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The StartCom Enterprise Linux AS-3 (Maccabee) remains still a very popular download, specially by users who want to re-use their older hardware.

Open standards, free software, and old documents

Time flies, and it has already been 3 months since our last Bug-Squashing Party. I think we all agree it is quite too long without such fun, and we should, therefore, fix that immediately. Fortunately enough, FISL[0] - the largest Latin-American FLOSS conference - starts tomorrow, and is certainly going to gather a number of people already involved with Debian, besides other potential contributors. It seemed to be a perfect opportunity for us to do collective in person hacking, while trying to get more people aboard and motivating interested people all around the world to join us and rock, so here we are, announcing the dates.

"..The Open Source movement is not only moving quickly but actually gaining momentum. The only constant is not simply change, but an increasing rate of change. This is in contrast to Debian, in which the last release took 3 years and the one before that took 2 years. I believe there is no technical reason why you cannot ship whenever you’d like. The Linux kernel merges in changes whenever they are ready without anything holding up the train. Your codebase is much bigger and your changes are more frequently more intrusive, but I believe there has to be a way to work things out even if it simply requires more resources."

The amd64 architecture has been added to etch, and over the next few weeks (particularly as the X.org changes get worked out) should become fairly complete. amd64 in etch should be debootstrapable at this point, and usable in some situations, but is obviously pretty limited while it doesn't have X. Hopefully this will improve pretty rapidly.

If you haven't checked out Endian Firewall yet, download the code and give it a try.

Recapping another busy couple of weeks in Ruby land as well as the first international Ruby conference.

For long-time watchers of Larry Ellison, the revelation that Oracle is looking at launching its own version of the Linux open source operating system has aroused a suspicion: is the software industry’s most acquisitive CEO stalking his next target? Mr Ellison made the comments in an interview with the Financial Times this week, laying out strong reasons why the database software company should embed a version of Linux into its existing software.

Tonight on The Linux Link Tech Show, episode 136:
We interview Jack Miller from the Centre/SIS student data systems project
What is Planet Techshow?
Dan takes a look at Qemu
Linc talks about SJphone
And much, much more

Be sure to check us out live every Wednesday night at 8:30 PM, EDT
Just point your favorite media player to any of the following streams:
http://www.binrev.com:8000/main
http://media.sysop.ca:8000/techshow
http://wdsmn.com:8000/techshow


You can also check out previous episodes from the download section of our home page

The Linux market in China continues to grow, according to a new research report from IDC. And it is apparently growing partially at the expense of Linux nemesis SCO.

ZDNet has an interesting article that brings readers up to speed on what's happening on the Linux graphic card compatibility and advanced GUI effects front. As usual there's a tug-of-war with people in the Linux developer community (including the free software advocates) and hardware makers regarding implementation of proprietary drivers with the Linux kernel, as opposed to offering full open-source drivers. The only trouble the hardware makers point out is that most of their closed-source drivers implement licensed third-party technologies that make it impossible to open them up for public development.

[It looks as if Intel plans to respond to the community. Great. We either have to use proprietary drivers or get FOSS drivers at the expense of being sucked into Intel's DRM. Vendors need to quit paying lipservice to the FOSS philosophy and GET REAL! - dcparris]

LINUX EXPERTS are dismissing as FUD a claim by Russian Anti-Virus outfit Kaspersky labs that it has invented a cross platform virus that can eat Windows and Linux systems.

[Yeah. Welcome to GNU/Linux Land, where we not only don't fear viruses, we patch our systems to be able to run them! - dcparris]

If you think setting up and using a printer in Linux is too much trouble, take heart -- you're not alone. To come to grips with a wide range of Linux printing-related issues, the OSDL-sponsored Portland Project has just held the first Desktop Linux Printing Summit in Atlanta.

Salt Lake City, Utah-based Linux Networx has named a new CFO, saying today that it has hired Robert Neumeister, Jr. as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for the firm.

Last week I installed Fedora Core 5 on two aging but serviceable systems: my eMachines desktop (2GHz Celeron, 768MB RAM) and a Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204 notebook (1GHz Celeron, 512MB PC100 RAM). The desktop had previously run Fedora Core 4 while the laptop had been running Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) for a few months and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 Update 1 prior to that.

Seeking to offset recent gains by Microsoft, a leading open source evangelist has launched a service designed to boost domain parking on open source software. Author and developer Bruce Perens created OpenSourceParking.com in response to a 5 percent market share gain by Microsoft in this month's Netcraft web server survey. The shift was due to domain registrar Go Daddy shifting 4.5 million parked domains from Linux to Windows Server 2003. "It's time for the Free Software/Open Source community to fight back," wrote Perens, urging open source supporters to park their undeveloped domains with the new service, which runs on the Linux operating system and Lighttpd web server.

Membership in the OpenDocument Format Alliance has almost quadrupled over the past month. The Alliance, a coalition of international organizations whose goal is to enable governments to have direct management and greater control over their documents, was launched March 3 with 36 initial members, but that has grown to 138.

Linux was one of the first cross-platform operating systems to use 64-bit processors, and now 64-bit systems are becoming commonplace in servers and desktops. Many developers are now facing the need to port applications from 32-bit to 64-bit environments. With the introduction of Intel Itanium and other 64-bit processors, making software 64-bit-ready has become increasingly important.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation is offing NTT's open source codes of the 128-bit block Cipher algorithm "Camellia", jointly developed with Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (Mitsubishi) in 2000, using the C and Java languages on the Camellia home page. This is based on the policy of expanding the international infrastructure technology to support a secure advanced information society as the first Japanese encryption algorithm.

Chinese domestic software company Redflag Linux has set up a joint venture company with Japan's Miracle Linux and South Korea's Haansoft to jointly promote the Linux operating system.