Your friends have been telling you to try out Ubuntu; forget the Microsoft proprietary operating system and liberate your computer. Yet, it's not such smooth sailing. Sure, you can download the Ubuntu CD, or get handed one, but once you're sitting at a login prompt what then? What can you actually do with this thing?

Verizon Wireless is backing a free operating system that competes with programs from Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Qualcomm Inc. and expects it to become the "preferred" software on its network.

Users of Red Hat Inc.'s Fedora who wanted an easier way to use the popular and free community-supported Linux operating system on portable USB drives have had their wishes granted.

Fedora 9, the latest release from the Fedora Project, goes up for download on Tuesday. The ninth release of Fedora ushers in a number of changes aimed at making the venerable distribution a more newbie-friendly desktop, but longtime users needn't fear a great dumbing down; version 9 packs plenty of power user punch as well.

Pick a kernel, any kernel. With your distribution's stable and testing kernels ready to install, plus the official kernel.org releases and release candidates, who's testing what, and are enough bugs getting fixed?

Alexander Viro discovered a race condition in the fcntl code that may permit local users on multi-processor systems to execute parallel code paths that are otherwise prohibited and gain re-ordered access to the descriptor table.

Nexuiz runs on an improved Quake engine called DarkPlaces. The engine has been undergoing on-and-off development by Lord Havoc, the game's creator, for several years. On icculus.org, Lord Havoc says he developed a custom OpenGL-only engine for DarkPlaces, and other modifications that "support Windows WGL and Linux GLX and have greatly improved graphics and image quality."

Linux has been getting a lot of press over the past six months, particularly populist distributions such as Ubuntu. Dell has installed Ubuntu onto its Linux PCs and laptops, and let’s not forget the phenomenally successful Eee PC from Asus, which runs the Xandros distro.

The next version of the Fedora Linux distribution, Fedora 9 “Sulphur”, has been leaked into the public domain due to a misconfiguration in one of the European download mirrors.