goodies pre-installed and the company has also created an app store so that users can install only what they really need. The software was demonstrated at this years’s Demo conference in Palm Desert, CA. Interestingly, the company barely mentions the name Linux on its website. Is this a clever stealth-marketing ploy for converting Windows users to Linux?”

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