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A while ago, Apple sold heavily discounted Macs to schools, hoping to get students to choose the Mac. Obviously, the same technique will not work for Linux, but it is important to get students interested in Linux.

The new distribution gOS 3 Gadgets BETA is based on Ubuntu 8.04.1 and is able to interact with Google Documents, Calendar and Mail. The newest release of WINE 1.0 is included to now support thousands of Windows software. The new operation system will also be loaded with Lightweight X Desktop Environment (LXDE) and other Google software for Linux to improve the user experience. This workshop describes how to install and run the new software from an USB stick.

By rights, copyright really shouldn’t apply to binary executables, because they are purely “functional” (not “expressive”) works. The decision to extend copyright to binaries was an economically-motivated anomaly, and that choice has some counter-intuitive and detrimental side-effects. What would things in the free software world look like if the courts had decided otherwise? For one thing, the implementation of copyleft would have to be completely different. Hypothetical? Academic? Not if you’re a hardware developer! Because this is exactly what the law does look like for designs for physical hardware (where the product is not protected by copyright).

Tomboy is a desktop note-taking application for Linux and Unix. Simple and easy to use, but with potential to help you organize the ideas and information you deal with every day. Tomboy is written in C# and utilizes the Mono runtime and Gtk#. Automatic spell-checking is provided by GtkSpell.

Japanese manufacturer Shimafuji is readying a two-inch cubed computer that runs Red Hat Linux on 1GB of flash. The Space Cube is equipped with a MIPS-based NEC VR5701 processor, 64MB RAM, and numerous I/O connections, including a Firewire-like "SpaceWire" port designed for spaceflight.

Fayandria Foley helped reel in big bucks in July with one of the year's most curious fundraisers. She helped pull together an American Cancer Society Relay for Life, which is typically a walkathon locally. More than 2,000 showed up -- or didn't, actually. Everyone at Foley's relay stayed home to participate.

Microsoft are poised to launch a new $USD 300 million advertising campaign this week, starring comedian Jerry Seinfeld among others. The marketing types responsible are intending to counter Apple’s successful "I’m a Mac" line, but the slogan picked out is simply on the wrong foot from the start and is thwarted by Linux immediately.

It's hardly news these days when RHEL or Suse Linux boots Windows or Unix off a server. And we know that commercial software vendors are paying plenty of attention to commercial open source. But have you ever heard of a community version of the open source operating system displacing one of the popular commercial distributions? That's exactly what happened in Germany's third-largest public TV and radio station, according to a new report on community Linux by analyst Jay Lyman of the 451 Group.

On a superficial level, Novell’s third quarter, which ended July 31, 2008, didn’t look that good. A closer look reveals though that Novell did quite well in general and extremely well with its Linux business. According to the company press release, “For the quarter, Novell reported net revenue of $245 million.” This was up from Novell’s net revenue of $237 million for the third fiscal quarter 2007. “Income from operations for the third fiscal quarter 2008 was $1 million, compared to a loss from operations of $10 million for the third fiscal quarter 2007. Loss from continuing operations in the third fiscal quarter 2008 was $15 million, or $0.04 loss per share, due to a $15 million impairment charge related to our auction-rate securities.”

I received an email recently from a young man in Brazil who wanted me to come to his university and talk to the students and faculty about using Free Software. I am normally happy to advise universities to use Free Software, but usually this is done in conjunction with some large conference held at the university or some other venue. I just do not have the time to visit each and every school. But I did investigate the university of the student and found that Microsoft was indeed a sponsor of the University. In fact, the university had a large banner on the front page of their web site talking about Microsoft as a partner. It was the first time I saw a university advertising a commercial firm on their home page.

"Poky Linux" and Matchbox developer OpenedHand announced that it has been acquired by Intel Corp. The U.K.-based embedded Linux services team will join the Intel Open Source Technology Center, and will focus on Moblin development for mobile Internet devices and other mobile devices.

SimplePie is a PHP library that can fetch, cache, parse, and normalize RSS and Atom feeds. It allows you to display the newest articles from websites with RSS or Atom feeds on your own site. This is a great way to add new, fresh, and relevant information to your site. This guide shows how you can set it up for your own web site.

You may recall, just a few days ago (I think...), we put out a script do language translation using Yahoo/AltaVista's Babelfish interface. I mentioned, briefly, in that post that, when translating something into a foreign language, I always like to do a "reverse translation" using the translated output from my original query, and see how close the back-translation comes to what I originally wrote. It can make for hilarious results. In fact, unless you're entering something like "hello," it's almost guaranteed to come back goofy when translated back to English (or your native language).

been able to have OpenBSD's /etc/fstab automatically mount the ext2 filesystem on my Compaq Armada 7770dmt's hard drive with no difficulty lately, but every couple of days or so I get a message while booting OpenBSD that says the Linux filesystem is not clean and that I should run fsck on it. I then boot Puppy Linux 2.13, run e2fsck on the partition, the errors are cleared up, and all is well until a few more days pass.

This is a site that looks like it is attempting make wireless for linux better.

Exaile is a music player aiming to be similar to KDE’s Amarok, but for GTK+ and written in Python. It incorporates many of the cool things from Amarok (and other media players) like automatic fetching of album art, handling of large libraries, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm submission support, and optional iPod support via a plugin.

Not only do the French have a different word for everything, they also have a strong Open Source leadership position. The French have done much to foster the growth and acceptance of Open Source software--especially Linux. The Mandriva Linux distribution was born and raised in France (now in its 10th year), the French government offers tax incentives to encourage more Open Source development, and more 175,000 memory sticks with Open Source software were given to Parisian high school students last year.

A decade ago, European countries leapt out of the gate to take the lead in the radical open source movement -- none more so than France -- and left U.S. developers in the proverbial dust. Through policies and high-profile projects, the French Republic for years has been advocating for all open source all the time, in government and education. And France is not stopping: This summer, an economic commission set up by French President Nicolas Sarkozy recommended tax benefits to stimulate even more open source development.

Minsk, Belarus-based product development firm Promwad has announced a design win for a Linux-based home-automation touchscreen panel. Promwad says it designed the "smart home multimedia control panel" in eight months, for a Swiss automation start-up called Incyma, using a Cirrus Logic EP9307 processor and Poky Linux.

Quite often, Steve Jobs is given all the credit for the original Macintosh - but in reality, it wasn't Steve Jobs who made the largest contribution to the project; in fact, he didn't even come up with the idea. Jef Raskin envisioned an easy-to-use computer with a graphical user interface, and somewhere in 1979 he got the green light to start the Macintosh project, and together with Bill Atkinson he put together a team to develop the hard and software. It wasn't until much later that the project caught Steve Jobs' eye, who realised the Macintosh project had more potential than his own brainchild, the Lisa. One of the people on the Macintosh team was Andy Hertzfeld, and O'Reilly News interviewed him a few days ago.