Just this week in the news, Jonathan Riddell, the leader of the Kubuntu project, announced that Canonical had decided to pull him off the Kubuntu project. Riddell explained that Canonical has decided to suspend Kubuntu's status as an official Ubuntu derivative, and to stop providing paid support for it.

This has left many Kubuntu users with a bad taste in their mouths, and wondering what will become of Kubuntu.

My family flew over to the USA to visit my wife's family in October 2011, and I couldn't pass up an opportunity to buy something technological for a lower price than I can get it in South Africa. One of the things I'd been wanting to buy for a long time was a netbook.

With this in mind, I did some searching and some research and decided to buy the Toshiba NB505 from Amazon.com. A number of the reviews on Amazon mentioned using Linux (usually Ubuntu) on the netbook, and they all said that it ran well. With this key piece of information, and a friend's recommendation of a similar model from Toshiba, I decided to save up some money and buy the NB505.

As per the site title, this blog is all about Christians and open source software, and how to use OSS in church and Christian organisations. We've discussed introducing and ultimately converting your church to OSS, and asked you what OSS you use in your church.

After blogging about these things, I thought it might be a good idea to write up a How To for those folks who use Linux on a regular basis, and want to set up a central Linux server at their church office.

My server setup at home works pretty well, so I am going to tell you how to make a similar setup.

The Details

• DHCP for assigning IP addresses to computers on the network
• DNS for caching of domain names, and serving the local server's internal domain name
• Samba for filesharing
• CUPS for a shared printer
• Arno's IPTables Firewall
• Apache HTTP server for web based app(s)
• Jethro PMM for membership management

Instead of me writing an article, I thought it might be time to ask those who read this blog about their church's open source usage. So, in no particular order, here are some questions:

• Does your church use open source software?
• Does it use OSS on Windows, or a full OSS stack (e.g. Linux/*BSD)?
• What open source applications does your church use?
• Does your pastor know he's using OSS?
• If you use OSS other than the usual suspects (Firefox, Thunderbird, etc), then what do you use it for?

At a guess, I'll say that most churches are probably in the "we use Firefox on Windows" category.

Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 2 is hot off the presses. We are reaching the stage in the development cycle of Ubuntu were things are pretty much in order. So, it is a good time to take a look at what the next release of many Linux users distro of choice is going to look like.

Lately, it seems all the talk with Ubuntu has been the desktop, more specifically Unity. It seems everyone is looking to redefine the desktop. GNOME 3/GNOME-Shell, Windows 8, and of course Ubuntu's in house shell for GNOME, Unity.  Unity was introduced on the desktop in Ubuntu 11.04, it had been used in previous netbook editions of Ubuntu also. Unity's introduction to the desktop was met with scepticism to say the least. The general opinion seemed to be that people either loved Unity or hated it, not a lot of middle ground.

As any other freedom-loving geek, I was rather excited when I heard about the first beta release of Ubuntu 11.10, the next release of Ubuntu. This also meant that Kubuntu would have their first beta out as well. I figured that the 3 of you who read my blog would probably like to see a review of Ubuntu's less well known sibling.

I initially only installed Kubuntu in a VirtualBox virtual machine, but realised that without actually using it, this review wouldn't be worth it. So, not being averse to shiny new software, I decided to upgrade my desktop to Kubuntu 11.10 as well.

Beta 1 of Ubuntu and Kubuntu 11.10, aka Oneiric Ocelot, has just been released. This is the first really big release of the next version of Ubuntu. Since I am a KDE/Kubuntu guy, I thought I'd do a review of the Kubuntu release.

Ubuntu folks don't need to feel left out, OMG! Ubuntu! has done a review of the Ubuntu release, so head on over there to read what they've said about Ubuntu, while I see what the new version of Kubuntu is like.

With more and more churches these days having an online presence, and with recent moves toward digitizing everything, a lot of churches are recording their sermons and putting the sermons on their web sites.

For churches that have not yet climbed onto this new bandwagon, it can seem a little daunting to start. They may wonder what new sound equipment they need to buy, as well as what special computers with special sound cards and expensive software are necessary to record their sermons.

This post has been migrated from http://christianoss.org/

Recently I was chatting with a few friends separately about Linux and using it in Churches. This got me thinking about what Churches might need, rather than about how to get Linux onto Church computers.

My friend Wesley and I were chatting about using the Dansguardian filtering software on a main firewall server at his Church's office. He initially wanted to install it on the desktop computers there, and then had the good idea to rather install it on a central server.