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For years, if you wanted an inexpensive, but Windows-compatible file and print server, you turned to Samba running on Linux. Now, with the first alpha release of Samba 4, this open-source project is moving closer to becoming a complete Windows 2003/Longhorn replacement. However, the Samba Group warns would-be users that, "Samba 4 is currently not yet in a state where it is usable in production environments. Note the WARNINGS in WHATSNEW.txt in the source and the STATUS file which aims to document what should and should not work."

Five years after being pegged a monopolist, Microsoft is coming under scrutiny for efforts to license its proprietary technology in accordance with antitrust legal demands from U.S. and European regulators. The Microsoft Communications Protocol Program (MCPP) was envisioned as a way to encourage competition and promote interoperability between Microsoft's products and Unix, Linux and open source applications. Whether the licensing program has worked as planned is a topic of hot debate, and the U.S. District Court in Washington plans to take up the subject for review on Sept 11.

A survey by the investment banking and securities firm UBS found that fewer CIOs will deploy Linux than in the past, but the results are being met with shrugs in the Linux community. A slowdown is often viewed as a natural event in market dynamics, a maturing of a technology. "This is not a bad thing," said Clay Ryder, president of the Sageza Group. Linux uptake had been on a tear, Ryder said. The momentum continued as business buyers increasingly saw its value.

Bruce Perens is here for the second keynote of the evening. I spoke to Bruce on IT Conversations last March when he was last in Utah to protest the Novell/Microsoft deal. Bruce is not only interesting to listen to, but entertaining as well. Bruce gives an intro about why he got excited about open source. As I mentioned, Bruce has criticized Novell in the past (and will today). The conference is being held at Novell, but the security folks haven’t thrown him out yet.

Workload Partition (WPAR) is a new feature introduced with the IBM AIX Version 6.1 operating system. It allows running applications to move between System p machines or System p logical partitions (LPAR).

Heavily funded by the European Union, the Science, Education, and Learning in Freedom (SELF) consortium launched the beta version of its site this week with the motto,"Be SELFish, share your knowledge!" By the end of the year, SELF hopes to develop into the Wikipedia of free learning materials, with a heavy emphasis on material about open standards and free and open source software (FOSS). All contributions, says David Megías, a Lecturer at the University of Catalonia and one of the SELF's organizers, will be"encouraged and accepted, unless they have to be removed for legal reasons." The twist here is that all contributions will be evaluated by the community, so that users can assess the quality of the materials that they are using.

I decided that I needed the Palm back in my life. I can maybe steal a minute or two hear and there to write, and if I use pen and paper, chances are whatever it is will never make it into print/online because things change and what I wrote is no longer up to the minute. My Palm Tungsten E had gone totally dead. I had to restore everything with a sync, and by some kind of magic, my Palm infrared keyboard suddenly started working again. So it was time to get the Palm and Linux talking to each other.

The KDE Community proudly presents the second Beta release for KDE 4.0. This release marks the beginning of the feature freeze and the stabilization of the current codebase. Simultaneously the KOffice developers have announced their third Alpha release, marking significant improvements in this innovative office suite. Both KDE and KOffice have benefited from the Google Summer of Code, as most resulting code has now been merged.

Issue 8 of o3 magazine is now available. This issue provides an end to end guide for building enterprise grade email systems using FOSS. o3 magazine is a FREE digital magazine, published twice a month in PDF format.

If you're a Linux user who's just been issued an Apple computer, you might want to look into a virtualization solution for Mac OS X. VMware's Fusion, which was officially released from beta at the beginning of the month, works well for running Linux (or other x86/AMD64 OSes) on the Mac desktop, and provides a great solution for multi-OS users who need simultaneous access to all their operating systems on the same machine.

Pursuing its strategy of developing a large international network of local partners, Mandriva today announces the launch of Mandriva Australia as the sole Australian partner for Mandriva SA, distributing and supporting Mandriva Linux operating systems.

AMD briefed Linux.com this morning on a pending announcement regarding the open sourcing of drivers for ATI graphics cards. It's official -- AMD will make code and specifications for ATI graphics cards available on the Internet on September 10.

Rumors and speculations have been flying around for months about ATI/AMD opening up the source-code to their Linux display driver or providing their GPU specifications to community developers. This for the most part had started after Henri Richard's statement at the Red Hat Summit earlier this year. Well, those rumors can finally be put to rest. AMD will be providing NDA specifications, an open-source library, and there is a new open-source graphics driver as a result. AMD will continue producing a closed-source proprietary driver; however, they are opening the source-code to a critical library with accompanying GPU specifications for X.Org developers. To get the ball rolling, AMD is also funding the development of a new open-source R500/600 driver.

When the BBC announced it's intention to develop the iPlayer as the intended method of viewing online content there was an outcry from non-Windows users who were outraged at being left out. An "e-petition" was put up on the UK Gov's (originally started by a certain Mr. T Blair) website asking the government to intervene. Read on for the response.

Innotek rolled out a significant update to its VirtualBox open source virtualization software this week. According to Achim Hasenmueller, managing director of innotek, the release of VirtualBox 1.5.0 for Windows and Linux marks the first time seamless windowing -- the ability to display a single Windows application on a Linux desktop -- is available for Linux systems.

IBM and Novell have announced an integrated open collaboration client for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop that includes IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Lotus Sametime and IBM productivity tools to deliver advanced email and calendar capabilities, unified communication & collaboration and lightweight yet powerful word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation capabilities with OpenDocument Format support.

In an effort to fully understand the math proposed by Roman Zippel in his Really Fair Scheduler, Ingo Molnar implemented a simplified version of the logic on top of his Completely Fair Scheduler code which he then humorously labeled the Really Simple Really Fair Scheduler, "could you please confirm whether the math algorithm you are suggesting is implemented by this patch roughly correctly?"

BugnuX is the first linux distribution for software testing, that is also installable, packaged with useful Testing Tools to help testers and quality assurance personnel. Open source Tools for testing web application, Java, load and performance are provided by default. BugnuX is a PCLinuxOS based distribution that uses Enlightenment 0.17 and Fluxbox as the window manager that has tools specially for software testing, and all the applications necessary for a common user (Browser, media player, office tools, etc.).

The French Ministry for Education has migrated 2,500 servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a growing trend for Europe's public sector.

[Check out the last sentence, interesting way to end it don't you think? - Scott]

Mark Shuttleworth, the self-made millionaire and leader of the Ubuntu project, has been very vocal about the adoption of free software and that "the free software approach is a better device driver development model." But what does Mark think about AMD's announcements this week with the 8.41 display driver and the just-announced program where AMD will be handing out specifications under NDA and helping out the open-source community? Mark Shuttleworth has provided Phoronix some of his initial thoughts on ATI/AMD's new Linux push.