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John Dragoon, Novell’s Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer today announced that due to the difficult economic times, BrainShare 2009 has been cancelled. The announcement made it clear that the primary reason was that Novell’s customers “are under increasing pressure to reduce travel and other controllable expenses and are hesitant to commit to attending our BrainShare 2009 conference.”

The open source IT channel continues to grow up. The latest example: Compiere, which specializes in open source ERP and CRM, is hosting training events for VARs and solutions providers.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Linux Mint 6 (Felicia) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Linux Mint 6 is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 8.10 that has lots of packages in its repositories (like multimedia codecs, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Skype, Google Earth, etc.) that are relatively hard to install on other distributions; it therefore provides a user-friendly desktop experience even for Linux newbies.

Adobe Systems is extending on Thursday its AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) technology to Linux desktops. Previously available for Windows and Macintosh, AIR is Adobe's free technology that enables delivery of Web applications that also can run outside the browser; it lets Flash programs run on the desktop. The Linux version of the software can be accessed here. The company is making available version 1.5 of AIR for users of the OpenSuse 10.3, Fedora Core and Ubuntu 7.10 or higher open-source Linux distributions. AIR 1.5 also has worked on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop, but the company has not tested it on this implementation of Linux.

I have recently been writing some documentation in DocBook XML format that I wanted to convert to PDF. Debian has a really useful package called xmlto that you can use for this, but it did not work for me. Instead I opted to use the DocBook-XSL stylesheets to convert DocBook to fo and use Apache fop to convert it to PDF. DocBook-XSL and Apache fop work wonderfully well but there were a couple of bumps that I had to sort out before everything worked as it should, especially regarding the Java setup and getting images to work correctly. Here is how I set up my DocBook toolchain on Debian Lenny.

On December 17th, 2008, the OpenVAS developer team released OpenVAS 2.0.0 which marks the start of the next generation of the Open Vulnerability Assessment System for network security scanning.

There's a long standing argument over the differences between "open-source" software and "free" software. But, a more common error outside of software ideology circles is that you can use open-source software anyway you please. Nope. Wrong. It's never been that way. Cisco, the networking giant, should know better than this, but they've worn out the FSF's (Free Software Foundation) patience. So, Cisco is now being sued by the SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) on behalf of the FSF for Linux and other GPL copyright violations.

ZaReason, which makes Ubuntu PCs and notebooks, plans to launch Ubuntu servers as well. That's a small step forward Canonical's Ubuntu Server Edition. But challenges remain, reports WorksWithU, the independent guide to Ubuntu.

Linux has a strong following among those who manage corporate servers, a loyal corps of desktop users and a small but growing base of laptop users. But it's also been a big -- if stealthy -- success as a platform for gadgets. In fact, there ought to be a Linux Gadget Hall of Fame. I'll get it started with the first group of inductees: 10 of the most important gadgets of all time, each one based on Linux.

Some of us will find some kind of alleged spare time on our hands over the next few weeks. Certainly, there’s often some kind of break from “work” over the festive season. Traditionally free software developers have used such times for long coding sessions, get-togethers and “hack-fests”. Of course we’re not all hard-core (or even soft-core) hackers so here’s a few suggestions for the rest of us who might want to try something new over Christmas.

Even as the US economy collapsed this fall, Asterisk downloads rose 30 percent, according to Digium. But that's not all. The company's partner program is generating exponential growth. Here's the scoop, from The VAR Guy.

Initially setting up the XSCF facility on Sun M4000's is just as much fun as you think ;) You may have noticed (sometime in the last year or so ;) that I like to write about Sun computers and Solaris almost as much as I like to write about the many variants of Linux out there, without which I might not even have gotten interested in computing in the first place.

Sun Microsystems has announced the release this morning of VirtualBox 2.1 with several enticing additions. VirtualBox 2.1 introduces support for hardware virtualization (through Intel VT and AMD's AMD-V) on Mac OS X host systems, support for 64-bit guest operating systems on 32-bit host systems, support for Intel Nehalem (Core i7) virtualization enhancements, full VMDK/VHD support, a new NAT engine, and new Host Interface Networking implementations on Linux and Windows. Perhaps though one of the most exciting changes in VirtualBox 2.1 is initial support for OpenGL acceleration on the guest operating systems.

In this article, I'm going to present a whole variety of Linux games, across a range of genres. I'm going to review several titles in detail, complete with screenshots and grades. Next, I will talk about non-native Linux games, which can still be enjoyed using certain tools and methods. We will talk about the tools and methods, too. We'll also talk about mini-games that come bundled with distributions, Flash games, online game repositories, and more. It should be interesting. If you're a gamer, spend 5-6 minutes of your time reading. I promise you, you'll like it. So, if you are new to Linux and wondering if you can enjoy games on Linux, the answer is: very much so yes. Follow me.

Movial is shipping a new version of its mobile video communications software that offers high-definition (HD) PC-to-PC, and PC-to-mobile video-conferencing. In addition to releasing Movial Communicator PC 7.2, Movial announced it has partnered with Cypriot telecom carrier Cyta to offer Communicator-based video-calling services.

Every major web browser has been updated this week, mostly to deliver security patches. It isn't every week that sees the delivery of an update for or affecting each of the major browsers. Those of us who like or need to use multiple browsers have plenty of downloading and installing to do, so thank goodness the process is largely automated.

Six-year-old BlueStar Energy Services Inc. doesn't have the kind of systems-baggage that saddles many older organizations. Still, the Chicago-based company found itself hindered by the rigidity of its core systems, which constrained its efforts to expand its customer base and offer new services. Those barriers to growth led the company to embark on a bold effort to replace the bulk of its IT infrastructure -- including voice, e-mail and financial systems -- with open-source software. The initiative has been so successful that CEO Guy Morgan attributes much of the company's recent growth to it.

What's the crowd up to these days? Solving the world's problems -- and saving corporations a lot of money in the process. A few individuals are managing to eke out some personal gain in return for their contributions, but for the most part, the crowd is beginning to look like an incredibly large, wise, cheap labor pool. Fortunately, it's also unwieldy, which may be the crowd's saving grace.

The TangoCMS project has released version 2.2.0 of its web page content management system. Central to the release is resolving some security issues.

The largest trend in Solaris deployment these days is to wait for end-of-life and then replace the server with Linux, where possible. But now that OpenSolaris exists, should this trend continue? Perhaps we should look at OpenSolaris instead of Linux? Last week I took the stance that OpenSolaris could in fact replace Linux. In theory—in the future, if Sun plays its cards properly—this is possible. Asking if I’d deploy OpenSolaris at work, however, is a very different question.