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In the last seven years, printing on Linux has undergone a metamorphosis. Barely adequate printing support, provided on a program by program basis, has been transmuted by a half dozen projects into a wealth of options comparable to those available on Windows or the Mac OS. Where printer manufacturers once ignored Linux, a growing number support it and the rest are watching closely. Standardization and support for multiple distributions remain major problems, but community and corporate interests have recently started working together to address these last remaining problems.

Microsoft will spend more than $440m (about £230m) in licensing fees and sales and marketing costs over the next five years to keep up its end of the historic Linux agreement it made with Novell.

Linux is unlikely ever to be a viable alternative to Microsoft's Windows on the desktop for corporate IT departments, according to leading CIOs.

[Tell that to helios and the 450+ employees now using Linux on the desktop! - dcparris]

Novell published additional details on the agreements announced with Microsoft on Nov. 2, outlining the substantial commitment made by both companies to address customers' growing requirement for Windows and Linux interoperability.

In this shortened episode: upcoming episodes on file managers and Fedora Core 6; interview with Patrick Volkerding on The Linux Link Tech Show; a discussion of various Linux commands including df, wc, cal, date, clear, who, whoami, whois, whereis, cat, lpr, lpstat, and lpq; promo for the Gadgetboyz podcast; a Listener Tip on GParted Live CD; listener feedback.

Novell officials are pleased to note four white box PC makers will distribute new PCs pre-loaded with the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 operating system. Specifically, European manufacturers ETegro Technologies, MAXDATA and Transtec along with U.S.-based R Cubed Technologies will sell notebooks and/or desktop computers with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 already installed and ship it globally.

OpenSSH 4.5 was released today, fixing a number of bugs and security risks. T-shirts, posters and CDs continue to feature in OpenBSD and OpenSSH releases.

Lately, I’ve found myself troubled with the changes taking place with Xandros. As many of you probably know by now, Xandros has gone through a reorganization that meant that they had to layoff roughly five employees.

Often labelled as a nation of software pirates Pakistan is looking at free software as a way to transform its image and build local skills.

Each distribution has some specific tools to build a custom kernel from the sources. This article is about compiling a kernel on Ubuntu systems. It describes how to build a custom kernel using the latest unmodified kernel sources from http://www.kernel.org (vanilla kernel) so that you are independent from the kernels supplied by your distribution. It also shows how to patch the kernel sources if you need features that are not in there.

Have you ever wondered why a company with the size, power and resources of Microsoft can't seem to get a handle on the never ending security fixes? Have you ever considered the insanity of offering "patches" to some security holes so obvious that not seeing them until later is suspicious at best?

VIA has been providing source for its unichrome IGP since 2003. Despite this, they managed to receive a lot of criticism for pulling several stunts with respect to this code. Their latest stunt is to stop providing source completely. XF40070 is now only available as a binary.

Excerpt from Linux Toys II by Christopher Negus. All-new toys in this edition include a MythTV entertainment center, eMoviX bootable home movies, a BZFlag game client and server, and an Icecast Internet radio station, plus five more. Companion Web site, LinuxToys.net, provides information for further enhancing the projects.

Version 1.3.0. Added front-end for Apache, vsftpd and Ample; updated AbiWord, Bash, Enlightenment, Ghostscript, Firefox, LILO, Linphone, OpenSSH, QEMU, Squashfs, XChat, X.Org; updated libraries: Freetype, glibc, GTK+, OpenSSL, Pango; removed Deco, Airsnort, gcrontab, gFTP; added NTFS write support; updated kernel to version 2.6.18.1.

We are on the brink of a very exciting time. The buzzword-friendly "Web 2.0" is here, and it's most punctuated by three terms: social networking, AJAX, and RSS. Nothing about these things is inherently new - AJAX existed as an ActiveX control present in Microsoft's Outlook Web Access long ago, social networking has existed for some time via sites like Friendster, and RSS is just a style of XML, which has been floating around in mainstream tech circles for about 10 years. But Web 2.0 is here, like it or not.

Announcing the release of Truva Linux 1.0, a Turkish desktop distribution based on Slackware Linux. The most notable features of the release include: integration of GParted for disk partitioning tasks during installation; MPlayer with support for playing encrypted DVDs and many popular media formats; introduction of udev for device management; support for Turkish and English languages. Truva Linux 1.0 is based on Linux kernel 2.6.17 and ships with X.Org 6.9.0, KDE 3.5.4, Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.6, MPlayer 1.0pre8, and the usual range of open source software applications.

A set of Eclipse plug-ins that integrate the Cell BE tool chain and enable rapid, more user-friendly, building of Cell BE applications on Linux. Elements in the design of the cell chip are expected in IBM’s future server chips, and could end up inside the PlayStation 3. See the SDK step-by-step instructions on how to create, build, and run POWER processing Unit (PPU)- and Synergistic Processor Unit (SPU) – managed make projects.

It's entirely possible that Novell is about to get fleeced, and that GNU/Linux will take a hit in the process, and Microsoft has a history of playing the Big Bad. But are we really being smart to always assume that Microsoft will win every battle it enters?

A growing movement, Free Culture started at Swathmore College in Pennsylvania during 2004 after two students sued voting-machine manufacturer Diebold for abusing copyright law. Now spread to thirty campuses in the US and branching into other countries, Free Culture's mission is "to build a bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture, rather than a top-down, closed, proprietary structure."

The One Laptop Per Child project has decided to utilize a Linux 2.6.19 OLPC kernel with a Red Hat Fedora Core 6 "run-time environment" for the first build of its giveaway portable notebook computer, the Cambridge, Mass.-based project's president for software and content said Sunday.