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Pentaho announced that its core open source BI platform and related projects hit a cumulative monthly download record of more than 55,000 in June. This rapid market uptake follows a series of significant second-quarter achievements for Pentaho and its Open BI Suite. As recorded on http://www.sourceforge.net and http://www.javaforge.com, Pentaho’s project downloads totaled more than 55,000 in the month of June.

I have been collecting signatures to the Petition to protect Information Technology property rights at the Ottawa Linux Symposium. Separate from this I received a message from someone in Australia doing similar work with Linux Australia, who also have a petition to their parliament documented as part of their legal issues. The focus on the petition is to tie anti-circumvention provisions to actual infringement, something that was contained in Bill C-60 in Canada.

Linux is uniquely positioned in the OS space with implementations in both the smartphone and feature phone segments. This is in sharp contrast to Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm which have focused on the smartphone segment. However, Linux phones still represent a small segment of the overall handset market.

The third of four days of the eighth Ottawa Linux Symposium saw a deep discussion on the relative merits of various network file systems in a talk called "Why NFS sucks", a tutorial on reverse engineering a USB device, an introduction to SELinux rival AppArmor, and an update on the status of the Linux Standard Base, among other topics of interest

Longtime Linux admins know that SSH, the "Secure Shell" protocol, is one of the most handy and potentially critical utilities in their software toolbox. Using multiple terminal emulators in an X Windows environment on a workstation, or via the Screen utility, a sysadmin for Linux or other Unix-based OS servers can manage several systems simultaneously with ease. Network administration shell or Perl scripts can make use of SSH to perform automated tasks on multiple servers at once simply and securely.

The MEPIS Linux project team on July 21 released SimplyMEPIS 6.0, its first public distribution to incorporate a Ubuntu core. Based on the Dapper LTS package pool, v6.0 runs the latest security-patched 2.6.15 kernel from Ubuntu-Security and is designed for stable, long-term use and support, project founder and chief maintainer Warren Woodford said.

Network printing is a leading cause of high blood pressure and premature hair loss in our long-suffering network administrator demographic. Fortunately, the FOSS world, as usual, does its best to mitigate our suffering. Today you shall learn how to use CUPS and Samba together to set up automagic client printer installations. That's right, my hardworking friends, none of this dashing about to individual workstations burdened with driver disks and Windows CDs. The goal here is to never leave your snug underground lair.

Many have written about how going Open Source changes your business model or sales process. Dana Blankenhorn notes that the open sourcing of Hyperic's product changed how they work. It required them to write code for stability and continuity, as well as adopt more Open Source tools.

I recently installed Fedora Core 5 and wanted to use my Mac formatted (HFS+) iPod Nano with it. I had read mixed reports about iPod/Linux compatibility so I didn't expect it to be easy. The transition was mostly undemanding, but the minor problems I encountered weren't what I expected.

With software companies better able to crack down on piracy, some people find they're having to make tough choices, according to Grigor Gatchev. Nearly every day in Bulgaria, he writes, computer experts have conversations that go something like this:

Next Tuesday at OSCON in Portland, I'll be giving a 3.5 hour tutorial titledOpen Source Clue Training: How to Market to People Who Hate Marketing.As I prepare for that, I thought I'd share some of the curriculum I've come up with. I'm looking for constructive feedback, suggestions and Stories From the Real World that might be useful to the tutorial. Here we go...

OTTAWA -- Day two of the eighth annual Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS) was more technical than the first. Of the talks, the discussions on the effects of filesystem fragmentation, using Linux to bridge the digital divide, and using Linux on laptops particularly caught my attention, but Dave Jones' talk titled "Why Userspace Sucks" really stole the show.

Aged geeks should remember the Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC) well. The hacker group was particularly famous for its easy-to-use Back Orifice spyware trojan released in 1998, which was as good for corporate espionage as it was for humorous office pranks. So it's with some irony that CDC has released an open source client that secures your instant messenger communications over the Internet.

If you're developing Java EE applications using the Eclipse integrated development environment, IBM has just made your life a little easier. We're providing one-stop access to two value-added Eclipse 3.2 bundles that include key projects in the Callisto release: Web Tools Platform (WTP) and Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF). Download one or both of these free Eclipse project bundles from our high-bandwidth servers with fiber connections to the Internet. Registration is NOT required

The Open Management Consortium, founded in May, is a grouping of small companies seeking to bring open-source business models to systems management, an area dominated by larger companies. Although it is still fledging, the organization is already in discussion with larger software providers to join the group and support it financially, said William Hurley, a co-founder of the consortium and chief technology officer of start-up Qlusters.

I have a column (/var/opinion) in an upcoming issue that deals with my struggles to get a MythTV system working. The column ends with a tease about yet another column on Linux standards. I don't want to spoil either, so I'll leave it at that. However, I have another beef about the way my MythTV system is shaping up, or more accurately, falling apart.

The events program and speaker list have been announced for the fall Embedded Systems Conference, set for Sept. 25-28 in Boston. The event will feature 160 exhibitors and 82 classes in eight tracks. A Linux/Open Source track features classes from well-known embedded Linux trainer/consultant Bill Gatliff.

After a year of testing, French virus experts have concluded that Microsoft Office is less dangerous than its competitor, OpenOffice. In the short term, this is great news for Microsoft... outside of Europe. More anti-open source FUD will delay some planned migrations. Longer term, OpenOffice will benefit, as France and Germany pour resources into securing the product they now rely upon. The race is, as they say, afoot.

Learn how to transfer an entire file system on a live system, including how to create, copy, and re-enable the new file system. If you have a UNIX disk or system failure or simply fill up your file system, then you need to create a new partition and file system and copy over the contents all on a live system. Effectively transferring components and retaining all of their information is a vital part of the migration process.

For now, Internet service providers are prohibited from discriminating against connections to particular sites on the Internet: they are required to treat traffic to Google exactly the same as traffic to Yahoo! or MSN. This principle of equality is called "network neutrality." However, large telecommunication companies are lobbying congress to scrap the network neutrality rules that have been in place since the birth of the Internet. We don't have to look far to see why this is a bad idea.

[They are chomping at the bit to be able to block content from subscribers to then charge for access to it.- Scott]