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One month ago LINUX For You magazine made a call to the Linux/OSS community to send in questions it has for Linus Torvalds. We were overwhelmed by the amount of questions we recieved. It took us a whole night to sort out the best ones. The final setlist? 35 questions. We did not number them just so he doesn't get frightened by just that number. In fact, we had his answers within hours; makes me think we could have sent him a few more? Anyway, without furthur ado, here's Linus Torvalds: blunt, excellent and descriptive...

Once again, Linux Journal leads the way in idiotic, pointless misogyny. And they wonder why they have no women subscribers.

This article describes how to integrate DSPAM with embedded ClamAV into a mail server based on Postfix featuring virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. DSPAM is a scalable and open-source content-based spam filter. The setup shown here is suitable for Debian Etch servers.

"I will predict that virtually every open-source company (including Red Hat) will eventually be acquired by a big proprietary software company.", Thus spake Tim O'Reilly in the comments to one of his other posts. In other words, why don't I just give up, sell out, and go home? I guess I would if I thought that Tim were right. He's not, not in this instance.

Sonos has integrated Sirius radio playback into its Linux-powered whole-house audio equipment. The commercial-free service can be trialed for 30 days by selecting a menu option on the Sonos Digital Music System's PDA-like controller (pictured at left), the company said. Sirius is best-known for its satellite radio product, which competed with XM Radio before the companies announced a merger earlier this year. However, Sirius also offers an Internet radio product.

The good part of *NIX-like systems is that some basic concepts are extremely well designed, starting with the filesystem philosophy and the security metaphor. Therefore, using Linux or BSD on your home desktop or on your laptop instead of Windows is not only a question of ideology or price — it's a matter of good taste. There are however a few places where something is under-optimal, not because GNU/Linux or *BSD are following "ancient *NIX principles", but simply because *NIX operating systems were designed in the times of the mainframes and minicomputers, where everything was a server, and usability issues like those raised by nowadays desktop/laptop computers were not considered.

Debian, one of my long time favorite Linux distributions turned 14 today. Without the Debian project there would be no Ubuntu. Debian was begun in August 1993 by Ian Murdock, as a new distribution which would be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU. Debian is pronounced /ˈde.bi.ən/. It comes from the names of the creator of Debian, Ian Murdock, and his wife, Debra. Happy 14th birthday Debian!

This week on Open News The Axe Falls On SCO, Google Signs On To The OIN, and Peugeot Revs Up Linux Desktop Deployments.

In the aftermath of federal district judge Dale A. Kimball's recent ruling, which determined that Novell, not SCO, is the rightful owner of the UNIX copyrights, the once-mighty proprietary UNIX vendor is on the verge of annihilation. As SCO's grasp on survival weakens and the company braces itself for descent into financial oblivion, much can be learned by reflecting on the circumstances of the case. A close reading of the ruling provides fascinating insight into the details of SCO's battle and sheds light on the peculiar events through which SCO has branded itself with the bitter taint of infamy.

A clever group of whippersnappers have got the right idea when it comes to home entertainment, namely, LinuxMCE-based systems that don't break the bank but offer a pretty stacked feature set. Fiire, a company which manufactures and sells modular media boxes and remotes aimed at unifying your media center has a few items it'd like you to see. The whole shebang is based around the FiireEngine, a $799 box that acts as a central hub to your media world.

On April 1 this year, I wrote a spoof headlined "Ballmer joins Linux Foundation board." Considering the statements that were reported last week as emanating from the executive director of the same foundation, Jim Zemlin, I wonder if my tale will still be considered a spoof after a few years.

Ignore the myths. Open source security technology is an affordable and robust option for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). While some buyers might think security is best left to vendors of proprietary software like Symantec or SonicWall , experts says open source software can give SMBs the protection they seek.

Open source in the enterprise is growing steadily, but for what applications? eWEEK IT expert Kevin Closson, chief software architect for PolyServe-HP, answers the question. Open-source databases like PostgreSQL, Ingres and MySQL are becoming serious alternatives to Oracle for enterprise applications.

Many Linux distributions can run large Web sites, but are you prepared to bet your online business on a free Linux distribution? eWEEK IT expert Stephane Saux, IT director at the San Francisco Chronicle, has some answers.

In a June of 1992 posting to the linux-activists mailing list, Linus Torvalds described the original Linux scheduler noting, "the scheduler in linux is pretty simple, but does a reasonably good job at giving good IO response while not being too unfair against cpu-bound processes." A year later, Linus posted a more detailed description of the scheduler noting, "the linux scheduling algorithm is one of the simplest ones possible". Comments in the original 254 line sched.c file read, "'schedule()' is the scheduler function. This is GOOD CODE! There probably won't be any reason to change this, as it should work well in all circumstances (ie gives IO-bound processes good response etc). The one thing you might take a look at is the signal-handler code here."

The "Windows Vista Capable" lawsuit took another step toward trial — or settlement — Tuesday when US District Court Judge Marsha Pechman denied Microsoft's request for dismissal. The suit was filed in March by a pair of miffed PC buyers. Their claim: Microsoft's prerelease "Windows Vista Capable" campaign was a sham because the Vista in "Vista Capable" is merely Home Basic and not Home Premium or Ultimate. Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog reports the ruling means Microsoft will have to answer in court at least two of the plaintiff's four claims, "that Microsoft's marketing violated the Consumer Protection Act, and that the company was unjustly enriched."

In Linux you run processes in two different modes of execution. There is userspace (aka user mode) which you run your everyday applications, like Firefox, Pidgin, irssi. From the kernel’s point of view, this is unprivileged mode, meaning user space applications don’t have access to hardware, or bits of the system critical to its function. The next mode is kernelspace, in this mode a process runs in privileged mode, giving it access to hardware and low-level system processes. In this article I show how to write a kernel module.

It’s too early to say for certain, but there are very encouraging signs that the world’s standards bodies will vote in favour of a single unified ISO (”International Standards Organisation”) document format standard. There is already one document format standard - ODF, and currently the ISO is considering a proposal to bless an alternative, Microsoft’s OpenXML, as another standard. In the latest developments, standards committees in South Africa and the United States have both said they will vote against a second standard and thereby issue a strong call for unity and a sensible, open, common standard for business documents in word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.

When picking a media center solution for your PC, it tends to be a matter of compromise. There are solutions that are visually attractive, solutions that are Free/open source software, solutions that are more complete than others and solutions that integrate well with a desktop environment. In the past there have been few, if any, that have been all of these things. After an extensive beta testing period a new version of LinuxMCE, release 0704, was recently made available to the public that shows how we can indeed have our media center cake and eat it too. Read on for details of this release and future plans for KDE integration.

One of the first things many decision-makers want for any given software product is a roadmap, so they can plan around releases. However, the Linux kernel is and always has been bereft of a roadmap. To counter this, the Linux Foundation announced today that it is offering a Linux Weather Forecast to help provide some guidance to developers and organizations that need to know where the kernel is going.