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The open source community is literally rocking the world and so is India’s largest Linux and Open Source convention and expo. The community is now being supported by Microsoft, long considered to be the 'opposing side'. Open Source India Week (OSIW) 2008 kicked off yesterday in Delhi after completing the Bengalure and Mumbai editions. At the occasion, Radhesh Balakrishnan, director, platform strategy, Microsoft, could be seen wooing the open source community, holding an olive branch in the form of promoting interoperability between the two systems.

Writing a custom app that could use a community bb, developer stumbles upon a ton more functionality added to his app after integrating it with phpBB than expected.

If you've always been itching to launch a startup but just couldn't come up with a killer idea, well, your ship is about to come in. No, it won't be quite as good as the Internet Bubble years, when any fool could raise a few million (hell, $30 or $40 million) to sell dog food online - no, really - but not bad, either.

SCO Group, which for years has claimed that Linux infringes on its Unix intellectual property, has received new funding and seems set to continue its battle against the open source operating system. Stephen Norris & Co. Capital Partners said Thursday it and unnamed Middle Eastern partners will fund The SCO Group with up to US$100 million to take over the financially beleaguered Unix company, move it out of bankruptcy protection, complete its controversial and unsuccessful Linux litigation, and take it private.

Just one year after Dell launched the IdeaStorm website where users can submit and vote on ideas for Dell to improve, the list of changes Dell has made is impressive, including launching their first Linux PCs.

On Monday, the LiMo Foundation, an industry consortium that wants to put Linux technology onto mobile handsets, announced the first release of its shared platform. The foundation also announced the immediate availability of the application programming interface (API) set for the platform. Prior to the announcements, ZDNet UK spoke with LiMo's executive director, Morgan Gillis, to discuss the platform, LiMo's rivals, and Nokia's entry into the organization.

Linpus Technologies has long been known in Taiwan for its Linux distributions. Now, it wants to become a player in the global Linux market with its new Linux distribution Linpus Linux Lite, which features a dual-mode user interface. One mode is for people who may never have used a computer before; the other is for experienced Linux users.

Google didn't get where it is today by charging end users for software and charging them again and again for endless upgrades. Back in the early Macintosh days (i.e. the mid- to late '80s), Apple used the OS to sell hardware. Upgrades were free. Today, Apple sells music at 99 cents a track, but what they're really selling is iPods, iPhones, iMacs, and any other damn thing they can slap an "i" in front of. Apple wins on the desktop -- and crushes Microsoft -- in one way: Make OS X free -- or very cheap. And make it run on Windows-compatible PCs and available preloaded from vendors like Dell and HP.

The cold, harsh truth is that Linux systems are pretty much ideal for being compromised for use as a botnet controller, ironically more often than not being in control of a virtual army of infected Windows PCs.

In the 35th edition of the Nouveau Companion, these open-source 3D NVIDIA driver developers talk about being a better bug reporter, X-Video improvements, PowerPC fixes, and MMioTrace being delayed until the Linux 2.6.26 kernel. At least three Nouveau developers will be at FOSDEM 2008 next week in Brussels, Belgium.

An ambitious initiative that aims to bring open source software to a new level in Europe hopes to make competition with US companies more interesting. QualiPSo is a four-year project partly funded by the EU. Its mission is to "bring together the major players of a new way to use and deploy open source software (OSS), fostering its quality and trust from corporations and governments."

SSH Key Authentication Using seahorse (GUI)

Need to know how to work with partitioning and virtualization? Want to know the differences between WPARs and zones and how the process differs from creating zones and WPARs? Have your questions addressed with this article and make your transition easier.

If you come from the world of Windows, you undoubtedly understand the concept of a shortcut. In the Linux world, shortcuts do exist, but they're generally referred to as symbolic links, or symlinks. They are so named because, like shortcuts, a symlink is really just a symbolic placeholder or link to the file or directory you're trying to get at.

Howto create a Transparent Terminal in Ubuntu Desktop

Zenwalk, a Slackware-based slim-and-zippy distribution, released a major update last month. The release announcement listed some noticeable enhancements and promised the best support for Wi-Fi you can expect in any Linux distro. Excuse me for being skeptic, but one doesn't expect midget distros to be the best in any field. How well can a single-CD 469MB distro hold up against every other multi-GB DVD distro available today? As it turns out, Zenwalk manages to squeeze in a long list of open source wireless drivers, as well as the proprietary Intel wireless device firmware. Surprisingly Zenwalk 5.0 not only does things you don't expect from a single CD distro, it does them with ease and very little command-line sorcery.

I finally managed to get a child in front of the XO PC from the One Laptop Per Child project. I thought I would share my observations from watching her interact with this interesting tool.

Mozilla has released beta 3 of Firefox 3.0, with around 1300 ‘individual changes’ from beta 2, with fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements. Firefox 3.0 beta 3 is here, with plenty of improvements set to send Firefox’s percentage of market share soaring ever higher once the final version is released to the public.

"Andrew [Morton] was looking for someone to run a linux-next tree that just contained the subsystem git and quilt trees for 2.6.x+1 and I (in a moment of madness) volunteered. So, this is to announce the creating of such a tree," began Stephen Rothwell, resulting in a lengthy thread discussing the current Linux kernel development process. In a follow up email announcing the first linux-next release, Stephen went on to explain, "it has two branches - master and stable. Stable is currently just Linus' tree and will never rebase. Master will rebase on an almost daily basis (maybe slower at the start)."

Make no mistake about, the Linux 2.6.x kernel is a *large* undertaking that just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Apparently it's also getting harder to maintain as well in terms ensuring that regressions don't occur and that new code is fully tested. That's where the new 'Linux Next' effort comes in.