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This small city on Florida's Gulf Coast runs one of the most cost-effective municipal IT departments around. I last wrote about Largo's Linux-based client-server network in 2002. A lot has changed for Largo's computer-using city employees since then, and even more changes are in the works.

For all but three of the past17 years, Microsoft has been involved in antitrust litigation with government agencies. That's enough to wear anyone down. But as the Judge at Europe's Court of Appeals delivered his judgement on Monday, I did notice some ennui - not from dogged old hacks, but from a new generation of pundits.

Boy, this sure looks nice, eh? Simple, GUI goodness that you might think will work just fine. And for most of you, it might, so long as you can meet these requirements.

There are unlikely to be any new applications developed solely for Unix after 2009, George Weiss, a Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst, told attendees at Gartner's annual Open Source Summit here Sept. 20. "I expect that, around 2009, we will have seen the last application developed specifically for Unix, after which no applications will be developed just for that operating system, though updates to existing applications will continue for some time to come," Weiss said in an address titled "Planning a Third-Generation Linux Enterprise."

The Open Source Technology Center (OSTC) at Intel has launched a Web site, LessWatts.org, to help Linux users maximize power savings. The site hosts several open source projects, and shares tips and tricks to help optimize power consumption on hardware from portable devices running on batteries to large data centers.

"What is going on whenever someone changes a code is that they make a'derivative work'," began Theodore Ts'o."whether or not you can even make a derivative work, and under what terms the derivative work can be licensed, is strictly up to the license of the original. For example, the BSD license says:'redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met....' Note the'with or without modification'. This is what allows people to change BSD licensed code and redistribute said changes." He added,"it is not a relicencing, per se, since the original version of the file is still available under the original copyright; it is only the derived work which is under the more restrictive copyright."

Things have been going pretty well for open source and open standards recently. First, there was theimplosion of the SCO case, in the wake of which even SCOaccepts that it may not be around much longer. Then we had therejection of Microsoft's request for a fast-track approval of its OOXML rival to ODF. Finally, the European Court of First Instance hasrefused Microsoft's request for an annulment of the terms imposed by the European Commission. All are notable victories that many regarded as unlikely a few years ago. But elsewhere, other open movements are still in the early stages of the struggle against forces pushing closed, proprietary standards.

Open source is truly the best way to unlock the value of information technology, Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative, said at the annual Gartner Open Source Summit here Sept. 20. "Open source can give you a common operating platform for real, and if you use Linux as a leveler, the individual ships will all right themselves rather than colliding into one another," he said, pointing to the fact that even Microsoft submitted two of its licenses to the OSI for approval, although as a company it remains ambivalent toward open source.

Lobby4Linux has recently acquired the means to label and display the disks in an attractive way. Distro authors and communities are encouraged to send us any "official" cd labels they wish used. We have 4 distributions that have actively requested that their distribution be included in the list of those made available,

"We have just launched a fund drive to cover our expenses for one year - until September 2008. “Keep Us Going” is the motto - for we have been going on for one year by ourselves and we now need external help."

Lyons also used his FSJ blog to slam Linux. What most people don't realize is that as a Senior Editor for Forbes Magazine, he was able to parlay his business associations and friendships to launch semi-regular attacks against his favorite target. That target is Linux.

o3 magazine, the enterprise Open Source magazine, today announced a beta of its news portal, o3news. The portal is designed to track all Open Source enterprise-related news. The service guarantees 24/7 coverage across timezones thanks to a globally distributed staff. o3news.com monitors over 25 news sources to keep you updated with enterprise news as it happens. You can read the news online at o3news.com or subscribe to its RSS feed (http://o3news.com/o3news.rss).

I used to switch between KDE's Kontact and GNOME's Evolution. But it's been a long time since I've looked back at the latter. I finally settled on Kontact to keep me in touch with the reality of my hectic daily schedule. See how you can keep up...

This tutorial shows how to install MySecureShell on a Debian Etch system. MySecureShell is an SFTP server that is based on OpenSSH and can be configured in many ways, e.g. it has support for chrooting users into their homedirs or for limiting upload-/download bandwidths. MySecureShell makes SFTP available for users that do not have shell access so that these users do not have to use the insecure FTP protocol anymore.

Nowadays, many machines are running with 2-4 gigabytes of RAM, and their owners are discovering a problem: When they run 32-bit GNU/Linux distributions, their extra RAM is not being used. Fortunately, correcting the problem is only a matter of installing or building a kernel with a few specific parameters enabled or disabled.

Most people are content to let their word process or determine hyphenation and text breaks for them. And, most of the time, the result is acceptable if they do. However, just as the default justification can be improved if you want to take the time, so can the text flow. OpenOffice.org has the tools you need, but improving the text flow is as much about knowing the conventions of text flow (what you might think of as the typographical grammar) as the settings themselves.

When I began my career as an assistant architect 12 years ago, I used AutoCAD R12, 3D Studio, CorelDraw 6.0, and Photoshop 4.0 for architectural drawing and 3-D modeling. Today, many architects still use their later versions, but those bulky packages provide many functions an architect will never use. Luckily, there are several open source alternatives that are well-suited for architects -- QCad in place of AutoCAD, Blender instead of 3DMax, Inkscape in place of CorelDraw, and the GIMP as a substitute for Photoshop.

Ulrich Dreppernoted a difference between the Linuxconnect(2) man page and the POSIX specification. The former states,"connectionless sockets may dissolve the association by connecting to an address with the sa_family member of sockaddr set to AF_UNSPEC." The latter reads,"if address is a null address for the protocol, the socket's peer address shall be reset." Ulrich explained that he preferred the description in the Linux man page, but the Linux kernel seems to actually follow the POSIX specification,"is this functionality which got lost over time? Or is the man page wrong and this never was the case? Is this a worthwhile change?"

Intel plans to launch an effort called LessWatts.org on Thursday, a combination of open-source software and helpful hints to reduce power consumption of Linux servers, PCs and gadgets.

The Microsoft Permissive License, one of two licenses the software maker submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval as open-source licenses in August, is unlikely to be approved in its current form. There have been two principle objections to the license from the open-source community, Michael Tiemann, the president of OSI, told eWEEK in an interview here at the annual Gartner Open Source Summit on Sept. 20.