John Diamond is the creator and lead developer of the popular free software game Alien Arena. He turned his hobbies and a talent for coding into a small business.

These three short videos — all less than 8 minutes long — give you an idea of Fedora 8’s "look and feel" during the installation and setup process, and show you what software is installed by default. The third video shows you how to install and — just as important — uninstall software in Fedora 8.

Damn Small Linux is tiny Linux distribution that John Andrews originally created in 2002 to see just how many applications could fit into a 50MB system. The project has grown over the years to include many other contributors working on hundreds of packages and applications. Last month’s release of DSL 4.0 brought many updates and changes, yet it remains a special-purpose distribution for older hardware because it lacks support for many modern features.

Apple’s .Mac service — commonly known as dotMac — is a suite of online utilities integrated with OS X. It is wildly popular with Mac owners, but it costs $99 per year. That annual hit to the wallet prompted J. Kent Pepper to commence a bounty-driven contest to create a free, open source replacement: the notMac Challenge. And he has found a winner.

Beginning today, anyone interested in getting an XO computer through the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program has a chance to grab one. The Give One, Get One (G1G1) program is open to US and Canadian residents who want to purchase one XO laptop for themselves for $399.

So you’ve written a nifty OpenOffice.org macro and want to share it with the world. You can, of course, publish the code on your Web site, but a better way to go is to pack it as an easy-to-install OpenOffice.org extension.

Firefox includes an option for bookmarking all open tabs, but heavy users of tabs will find that this option is hardly enough. When you are researching a subject, the particular combination of tabs matters as much as the individual ones — and, besides, selecting the tabs to open individually can be tedious if you are dealing with several dozen. And what happens if your session crashes before you have a chance to bookmark? You can address such concerns by installing Session Manager, a highly customizable add-on for preserving the state of the window after you close the browser.

I’ve been hearing the phrase "This is the year of the Linux desktop" for 10 years. For me, it’s been a true statement for each of those years, because GNU/Linux has been my primary desktop operating system since 1997. But for most people around the world, this is the year of the the Windows desktop, same as it was last year and the year before. But if we each spent one day telling others about GNU/Linux, could we make a difference in the lives of at least a few people? I think so. That’s why I’m promising — right here and right now — to spend at least one day in the next three months handing out free GNU/Linux install CDs, and why I invite you to join me in this effort.

What does a marketing guru with a passion for the South Seas and a penchant for entrepreneurship do? He launches an e-commerce site that sells noni juice, custom surfboards, and island-inspired home accessories, of course. And because the site is highly branded and feature-rich, he hires an open source developer to code it for him.

Handwriting recognition, like its cousins speech recognition and optical character recognition, is a domain still dominated by proprietary products. Where there are Linux solutions, such as the one in Nokia’s Maemo Internet tablets, they are often closed source plugins protected by patent claims. Thus I was pleasantly surprised to find CellWriter, a small, straightforward handwriting recognition tool that integrates easily with modern Linux desktops.