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I spent some time this week playing with and learning about the concept of public computing -- computers placed in public locations, primarily for accessing the Internet. There is a Canadian company that has really nailed the whole concept. Userful Corp. out of Calgary (www.userful.com) has a product called the Discover Station, a Linux-based computer that is designed from the ground up for public computing.

Power.Org will sponsor the first Power Architecture Developer Conference in the Austin Convention Center September 24-25. The vendor-neutral convention will gather Power.org's corporate members with developers, hardware and software solution providers, academics and designers to show how open collaboration can break down barriers to innovation. The two-day event will include technical sessions, hands-on labs, keynote addresses and vendor demonstrations.

IBM added a delicious twist on its new commitment to help OpenOffice.org battle Microsoft Office by donating code that was originally derived in part from a Microsoft-developed technology. IBM’s iAccessible2, code-named Project Missouri, is a specification for technology used to help the visually impaired interact with Open Document Format (ODF)-compliant applications and was developed in part using Microsoft Active Accessibility (MAA) as a starting point.

With an incremental update to its Solaris 10 OS, Sun is extending the platform's virtualization capabilities to accommodate Linux and Solaris on the same computer. Sun will add to the Solaris Containers capability, which has bolstered server usage by allowing for multiple instances of Solaris on the same server, said Dan Roberts, Sun director of marketing for Solaris. With Solaris 10 8/07, being announced Tuesday, users can run Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS Linux, and Linux applications via Solaris Containers for Linux Applications.

Since launching Yellow Dog Linux for the Playstation 3 (PS3) last year, Terra Soft has been busy expanding its presence in the Cell processor ecosystem. To get an update about what the company has been doing, we contacted Terra Soft's CEO Kai Staats via email in Nakuru, Kenya. Staats is there working with the Pistis Orphanage & Academy to complete some important projects for the children's home and school.

Five fresh rumors have arisen surrounding the secretive Google Phone, but unfortunately none point toward a potential release date. The most interesting rumor is that the Google Phone will not be running on Windows Mobile like all over HTC-produced smartphones and Pocket PC Phones. Instead, it will get treated to a Linux system similar to that offered on certain Motorola phones.

The energy efficiency battle between Linux and Windows is intensifying, with each claiming to be better at cutting power consumption and avoiding environmental damage. The Linux Foundation has already clarified its plans to bring improved power management to the operating system through its Green Linux Initiative. The working group is making it easy for kernel developers, hardware manufacturers, system vendors, distributions and end users to collaborate on the requirements for more effective power management in Linux.

I've said it before, with the proper support in place, anyone can use certain Linux distributions successfully. And apparently, this has been shown to be true yet again. But even considering this success story, there remains a shortage of understanding on which dial-up modems will work and why, if that new all-in-one printer grandma just purchased will work with her chosen distribution and so on.

Shopping for a home computer involves more than just choosing hardware — buyers must also pick what kind of operating system they want to run that new machine. And for most people, that's long meant choosing between Microsoft's Windows, which runs on PCs, or OS, the system that operates Apple's Macintosh. Enter Linux, an operating system created by Finnish university student Linus Torvalds as a hobby. Once only a toy for geeks, Linux now is vying for a place in the consumer operating system market.

[Not "news" really, but these kinds of stories are appearing more and more on non-tech sites. – Sander]

Now that Oracle 11g has hit shelves, the question many IT shops ask themselves is which hardware and operating system does Oracle run best on? When it comes to Oracle server platforms, Donald Feinberg, a Gartner Inc. analyst, said it's really a toss-up between Unix and Linux. "In general, Oracle runs well on any Linux-capable hardware," he said.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Colour Picker and Welcome applets appear for Plasma. Many bugs fixed, especially through the merge of the Summer of Code project "KRDC Revamp". A KPart created, amongst other improvements in Marble. Support for XESAM UserLanguage queries in Strigi. More work, especially in playlist handling, for Amarok 2.0. Improved search interface in KSystemLog. A return to work on KRecipes. KVocTrain is renamed Parley. Restart of development on a successor to the Eigen math library, Eigen2. Start of a port of KMLDonkey, a file sharing frontend, to KDE 4. Parts of the Cokoon decorator infrastructure ported from Python to C++. Security fixes in KDM. Work on page effects in KPresenter. Kross bindings for the Falcon programming language. Import of PyKDE4, new Python bindings for KDE development. KDE SVN housekeeping sees the move of a variety of unmaintained applications to more relevant locations with regard to the KDE 4 release.

The IBM XL Alpha Edition UPC compilers are a technology showcase of the Unified Parallel C (UPC) language, Version 1.2, supporting IBM System p systems running AIX and Linux. This updated version of IBM XL UPC Compilers supports UPC 1.2 and contains bug fixes and performance improvements.

IBM joined OpenOffice.org on Sept.10, and the company is bringing its programming muscle with it to improve the popular open-source office suite. While IBM has long used OpenOffice.org code, licensed under the LGPL (Lesser GPL), in its own programs, such as the groupware program Lotus Notes 8, this has been IBM's own fork of the code. Starting now, IBM is directing its OpenOffice development efforts--involving about three dozen programmers--to the public, open-source OpenOffice suite.

A download manager can save you time if you download a lot of large files from the Internet, but it can be annoying to have to grab a link from your browser and pass it to the download manager manually. With the FlashGot extension for Firefox, you no longer have to. FlashGot sits between the two applications and fuses your favorite download manager with your Web browser. FlashGot supports more than 38 graphical and command-line download managers for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. The tools supported on Linux are Aria, cURL, Downloader 4 X, GNOME Gwget, KDE KGet, and wxDownload Fast. If you have any of these installed, FlashGot will automatically detect it and integrate it with Firefox.

One of the decisions which was made on the OSDL Printing Summit in Atlanta last year and widely accepted by all participants was to switch the standard print job transfer format from PostScript to PDF. This format has many important advantages, especially
* PDF is the common platform-independent web format for printable documents
* Portable * Easy post-processing (N-up, booklets, scaling, ...)
* Easy Color management support
* Easy High color depth support (> 8bit/channel)
* Easy Transparency support
* Smaller files * Linux workflow gets closer to Mac OS X

SmoothWall has released the latest version of its open source network firewall - SmoothWall Express 3.0. Code-name Polar, this version claims huge advances on Version 2.

Law suits sparked by patent infringement claims are risky ventures. They hardly ever make either party look good, and they are anything but sure bets as revenue producers - unless you're an attorney. Therefore, when they do happen, those involved usually go out of their way to keep all but the essential facts of the case from public view. Not so with the current sue-me-sue-you spat between Network Appliance and Sun. Here we have Dave Hitz of NetApp and Jonathan Schwartz of Sun arguing their cases blogospherically and in conflicting detail.

The Open Source Initiative's chairman, Michael Tiemann, announced Friday that the organization's licensing board have officially approve the version three of the General Public License and Lesser General Public License as OSI-approved.

I am always looking for other jobs, not because I am unhappy or really ready to get one, but because I always want to see what’s out there. When it comes to meteorology jobs or science jobs in general, any good ones want you to be comfortable with linux. Linux is the way of the future and we need to accept it.

The rumors about VMware putting ESX Server on dietary supplements have been confirmed. The virtualization darling today revealed ESX Server 3i - a super-thin hypervisor that will be built into the memory of servers from companies such as Dell, HP and IBM. We've been writing about the so-called ESX Lite for some time now, particularly in conjunction with Dell. The Round Rock-based server maker plans to ship an appliance-like machine later this year that will include a hypervisor in flash memory.