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The relationship between business, vendors and coders has been tested at a Sun Microsystems conference in San Francisco intended to express oneness with open source. Ian Murdock, Sun vice president of developer and community marketing, and Marten Mickos, head of Sun's database group, used CommunityOne to outline Sun's ideals on recent acquisition MySQL, OpenSolaris and NetBeans. At the same time they explained Sun's attempts to monetize them.

After several weeks of delay, the First Issue (2nd Volume) of THE *NIXED REPORT is now available. Of interest to FOSS users is a previously unpublished blog entry from helios.

Your editor is not always known for making life easy for himself. Perhaps one of the most clear examples of masochistic behavior would be a certain preference for running development distributions on mission-critical systems. That said, your editor has stuck with a stable distribution on his laptop through a round of intensive travel earlier this year. But that was too easy, so, shortly before heading off to the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit, the laptop got moved to the Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" distribution. Needless to say, there have been some interesting ups and downs (literally) since then.

More people are converting to Linux platform and it seems that they are not regretting the conversion. It was after the church service when there was a tap on my shoulder. "Hey Neil, just letting you know that you converted me" said the voice. I turned around. There before me was Gary (not his real name), a member of our church. Before I had the brainpower to wonder why it was that a Christian in our church had just announced that I had converted him, he continued. "I'm using Linux"

Mercury Computer Systems announced a Linux-based engineering development kit (EDK) for a 7-10 pound computer that targets small ground, naval, and air vehicles. The "ruggedized" PowerBlock 50 (pictured at left) supports multiple processors to provide "well over 100 GFLOPS of processing power," according to Mercury.

This tutorial shows how you can enable Compiz Fusion on an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) desktop (the system must have a 3D-capable graphics card - I am using an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 here). With Compiz Fusion you can use beautiful 3D effects like wobbly windows or a desktop cube on your desktop.

OfflineIMAP allows you to read your email while you are not connected to the Internet. This is great when you are traveling and really need an attachment from a message but cannot connect to the Internet. You can use OfflineIMAP to sync all your email during the night so that it is all instantly available when you wake up. This is a security trade-off -- you gain speed and availability for your email at the expense of having to properly protect the local copy of all the email that is created on your laptop.

Want to run web applications on your desktop without a browser? Adobe’s Integrated Runtime (AIR) does exactly that and now an alpha release for Linux is available. Adobe has already released AIR 1.0 for Windows and Mac but apparently the Linux version has been delayed while Adobe waited for Flash for Linux to be finalised. Air makes it possible to run a range of applications (usually web applications) on Windows, Linux and Mac using the runtime environment.

The programme committee of the Akademy 2008 KDE contributor's conference would like to thank everybody who already has submitted a proposal for a presentation at Akademy 2008. The conference programme is beggining to gain shape. Due to popular request the program committee would like to solicit additional proposals and has decided to extend the deadline for submission of proposals to Monday, May 12th. Tell the world about your contribution to KDE. Tell the community what cool things you have done with KDE. Submit your proposal for a presentation at Akademy 2008 no later than Monday, May 12th 2008, 23:59 UTC, to akademy-talks-2008@kde.org.

KDE 4 gives you lots of freedom with your desktop icons and it turns out you can do a number of interesting things with that freedom.

Packt Publishing has published a book about administrating Scalix, an open source email and calendaring software package. Author Markus Feilner and the publisher have generously agreed to share a sample chapter on the the Scalix Administration Console (SAC), excerpted from the work, Scalix: Linux Administrator’s Guide.

Recently I had cause to buy a scanner. Being in a reasonably small home I was eager to save on desk-space, and so decided to upgrade my ageing inkjet printer at the same time. Having looked around I eventually went for an HP Photosmart C5180 device. This is my experience of installing it on Debian Lenny .

KDE Italia is attending this year'sOpen Mind Free Software event from May 8 to May 10, 2008. This event is tailored for all people with an emphasis on young students. Giovanni Venturi and Daniele Costarella will give a presentation on KDE 4 as well as provide further information on KDE applications during their workshop. Open Mind is located atVilla Bruno - San Giorgio a Cremano - Napoli - Italy. There will be a KDE Italia booth at the event where you can go for more information on the team as well as KDE. Please stop by and say hello to Giovanni Venturi and the rest of KDE Italia.

Suppose you’ve been good (or sort of good anyway), and you have a huge stack of CD-ROMs (or DVDs) with backups and archives of your old files. Great. But how can you find anything? I solved this problem today by making an index of all the files stored on these disks using a few simple GNU command line tools.

On this tutorial we can see how to make a dvd using dvdstyler and cinelerra. Dvdstyler uses "mpeg2 with audio" to make dvd, the problem is that cinelerra can not use this format, but this can be solved by dvdstyler that can directly mixing video and audio and this means low loss quality!

Using browsers which are Web 2.0 enabled whenever you just what to Google something is like calling out the Fire Brigade when you have just burned the toast. Definitive overkill. If you are just surfing for information, then you want the little browser on the low fat, low body-mass index, skinny latte diet with a low carbon footprint. If Dillo were a catwalk model, it would be size zero. Think of it as the Victoria Beckham of browsers— but better looking; where the big hitters like Firefox, Flock and Opera sometimes move like a Sloth on Mogadon, Dillo tears down the track like a Whippet on speed. read more here

In a new series of People Behind KDE interviews, we visit the United States of America to meet a KDE developer with an affinity for education, accessibility, and Asian culture, a person who works on getting you Hot New Stuff - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Jeremy Paul Whiting.

It is a natural process. Whenever groups are formed, fractions will emerge. And when those fractions unify for one reason or another, there are others who won't agree, stay behind and found new groups. In Open Source, nobody owns anybody. If you can't find what you need, if you don't agree with somebody, you make your own.

Sun Microsystems officially launched OpenSolaris (OS) today. Available pre-built as a combo live/install CD, the initial binary distribution download of the OS features a GNOME user interface, highly fault tolerant ZFS root filesystem, IPS package managment, and "DTrace" tuning tools.

"I'm a genuine old fart," says Tim Bray as he looks back at his three decades in computing. Widely known for his standards work on XML and the Atom syndication format, at an age when many former developers have moved entirely into management, he seems to have found a niche that takes advantage of his experience. As director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems, his job is to keep current with Web and general programming and to encourage adaptation of new developments within the corporation. At the recent Open Web Vancouver conference, Bray talked to Linux.com about how he fills his role at Sun, and the trends he sees in computing.