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Anti-Linux evangelists try to level many claims against the free open source operating system Linux. Arguments against the base cost (nothing!) or about the turnaround time to repair security exploits don’t work. But there is one item in the anti-Linux arsenal which often hits hard: lack of support. Here's why it makes good Linux techies groan when they see it.

The already vicious lawsuit involving Barracuda Networks and Trend Micro that is currently in discovery in front of the American International Trade Commission (ITC) just turned nastier. Barracuda has filed its own patent infringement claim against Trend Micro, based upon three recently acquired patents. The suit is in response to Trend Micro's allegation that its patent is being infringed by Barracuda shipping Clam Antivirus (ClamAV), the popular free software application, and appears designed to pressure Trend Micro to reach a negotiated settlement. "It's unfortunate that we have to spend time and energy and money doing this BS legal stuff when we could be spending that time and money and energy making the Internet a safer place," says Dean Drako, Barracuda's president and CEO. "It makes you sad."

I just noticed the folks over at CodeWeavers are having a get the word out campaign. If your a proud customer of theirs and would like to help them spread the word about the great products that they have, this would be a good time to do it.

Adrian, you dumb arse! At least that was my initial reaction when I read his “Linux’s dirty little secret” column about his struggles with installing applications onto a Linux distro. It was either the Linux Geek rage originating from the knowing that he didn’t Read the Fine Manual (RTFM) or the sheer jealousy of not getting 300+ Talkbacks whenever I post something on ZDNet like the fine Mr. Kingsley-Hughes. But I digress.

Microsoft Corp. will begin selling its Office programs to consumers on a subscription basis starting mid-July, in a bid to reach thrifty PC buyers who would otherwise pass on productivity software. The software bundle, which also includes Microsoft's Live OneCare computer security software, will be sold at nearly 700 Circuit City stores for $70 per year.

I've been waiting ... and waiting ... for Debian to come to its senses and re-add the sound chip -- the ESS 1988 Allegro -- in my Gateway Solo 1450 back into the Lenny kernel. Sound had been fine in Debian Etch (Stable) and in the first two kernels in Debian Lenny (Testing), but once the 2.6.24 kernel was added, I lost sound on the $0 Laptop. Reverting back to the 2.6.22 kernel restored my sound, and I eventually hunted down the bug report, which -- in grand Debian tradition -- didn't solve the bug but instead provided a work-around.

A commercial RTOS and tools provider will host an event for embedded Linux developers on August 6th, during the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. "Wind River Developer Day" will offer sessions on the mobile device market and Carrier Grade virtualization, along with Wind River product tutorials and demos.

This tutorial explains how you can run your own web server on CentOS 5 with the help of Apache and the BIND name server.

Yesterday I discussed the Bonnie++ tool, which can be used to benchmark filesystem performance. When you are tweaking a RAID and filesystem combination, you generally want to see whether your changes work in a positive manner across the board, and by how much. I created a utility called bonnie-to-chart to show the results of multiple Bonnie++ runs in either absolute or relative performance terms. It's primarily a Perl script that can be used together with the Open Flash Chart component.

After the recent release KDE 4.1 beta 2 and openSUSE 11 with KDE 4.0.4, some critics have been especially vocal in expressing their displeasure with the KDE 4 user interface paradigms. The debate has grown increasingly caustic as critics and supporters engage in a war of words over the technology. The controversy has escalated to the point where some users are now advocating a fork in order to move forward the old KDE 3.5 UI paradigms. As an observer who has closely studied each new release of KDE 4, I'm convinced that the fork rhetoric is an absurdly unproductive direction for this debate.

The Institute for Justice has filed a lawsuit on behalf of computer repair guy Mike Rife against the Texas Private Security Bureau (PSB) arguing that a new law unconstitutionally denies computer repair companies the right to work in their chosen profession. This based around the Texas Constitution which protects the right of Texans to earn an honest living without unreasonable government interference.

[Not FOSS related but I thought it would be of interest - Scott]

BusinessWeek's Steve Hamm and Geri Smith have written One Laptop Meets Big Business, a good article summing up the recent history of the OLPC project and it's difficulties with sales numbers, fading promises, Intel, and its internal strife over the Microsoft decision. None of that information is particularly new, but the article continues and goes in to some insightful problems with the educational model of the OLPC project formulated at 1CC, the OLPC headquarters; namely, hubris.

A couple of weeks back, a small New Zealand-based company, OnlineGroups.Net, released the source code for its online collaboration platform, GroupServer. When a big company releases source code for anything, it's often termed a risky move. For a small company, the risks are more or less the same.

The popular social networking site Facebook just announced a Chinese version, but similar Chinese-based Web sites such as Xiaonei and Hainei have been struggling there. However, since April, UCenter Home, an open source social network service based on PHP and MySQL, is pushing open social networking in China. Like other successful follow-the-leader Web sites in China (take Baidu, for example, which is a counterpart of Google), UCenter Home lacks innovative ideas but is good at localization. Its social network framework copies Facebook's, but it brings a style to the Chinese market that is more welcomed by local people than other foreign and domestic competitors.

Well, since I've gone through both Ubuntu and openSuSE Linux, and my curiosity about Unix systems in general has really started to kick in, I've decided to go through a few more variants to see what they are like, how they load on my laptops, and whether I might prefer one of them over my current favorite (Ubuntu). I might end up regretting this decision, but I assume there will be plenty of adventure and frustration along the way, and perhaps some learning and enlightenment.

How to attempt to work around the fact that Solaris 10 zones, living on zfs rooted filesystems, can't be handled properly by Sun's Solaris 10 upgrade!

LinuX-Gamers Live is a live DVD from Germany based on Arch Linux that includes nothing but games. Version 0.9.3 was released in June and provides an excellent means of sampling Linux games or setting up a home arcade, although a few of the games wouldn't run on my machine. There are no productivity tools, Web browsers, or package managers here; this disc is all play and no work. Because it's a live DVD, no hard drive is required to run the games. Once you burn the downloaded image to a DVD, you have a portable arcade that will run on any x86 system with 512MB or more of RAM. A 3-D accelerated video card is also required for most of the games. Proprietary drivers for Nvidia and ATI-based video cards are included, so you can enable acceleration for those types of cards by simply answering a few dialogs during the boot process.

A private school in St. Louis, Mo. is increasingly choosing Linux for the computers it supplies to students and faculty, according to laptop supplier Lenovo. Students at the Whitfield School are using Linux about 86 percent of the time now, Lenovo says, up from 50 percent three years ago. Lenovo has supplied about 600 laptops to the Whitfield School, it says, including systems that run both Linux and Windows. Whitfield started its PC program in 2005, and this year achieved its goal of supplying each student in grades six through 12 with their own laptop, it says.

Today's IT managers face tough choices. PCs that run fine today have an uncertain upgrade path, now that Microsoft has chosen to discontinue Windows XP. Upgrade costs associated with Vista, coupled with the ever-escalating cost of application licenses, make switching to desktop Linux an increasingly attractive option. For many businesses, however, it's difficult to know where to begin. The Linux market is broad and thriving, with myriad options to choose from. Most organizations will want to phase in Linux gradually, which in many cases will mean supporting a heterogeneous computing environment for the first time. As a result, it can be hard to predict where software incompatibilities might affect critical business processes.

Linux is a hacker’s dream computer operating system. It supports tons of tools and utilities for cracking passwords, scanning network vulnerabilities, and detecting possible intrusions. I have here a collection of 10 of the best hacking and security software tools for Linux. Please always keep in mind that these tools are not meant to harm, but to protect.