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Red Hat chief executive Matthew Szulik has added his voice to the growing stream of rebuttals to Larry Ellison's comments about buying Novell and "owning" Linux. In an open letter to the Financial Times, Szulik criticized the 30-year track record of companies like Oracle in their treatment of customers and signed off essentially saying the days of closed-source software vendors are numbered.

If the slow booting time of your Linux box is driving you crazy, consider parallel booting techniques.

The BCS is backing an open source initiative to promote the development of assistive technology.

DistroWatch reports - MEPIS founder Warren Woodford has announced the alpha2 release of SimplyMEPIS 6.0. Alpha2 primarily incorporates suggestions from the MEPIS user community and package updates. For example, the Utilities and Development menus have been reorganized. To reduce the clutter in SystemSettings, the input device configurations have been placed in a submenu.

OSDir had a look at the latest MEPIS offering in the SimplyMEPIS 6.0 Alpha 2 Screenshot Tour.

"The meeting was attended by about 40 developers from printer vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard, Lanier, and Lexmark; to operating system distributors like Apple Computer, Debian, and Novell; to those two Linux desktop powers, GNOME and KDE; and more. Their job? To nail down exactly what's wrong with printing and Linux, and to work out ways to resolve these problems once and for all."

DistroWatch reports - The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the Beta Release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS - codenamed 'Dapper Drake'. The Beta Release introduces the new Desktop CD, which can be used both to try Ubuntu 'live' and to install the system. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (long-term support) will be the first Ubuntu release to be supported for three years on the desktop, and five years on the server.

OSDir had a run through both Ubuntu and Kubuntu in their screenshot tours.

Portable Document Format (PDF) is set to displace PostScript as the standard print job transfer and processing format for Linux, though Linux will maintain PostScript support for a long time to ensure backward compatibility.

BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Larry Ellison told the Financial Times this week that he was thinking of doing a Linux 'distro" (the term for individual variants -- short for distribution) to support the Oracle database. RedHat stock immediately took a hit.

A new stable version of the Slackware-based GoblinX live CD, GoblinX 1.3, is now available for free download. GoblinX 1.3 uses a 2.6.15 Linux kernel and the XFce desktop environment as a default, although KDE 3.5.1 is included.

(Comtex Business Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)LAWRENCE, Kan., Apr 20, 2006 (University Daily Kansan, U-WIRE via COMTEX) --Buying software in a box was an alien concept to me from day one of my digital life. In the early 90s, a respected veterinarian gave me my first pirated copy of Windows 3.1. I traded war games with the son of the man that ran a local church camp. Most people in my small home town hadn't even heard of the Internet yet.

Last week the press, especially that segment least friendly to Novell and open source, headlined the fact that 3,000 out of 5,000 Novell employees had the capability to boot Windows on their computers. One typical headline read: "Novell's shift to open source makes slow progress."

[Dave's point is a good one - something many of us have been saying for some time now. Glad he could join the party! - dcparris]

Ubuntu Dapper Drake, originally set for release Wednesday 20 April until it was postponed to 1 June, will instead be released as a beta tomorrow. We take a look at what to expect from the world's most popular desktop Linux distribution.

SourceForge.net is one of many OSTC-owned websites that is popular with the open-source development community. Jay Seirmarco, General Manager, and Ross Turk, Engineering Manager, recently updated the organization's progress in an exclusive SYS-CON interview that can be found at http://www.sys-con.tv/read/209135.htm.

"We continue to contend that there was no infringement of any kind and that the facts in this case show that Microsoft developed its own product activation technologies well before z4 Technologies filed for its patent," Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans wrote in an e-mail.

April 19, 2006 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Web hosting provider and Internet Service Provider (ISP) Zen Internet (http://www.zenwebhosting.com), who won the ‘Best Business ISP’ award in February 2006, has announced it is offering new customers a trial of its Linux web hosting packages for only 1 British Pence.

[That's roughly $0.02 for us Americans. I wonder if they offer a reseller package? ;-) - dcparris]

BEIJING, China (UPI) -- China`s Linux market will be worth more than $51 million annually by 2010, up from $11.8 million last year, researchers say.

Xandros is making a move at the Linux SMB server market by offering its forthcoming server OS with Scalix groupware baked in. (Linux-Watch)

CollabNet, a leading provider of on demand distributed software development solutions, today announced its new offering, CollabNet® SubversionTM On Demand for the enterprise. The solution provides the infrastructure and services large enterprises need to reliably and easily deploy the Subversion open source, version control system to hundreds of users within global, software development teams. With the cost and service benefits of an on demand model, CollabNet Subversion On Demand allows Global 2000 companies to safely apply open source practices in the enterprise for more effective distributed software development.

Review: Ziff Davis Internet Linux editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols thinks the newest SUSE Linux is already a winner, even as just a release canidate. (DesktopLinux)