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PCLinuxOS Magazine, November 2008 (Issue 27) is available to download. You can find it at the PCLinuxOS Magazine website. If you'd like to be informed immediately about our releases, please signup for the Magazine-Announce mailing list .

I like Linux netbooks. I like them a lot. They're lightweight, they're solid performers, they're cheap, and it looks like they're soon going to be cheaper than ever. According to Mike Elgan, starting on Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving, you'll see new, solid brand-name netbooks going for as little as $199. We're already seeing Best Buy offering the Asus Eee PC 900a for $299. Will we see the Asus Eee PC 1000, which I like, for $399? We just might.

In addition to VIA announcing a register documentation drop and driver partnership, S3 Graphics, which is a VIA Technologies joint venture company, has announced a new graphics card. Earlier this year S3 announced the Chrome 440 GTX, but today's press release christens the Chrome 500 series. The Chrome 500 series is compatible with OpenGL 3.0 (and Microsoft DirectX 10.1) and is quite an affordable graphics card.

This howto describes a method to install a Squid 3 server as an anonymous proxy. An anonymous proxy is a tool that attempts to make activity on the Internet untraceable. It accesses the Internet on the user's behalf, protecting personal information by hiding the source computer's identifying information. Simply say to hide your IP.

Beat the IT budget blues with these 5 ideas. You'll save money and enjoy great performance and peace of mind.

I've been using a T-Mobile G1 for about a month now, and while it's the best phone I've ever owned (yes, I bought it), I haven't yet found myself sayingI love this phone. I like it plenty, don't get me wrong, but like any device, it's got things about it that are frustrating and other things that are pretty cool.

An easy way to keep track of user groups in passwd to cap off the business week. Today we're going to shoot out another quick scriptlet that might be useful (or distracting ;) from time to time. It’s a bit of a follow up on our post from earlier this week on using bash to produce fancy user names for folks logged into your machine, although it’s a little bit longer.

Dismissed, dismissed, dismissed. $2,547,817 in converted monies, over $918,122 in interest on it, and $625,486.90 for the constructive trust against The SCO Group. That's well over $4,000,000 that SCO will no longer have for bogus litigation. If they are indeed ordered by the court to pay, it will reduce their equity by roughly half. My money is on Darl McBride never being allowed to try this stunt again.

LinuxPlanet Classics: The popularity of Ubuntu Linux has attracted millions of new Linux users. Helping inexperienced computer users, whether as part of your job or just on a friendly basis, can be demanding and frustrating. But it is an essential part of building community, and just being a decent person. Michael Hall has some helpful pointers for keeping perspective, keeping your temper, and keeping your sanity.

Most system administrators planning to install Linux on IBM System p eventually run into an important question: Which Linux distribution should I install? This article compares two distributions from Red Hat and Novell, and weighs the pros and cons of each.

Firefox is cram-full of hidden treasures, as we have learned in this series. Today Akkana Peck exposes Firefox's expertise at handling those ridiculously long URLs that plague the Web-- email clients mangle them, copy and paste is a nightmare-- but Firefox has some special tricks that make them easy.

Ziff Davis Media announced Wednesday that it was ending print publication of its 27-year-old flagship, PC Magazine, and would take the title online only. PC Magazine’s circulation was 1.2 million in the late 1990s. It is the latest of several magazine publishers to drop a print edition, as advertising plummets and the cost of printing a paper version rises. “The viability for us to continue to publish in print just isn’t there anymore,” Jason Young, chief executive of Ziff Davis, said in an interview.

[Moving to a online only publication? It seems the trickle is becoming a flood. - Scott]

Fedora 10 isn't even being released until next week, but five features have already been approved for Fedora 11 and a release schedule has been put in motion. FESCo, or the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, convened yesterday and approved the Fedora 11 release schedule (though it's likely to change as with all past releases) and approved five of the proposed Fedora features. The five features that are marked to be introduced in Fedora 11 include DeviceKit integration, improved volume controls, Windows cross-compiler support, Presto plug-in integration, and simple support for setting up a multi-seat system.

If Microsoft would pursue one of their own MVPs so viciously and tenaciously, over nothing more than a damned plugin, what do you suppose they’ll start doing once their “IP” has well and truly infested Free Software?

System monitoring tool Nagios offers a powerful mechanism for receiving events and commands from external applications. External commands are usually sent from event handlers or from the Nagios Web interface. You will find external commands most useful when writing event handlers for your system, or when writing an external application that interacts with Nagios.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Thursday, November 20, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Today you'll discover how low open source company stock has gone, you'll find out that Mozilla is doing okay, that Moonlight is coming (real soon now), that your old computers are going places you don't care to know, and that Jurassic Part may be just around the corner. Or not.

Mythbuntu lets you do anything you will want to do in terms of media content and has the features to enhance your entire media center. Once I hooked it up to my network I immediately had movies, music, etc. off the Internet. I cannot emphasize how easy to set up it was.

Ubuntu and CentOS are now in the rPath. The company yesterday began shipping a version of its rBuilder build and release management system for Linux that adds those distros; the tool previously worked only with Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise and its own rPath Linux.

Mozilla has advised Firefox customers not to try add-ons classed asexperimental, such as the recently released China Channel, because they could cause computer problems. Firefox add-ons allow users to personalize their browsing and add additional features, and because Firefox is open source, many of these add-ons are thought up by third-party developers.