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Despite the the passage of the CAN-SPAM Act, email users are still subjected to vast quantities of spam and virus-laden messages. Roaring Penguin's CanIt-PRO is a Sendmail-based application that helps block spam, viruses, phishing attempts, and other nastiness. I found it to be one of the better commercial Linux email filtering packages.

Analysts who deny Linux's place in the enterprise as a desktop have either failed to interrogate the system thoroughly or have a bias.

A run of 100 Linux-powered humanoid robots goes on sale in Japan Friday, priced at 1.5M Yen (about $14,000), not including 10,000 Yen (~$90) monthly service fees. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries conceived of Wakamuru as a pleasant companion offering a range of electronic-age valet services, it says.

What's with Ubuntu's naming convention? With Knoppix at least they named the distros differently. With KDE and Gnome, taking the first letter of the names was good enough. But Ubuntu and those using it have developed a silly idea and are trying desperately to make it 'cool'.

Independent software vendors (ISVs) supporting the adoption of Linux and open standards were given another boost from IBM this week as the company teamed up with Red Hat Inc. to promote adoption of the open source operating system.

Following is an email received by a commercial software company offering products for (among others) the Linux platform.

The Free Standards Group (FSG) announced today that Computer Associates (CA), NTT DATA, and Open Country have signed on as members to the group. The group also formally announced the release of the Linux Standard Base (LSB) 3.0, and support for the standard by major vendors. Executive director Jim Zemlin said that all the major distributions had "come out and certified or are certifying to the LSB 3.0." The list of vendors and organizations certifying their distributions includes Red Hat, Novell SUSE, the DCC Alliance and Asianux.

What utility do practically all Linux users use -- regardless of their job or expertise? A boot loader. In this article, see how a boot loader works, meet two popular loaders -- LILO (LInux LOader) and GNU GRUB (GRand Unified Boot loader) -- and review the pros and cons of each.

The "Name" brands do not manufacture their own laptops. They buy them from Original Design Manufacturers (ODM). These ODMs sell their computers to DELL, Toshiba, IBM, HP, Compaq, Sony and others. They then put their label on it and market it. You can find the same laptops and buy yours without an operating system.

John "Overcode" Hall died this weekend from his fight with cancer.

Novell, Red Hat and Debian alliance announce that they will certify operating systems to comply with new version of Linux Standard Base.

So far, the Open Source applications have been Softpedia users’ number one applications. Last week, Firefox won the Battle of Browsers, being rated as the best application for Internet browsing. Now, another Mozilla product has been awarded the Softpedia User’s Choice title.

After several of my favorite operating systems and distributions failed to properly connect to wireless hotspots without a lot of command-line tweaking, I found Netapplet, a great little GNOME applet in Novell's SUSE 9.3 Professional that scans for 802.11a/b/g wireless networks and shows you their signal strength and ESSID. You can then select the hotspot of your choice (if several are available) and continue on to the Internet from there. Yes, you can do the same thing from the command line by using iwlist and iwconfig, but it's nice to have it done automatically. Although Novell engineers created Netapplet for SUSE Linux, it can be installed on any GNU/Linux distribution. Once you've got this program on your GNOME-based laptop, you'll wonder how you ever did mobile computing without it.

Piper Jaffray reiterated a "marketperform" rating and $8 target price on BEA Systems (nasdaq: BEAS - news - people ), saying it expects the company to continue feeling pressure from the open-source movement. "We believe open-source offerings from JBoss and Gluecode will continue to pressure BEA in the app server market," Piper said.

Microsoft has accused Linux of having "support issues" as the Redmond giant unveiled the first beta of its Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Solution operating system for high-performance computing (HPC).

"As far as whether there's a new browser in town, I think the numbers speak for themselves," says Blake Ross, one of the co-creators of Firefox. "But I never look at this as a 'browser war.' Firefox is not a war on Microsoft; it is a war on complexity."

"By working closely with Eclipse, and proposing a new open source mobile development tools project, we will provide the more than two million registered developers in our Forum Nokia program with complete integrated tool packages optimized for Nokia platforms," said Pertti Korhonen (pictured), EVP and CTO of Nokia as it was announced this morning that Nokia has joined the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer and Board member. As Korhonen says, Nokia will support the work of the Eclipse open source community by contributing software and developers to a proposed new Eclipse project.

Red Hat has said that its Global File System (GFS) is now supported by Oracle for use in Oracle RAC solutions, EMC CLARiiON® networked storage systems, EMC Celerra® iSCSI network attached storage (NAS) systems solutions and NetApp for SAN interface solutions. Red Hat GFS is the first third-party cluster file system supported by Oracle for RAC solutions on Linux.

New Session Clustering Solution and Enhanced PHP Management Ensures Superior PHP Application Availability and Response Time

Founded by tuXlabs' ubergeek Jonathan Carter, Skubuntu adds games, educational tools and a host of localised school-ready tools to Ubuntu Linux to make it the distro of choice for educators.