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Most of the Novell/Microsoft patent deal is now out in the public. With this, the veil has been lifted in part from this controversial patent partnership. With this unveiling we now know that there is still no proof, other than Microsoft's flat unsupported statement, that Linux violates any of Microsoft's patents. We also know that it appears, as Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian has said, that Novell never agreed that Linux violated Microsoft's patents.

Fixing a scanner broken by the Feisty upgrade

This article shows how you can install Ruby on Rails (RoR) and integrate it in Apache2 on a Debian Etch system. Ruby on Rails is a web application framework which is rapidly gaining popularity among web programmers. It aims to increase the speed and ease with which database-driven web sites can be created and offers skeleton code frameworks (scaffolding) from the outset. Applications using the RoR framework are developed using the Model-View-Controller design pattern.

Backing up files and directories is relatively easy; databases, however, have some special quirks that you need to address. Our examples use MySQL, but the same principles apply to PostgreSQL and other relational databases.

The last decades a little war has been fought in the small town of Fuddenheim. A group of private citizens decided some 15 years ago to introduce free public transport in order to combat air pollution and congestion. Donations allowed them to buy a few buses which were operated by volunteers. The free transport slowly became a hit and the commercial operator, Omnifast, couldn't ignore it anymore.

Conflicts with European law, they say: A group of small British businesses has mounted a challenge to changes made by the Intellectual Property Office's (formerly known as the Patent Office) to the scope of the monopoly a patent holder can be granted for a software patent.

[Not GNU/Linux, but definitely of interest to the FOSS community - dcparris]

Despite recent changes in Google’s data-retention policy, data protection officials from 27 European countries have written to Google warning that the search giant may be in breach European privacy rules because of the way it stores data on individual searches.

Get a life or just Google it - the choice is yours

[Hmmm... No wonder John Connor lived "off the grid" - dcparris]

The concept of flexible digital displays in not new. But a working model is. Sony this week released video of exactly that.

[No word yet on the availability of GNU/Linux drivers for this one - dcparris]

Asia Pacific customers wanting to get their hands on Dell PCs, pre-loaded with Ubuntu Linux, will have to wait.

Joost, the compelling new on-demand P2P video service from the creators of Skype, has attracted considerable attention since the launch of its closed beta program. Last week, we offered 10,000 of our readers the opportunity to join in on the fun. I grabbed an invite myself so that I could put Joost to the test on the open-source Linux platform.

HELIOS’ simplified Yellow Dog Linux v5.0 utilizes the IBM 64-bit 3.2 GHz Cell processor to provide a powerful state of the art Linux server for Sony PLAYSTATION 3

[Not to be confused with Helios, the Texas FOSS advocate - dcparris]

Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin says Microsoft's recent patent claim against Linux and the open source community is a furphy, alleging it is a delaying tactic to merely help protect its profits, according to a column penned last Friday in Business Week.

Windows Servers Growing Faster than Linux Servers for First Time

Customers are now implementing solutions based upon the OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Microsoft's OpenXML standard, endorsed by ECMA, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Billions of word processing and spreadsheet files are being converted to XML in one of these two formats. OpenDocument expert Gary Edwards believes that adopting OpenXML means lock-in to Microsoft products on an unprecedented scale. In this podcast, Edwards defends OpenDocument's capabilities but also challenges the ODF community to out-innovate Microsoft to provide a competitive alternative to Microsoft's lock-in. He also challenges the open standards community to focus on delivering alternatives to Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint servers. Edwards also describes Open Document Foundation's da Vinci plug-ins for Microsoft Office.

[This was actually posted a while back, but is still of interest to LXer readers. - dcparris]

More realtime than beforeBEA Systems is adding go faster stripes to its Java application server, with two products designed for time-critical work environments.

[Not strictly GNU/Linux-related, but might be of interest to some readers. - dcparris]

Recently, Nicholas Carr wrote an article titled "The Ignorance of the Crowds" in the Strategy+Business Magazine. In the article, he tries to portray open source as a hybrid Bazaar-Cathedral model and warns the businesses against any reliance on the open source process to drive innovation. In this post, I am going to take his arguments and show how he has got it totally wrong.

In my last blog post, I mentioned a piece of the Hacker Ethic. Were it not for said code of ethics, the Free and Open Source Software movements would not be where they are today... Let's take a look at the Hacker Ethic.

Linux has the remarkable ability to be adapted and scaled to specific purposes. It can run corporate servers, personal computers and even small consumer electronics devices. Open source isn't a CE manufacturer's only choice for a micro OS -- among other options are WinCE and Wind River. Unlike other applications, however, a Linux system demands no royalties.

Microsoft SEC filings open up on Novell plan