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The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is seeking nominations for a new set of awards to recognize individuals and organizations contributing to open source software. The Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC), as they are called, will endow the recipients with grant money to further their work. Nominations will be taken at the Foundations Web site through August 4.

The two-year-old Symphony OS Project released a new beta version of its Symphony OS 2006-05 on May 18, its first release in nearly six months. The Debian-based distribution, which ships as a live CD with a hard drive installer, utilizes a 2.6.16 Linux kernel and the Mezzo desktop environment.

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Cash'n'CarrionDive Into Python is a hands-on guide to the Python language. Each chapter starts with a real complete code sample, proceeds to pick it apart and explain the pieces, and then puts it all back together again in a summary at the end.…

The GP2X can run games, music and movies, read e-books and store photos. The distributors claim that the handheld offers "higher quality audio and video playback" than the Sony PSP and it can also be connected directly to a TV set.

San Francisco-based StumbleUpon, which has four employees, makes a recommendation engine. When its users don’t want to trust places like a search engine, Google News, or Boing Boing to surprise them with fun and interesting sites, they ask the free service to throw something new their way. Then the company incorporates feedback to better deduce appropriate fits for each user.

A live CD Linux distribution can offer a full-fledged computing environment on a CD or DVD, but if you have access to a Windows-based machine, a removable storage device with Windows portable applications might be a better option. Luckily, using a Windows machine doesn't mean you can't use open source software. Many of the most popular portable applications are, in fact, open source: applications like OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird, Firefox, and Gaim. Let's take a look at some of the lesser-known and most useful portable applications you can put on your USB flash drive or mobile hard disk.

Statistics Canada has responded to concerned free software users by adding GNU/Linux support to the online census. While other free operating systems remain unsupported and issues about security and policy remain, this response is an important first step in ensuring open access to Canadian government online services.

The problem: you've taken the trouble to hand-build your finely tuned 64-bit computer, and you've installed your favorite 64-bit flavor of Linux -- but the cretins who run the World Wide Web are still putting up content viewable only on 32-bit Intel-compatible Web browsers, either designed for their in-house plugins that they supply only as 32-bit binaries, or in compressed media formats for which players are available only as 32-bit binaries. What are your options?

The challenges for IT in places like Africa, where a number of developing nations reside, are formidable: power grid issues, metered telephony in many cases, and the heat, sand, or storm conditions that make hardware difficult to maintain. One group in Nigeria, the Fantsuam Foundation, is partnering with expLAN Computers, Ltd. of Devon, United Kingdom, to developing a computer that addresses hardware issues. The effort is called the Solo Computer Project.

Welcome to this year's 20th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. With a successful SUSE Linux 10.1 release freshly behind us, the attention of distribution watchers can once again turn to Ubuntu, as the project's final two weeks of "Dapper" development focuses on bug fixes and polish. Has Kororaa broken the GPL by including proprietary kernel modules on their live CD? Nobody knows for sure, but even if it hasn't, the controversy means that the project's developers might stop all work on their Xgl edition.

Sun Microsystems plans to offer support for the Ubuntu server Linux distribution on its T1 server line, the company said at the JavaOne industry conference in San Francisco. "We will be aggressively supporting the fork that Ubuntu has been doing," Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz said at the conference.

There are some simple steps your company can take to demonstrate that the e-mails you're sending aren't spam. If you're not taking them, many recipients are now ready and willing to filter your messages into the trash.

I've been a Linux diehard since my early days with Debian 1.3. I visited various RPM distributions, including Red Hat, Mandrake, and SUSE, flirted with Gentoo, and jumped on the Ubuntu bandwagon, but I could never find a single place to settle -- until I tried Arch Linux.

Last December I blogged about some uproar Linux creator Linus Torvalds had caused by posting on the gnome.org Usability list his extreme dislike for the direction the Gnome developers had taken with the UI.

Opinion: Could a Red Hat or Novell somehow take over Linux and become like Microsoft? The answer is no. NO, with a capital"N" and"O."

SmartyHost has admitted to teething problems in the migration of its datacenter facilities from Primus to Optus. Originally announced in April as a way to improve its quality of service, the Australian web-hosting company began its migration last Wednesday. Ever since, SmartyHost has been beset with complaints on broadband community site, Whirpool.net.au.

This is the first in a series of tips on how to use Nmap in an enterprise network environment.

Arguing for an increase in your IT security budget is often an arduous task, so many administrators turn to free open source tools to help get the job done. But how can they rely on tools with no commercial support and that never get past the beta version? Well, if you think like that, you need to think again.