We recently asked readers for requests on new articles you’d like to see (and thanks for all the great ideas!). One such request was a beginner’s guide to Arch Linux. As a Linux distro addict, I’ve heard of Arch many times over the years but for some reason, I’d never actually given it a shot. In particular, one aspect that’s always interested me has been Arch’s homegrown package management system, pacman. Today we’ll be finding out what Arch is all about, how to use it, and what makes it special.

Tiny Core Linux is a very small minimal Linux desktop. It is based on the Linux 2.6 kernel, Busybox, Tiny X, and Fltk.

Are you creative enough to win? Enter and find out. As promised yesterday, this is my potential solution to the Linux survival question: A Linux Commercial–created by you–and it’s a contest. Sound exciting? You creative types will now have a chance to create your own short film/video/commercial for Linux. Give Linux a face, a voice, a rap, a song, a cool theme–whatever! The sky’s the limit and I want to see your best work on this project. Create a short video, upload it to YouTube and let’s see what happens.

I think it is time that Sugar Labs and Sugar developers to realize that the success or failure of Sugar does not depend on its ability to play YouTube videos. Not because is not important but because there is very little chance to penetrate this market dominated by Microsoft and Apple. Like it or not Sugar Learning Platform’s success or failure lays on its 1 million users with XO-1 (and hopefully XO-1+). If they are successful and happy and the data pile in to support it, everybody will pay attention and traction will be gained even in the developed world. However, even then Sugar’s aim should be the virgin markets.

In part 3 of our gamers recommendations we present more strategy games, puzzles, card games, language skill training and more. To be continued..

A post on the Ubuntu Tweak blog points out that the new 0.5 version release should come today: I plan to make it online at the the last day of 2009: I don’t want to take this task to the new year, because I’ve been developed for them over half year! Ubuntu Tweak 0.5 will come with a redesigned UI (but version 0.6 will suffer major UI changes), XFCE specific features and most importantly: the ability to fetch online database to keep the ppplication information up-to-date. That means that you will be able to keep your applications and sources up-to-date without updating Ubuntu Tweak.

Michael Widenius continues his campaign to keep Oracle from acquiring MySQL
with href="http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-keep-internet-free.html">a
petition and a lengthy FAQ on what he sees the problems being. “If the deal is approved based on the fact that ‘MySQL can be forked’, that will be a big blow to open source Software.

It means that open source software is not protected for anti-competitive
measures and it will be ok for big companies to freely buy up their open
source competitors and kill them.

Note that not even PostgreSQL is safe from this threat! For example, Oracle
could buy some companies developing PostgreSQL and target the core
developers. Without the core developers working actively on PostgreSQL, the
PostgreSQL project will be weakened tremendously and it could even die as a
result.”

Free software made steady progress in 2009, even if it didn’t have the excitement of previous years.

We finally have tons of machines that come in these tiny little boxes, sometimes with pretty interfaces, that hook straight up to our TVs.

Debian has updated
expat (denial of service).