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Three months ago, former sponsor Bank of America dropped the affinity credit card of the Linux Fund, the"public charity" with a stated mission to support free and open source software. This week the project emerged from hibernation and began accepting applications anew for its on-again, off-again Tux Visa card. New underwriter U.S. Bank is offering consumers a platinum, student, or basic Visa card, each of which provides a small cash reward to open source projects selected by the Linux Fund advisory board. What changed?

I am always looking for great Linux utility tools that can help me manage my PC. Parted Magic 1.8 is one of them.... Great bootable CD plus one is able to place it on a USB key. A must utility for every PC user! Personally I have always used GParted for all my partitioning needs. GParted alone is a great tool. What interested me about Parted Magic was that it included Gparted plus a few more excellent utilities that I think I could find very useful. The USB role of Parted Magic was something that one could use and so I downloaded the iso from the Parted Magic Web Site and began my testing.

Since May, ingimp, a modified version of the GIMP, has collected daily logs on what users do with the program in the hope of improving its usability. The richness of this data is unprecedented, yet improving the GIMP is only a sideshow for the project. What ingimp is really designed to do, according to the project's leader, is develop the software and practices to put free and open source software (FOSS) usability testing on a professional footing "without placing an undue burden on either the developers or users."

Motorola knows that product development needs to move quickly for the company to stay competitive -- and it’s using Linux to hasten the effort. “We do all of our advanced technology development on Linux,” says Mark VandenBrink, a Motorola fellow and chief architect of systems software at the company. Software developers are using Linux to build Web browsers, multimedia players and other mobile applications, VandenBrink says. The Linux community can develop new phones with new features quickly for a variety of global markets.

Today, Microsoft took another step in its relationship with the open source software community. By bringing up a new web property that clearly outlines Microsoft’s position on OSS by providing specific information about Microsoft, the OSS community and the interaction between the two.

Examine how to use the Network Information Service (NIS) to share core databases between Linux and UNIX, and how to use the Network File System (NFS) to share file systems, both with direct links and through the automounter. Although UNIX and Linux are similar, there are some differences between the two that can complicate the process of integrating the two systems. Both, for example, share the same authentication system, but most systems are also standalone. Sharing this authentication information enables you to provide a single sign-on (SSO) functionality to any of the servers in your network.

"This is a free minix-like kernel for i386(+) based AT-machines," began the Linux version 0.01 release notes in September of 1991 for the first release of the Linux kernel. "As the version number (0.01) suggests this is not a mature product. Currently only a subset of AT-hardware is supported (hard-disk, screen, keyboard and serial lines), and some of the system calls are not yet fully implemented (notably mount/umount aren't even implemented)."

[Not "news" really. But fun for the nostalgia inclined :-) – Sander]

At OSCON a few minutes ago, Nat Torkington asked Bill Hilf what will change in the future specifically with regard to Microsoft dealing with F/OSS projects regarding patents. (The context is that Hilf had just said that Microsoft has made mistakes in certain areas. Hilf’s response was… priceless. “I get a lot of e-mail.” “People like to subscribe me to crazy newsletters and spam.” Uh, thanks.

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

The 2007 business meeting of the IMIA Open Source Working Group will take place as follows: Sunday, 19 August 2007, from 5:30 - 7:30pm Venue: Room P3, Brisbane Convention Centre, Australia (in conjunction with medinfo2007) Agenda to be advised later. Apologies to colleagues who won't be at medinfo2007. All queries to imia.oswg[at]gmail.com Updates and agenda will be posted on the IMIA OSWG website atwww.chirad.info/imiaoswg

Whoever runs a version 9 of BIND (more than 50% of the internet is using it as their DNS) in a configuration as a caching name server should read CVE-2007-2925, Trusteer, or the Internet Storm Center, and upgrade their systems.

Membership marks the latest in a series of commitments to build interoperability with industry leaders

The open source collaborative software platform, Mindquarry, earlier this week launched the beta of its hosted collaborative service, Mindquarry GO.

Fuzz testing, which uses random input to test software for bugs, has been the biggest thing to happen in IT security in quite awhile. Now you can quickly and easily direct your own fuzz testing ops, thanks to a cool little program called zzuf.

Linux company DcData and telephony solutions providers BizCall have entered a strategic partnership in order to provide IP Telephony and VOIP services to the Kwazulu Natal market, forming BizCall KZN.

In order to broaden the availability of open source professional services software, this visual guide shows you how to install Apache, MySQL, PHP and allocPSA on Windows.

In 1999, a scientist wanted to look at some data from soil samples collected on Mars in 1975 by the Viking lander. He wanted to test a theory about detecting the existence of Martian bacteria and microbes–in other words, finding life on Mars. The scientist thought he would find what he needed on a NASA website somewhere, but it wasn’t that easy. The original data had been misplaced, and when the huge magnetic tapes that stored the data were found, they were “in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died.” Someone finally found a ream of paper printouts propping a door open and humanity’s understanding of the universe expanded a bit more. The tragic sense that would have accompanied the loss of this knowledge is echoed in accounts of the destruction of the Library at Alexandria, and probably why book-burnings are seen as a sure sign that a society is unhealthy

The openSUSE team on July 20 released version 10.3 Alpha 6. In addition to extensive upgrades, this is the first alpha containing the new refactored libzypp software management library, with some "rough edges," says the team. Targets include x86, x86-64 and PowerPC. It's been about six weeks since the openSUSE team released Alpha 5, featuring kernel version 2.6.22.rc4 and a choice between GNOME and KDE desktops. Novell is shooting for completion of v10.3 for general release in October, the team stated.

Red Hat graphic designers are no strangers to the pains of proprietary formats. Over the years, many have lost photographs, archived projects, and important portfolio work when formats have been changed. They’ve been forced to upgrade before they’re ready, too. That’s why they’re interested in open source design tools, like Inkscape and Scribus, which are becoming more popular and widely used. And when Red Hat offered to create a logo, t-shirt, and poster to raise awareness for ODF, it wasn’t hard to motivate Red Hat designers to get involved.

Hoping to inspire people to write code that can run on its multi-core processors, Intel has open sourced one of its development packages. Users of all shapes and sizes can now download the code for Intel's Threading Building Blocks (TBB) – a C++ template library that caters to the design of parallel code. By open-sourcing this product under the GPLv2 (General Public License), Intel expects more developers – particularly those playing with Linux – will give parallel programming a go. This is a self-serving effort in that Intel desperately needs an influx of parallel code in the coming years, so that software will run well across multi-core chips.