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Japanese television technology that will give viewers access to high-speed broadcasts over the internet could render conventional television obsolete and transform the media landscape within years, analysts have predicted. The country's electronics and telecommunications industries are developing a technological standard for a new "internet television" set, which will let users browse websites and watch streaming programs at the touch of a remote control.

The government-led Korean digital textbook project will adopt Linux. The Ministry of Knowledge Economy and the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology of Korea announced their decision to choose the open software for digital textbook, the key project for the government's digital education policy. The digital textbook provides the contents of conventional textbooks, reference books, workbooks and terminologies in the form of video files, animations and virtual reality. It is the main learning material for students with various interactive features that cater for the needs of learners with different levels of capability.

Welcome to this year's 21st issue of DistroWatch Weekly! An interesting week that brought two big enterprise Linux updates (SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP2 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, both released on the same day) and a number of smaller distribution releases, of which Absolute Linux 12.1, Ultimate Linux 1.8 and TinyMe 2008.0 seem the most impressive. But the big focus of the coming weeks is undoubtedly openSUSE 11.0 - the most innovative Linux distribution release for some time. Do help with testing, though, if you can. In the news section, Paul Frields and Mark Shuttleworth talk to various publications about their respective distributions, CentOS explains why it takes three weeks to build a new version of its distribution, Xubuntu plans to add some of the much-requested features into Intrepid Ibex, and Famelix GNU/Linux receives undue attention from Microsoft's anti-piracy body. Also not to be missed: our first look at OpenSolaris 2008.05 and an update on Zenwalk's package management utility, Netpkg. Happy reading!

Linux vendor Red Hat has updated its enterprise Linux version with features for big servers and some green improvements. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 includes virtualization support for bigger systems and more memory architectures. The new version supports up to 64 CPUs and 512GB of memory, and can virtualize across non-uniform memory access (NUMA) systems. It also has new drivers to improve support for x86/64, Itanium, IBM Power and IBM System Z.

Currently, bash only supports one dimensional aways, however there are several different ways to emulate associative arrays in bash.

Earlier this month we announced that AMD would soon be releasing their Stream SDK for Linux, and just before the start of the weekend this inaugural release had occurred. The Linux release of the AMD Stream SDK v1.1 Beta brings both CAL and Brook+ for those using ATI/AMD graphics hardware. This v1.1 Beta release is also in tune with the new beta release for Microsoft Windows XP.

In 2007 a handful of countries began a treaty-making process to create a new global standard for intellectual property rights enforcement, the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). ACTA is spearheaded by the US, the EU Commission, Japan, and Switzerland — those countries with the largest intellectual property industries. Other countries invited to participate in ACTA’s negotiation process are Canada, Australia, Korea, Mexico and New Zealand. Noticeably absent from ACTA’s negotiations are leaders from developing countries.

After the multi-lateral treaty’s scope and priorities are negotiated by the few countries invited to participate in the early discussions, ACTA’s text will be “locked” and other countries who are later “invited” to sign-on to the pact will not be able to re-negotiate its one-sided terms. It is claimed that signing-on to the trade agreement will be "voluntary", but few countries will have the muscle to refuse an “invitation” to join, once the rules have been set by the select few conducting the negotiations.

[This is news because May 22th a discussion paper appeared at WikiLeaks. In March, when it was yet unknown what ACTA would look like, IP Justice published the white paper the 'Full Story" links too. It's a paper about how the rich governments try to almost forbid P2P, stifle innovation through broader 'piracy protection', colonize poor countries and create more opportunities to spy on its citizens. All that in a secret undemocratic way; taking away digital rights. However, their excuses are quite good: Stopping dangerous fake-medicines, car parts etc. - hkwint]

At least three open source software suppliers submitted tenders to Becta yesterday for the £270,000 Schools Open Source Project. The winner will spend two years building a community of schools which uses and develops its own open source alternatives to Microsoft software.

The Dutch Council of State is willing to open source its application that can centrally convert documents between open formats and proprietary formats, said Marcel Pennock, the tool's developer, Wednesday at a conference on Open Document Format (ODF) in Utrecht.

The official text of the appeal in PDF.

The Moscow regional administration will test usefulness of an Open Source desktop by migrating several hundreds of desktop PCs to Mandriva GNU/Linux and by installing OpenOffice on a thousand others.

[Hmm, yeah, news from Russia travels a bit slow to LXer it seams; or is it just I should check the migration news more often? - hkwint]

LXer Feature: 25-May-2008

In this week's Roundup we have reviews of 7 Audio Players and 42 of the best free games for Linux, the $100 laptop platform moves on, seeing Linux clearly, Chinese Linux rises 22 percent in 12 months and a great article titled Chicks Love Linux. We have lots Microsoft related articles including Microsoft blames users for Vista infections, Microsoft to make Office open to ODF format, Can Microsoft 'do' open source by 2015? and my favorite Microsoft offers cash back on searches.

The Russian Post has started testing the free software to be used in ordinary post offices. Cutting costs for software is one of the main reasons to migrate to Linux. No details are reported. However, according to some sources, the Russian Post might prefer Red Hat.

[Sunday is a good day to bring old news from a month ago, isn't it? Nonetheless, 125.000 new Linux desktop users are normally a reason for a big article, so a bit strange we missed this one. Sorry on behalf of the LXer team - hkwint]

[ Though not really 'news', this article presents an interesting overview of software patentability in Europe. It was written by two senior associates of a legal studio based in Rome - hkwint ]

About the time this site was taking shape in the very late Spring and early Summer of 2007, I was detecting a plaintive tone in the responses I was getting from a very few invited viewers. There were even complaints about the colors. Too soon I too knew that the grayish blue tone I was viewing on my main monitor did not match what others were seeing. Indeed, I needed only to move the browser to the monitor to the right of my dual monitor setup to see both the color shades and color depth differed. Not good.

The world's top handset maker Nokia Oyj expects the role of the Linux operating system in its product portfolio to increase as the role of its Internet-focused devices grows, company officials said. Linux has so far had little success on cellphones, but its role is increasing as more new Linux-based models reach the market, while Google Inc gave it a vote of confidence by using it to build its Android platform on.

A look at the difference between how, why, and when geeks and regular people get new PCs.

In this HowTo I will describe how to prepare a Debian Etch server for OpenVZ. With OpenVZ you can create multiple Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on the same hardware, similar to Xen and the Linux Vserver project. OpenVZ is the open-source branch of Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization solution used by many providers that offer virtual servers. The OpenVZ kernel patch is licensed under the GPL license, and the user-level tools are under the QPL license.

This posting attempts to address several issues raised up during the recent discussion at Lxer.com. View:- OpenSolaris 2008/05 Live CD worked for me just now
Install on bare metal is quite simple if OpenSolaris HCL has been consulted before it began.
Create installation profile for OS200805 HVM Guest ...

So according to El Reg, it turns out ASUS is selling its Eee 900 laptops in the UK with 4400mAh batteries -- quite a bit smaller than the 5800mAh batteries that come in the US version. It's insult to injury when you consider that the larger screen necessarily sucks down more juice than on the 700 series, but ASUS explains that overseas users get a tradeoff in exchange: UK warranties last two years, supposedly longer than their US counterparts (although to be fair, we've heard of retailers listing the US Eee's warranty at two years as well). Caveat emptor, and all that.