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IBM has expanded its server lineup with a new mainframe system designed just for Linux that may be aimed, in particular, at higher-end x86 systems. The new system uses IBM's specialty Linux processor and runs either Novell SUSE or Red Hat systems. It does not use the mainframe operating system z/OS but includes mainframe management software as well as IBM's z/Virtual Machine system. Together, they constitute the company's latest "solutions edition," or what IBM says are lower-cost, integrated stacks for the mainframe.

Google Chrome for Linux is finally ready for beta. Chrome is a fast Internet Browser who was already available for Mac & Windows.

Richard Stallman's free software organization seeks to assemble a loose and open group of supporters on a voluntary basis to distribute information on the Web and promote free software.

A downloadable beta of a fundamentally re-jigged version of open source media centre Boxee has recently been made available to a closed circle of users. As well as sprucing up the user interface with a tidier home view, the media library has been revised and now also lists internet, in addition to local, content. Multi-episode TV series, as offered by US service Hulu, for example, can now be sorted by series and episode.

D-Link is readying a Linux-based IP set-top box (STB) based on the open source Boxee home entertainment stack. The singularly styled "Boxee Box DM-380" incorporates WiFi, Ethernet, USB, and HDMI out, as well as analog and digital audio outputs, says the company.

Mozilla Messaging has announced the official release of Thunderbird 3. Ars takes a hands-on look at the improvements in the new version—including tabbed messaging and enhanced search—and finds a lot to be excited about.

There is a hidden game in the Openoffice Spreadsheet program Calc, the game is an Easter Egg that let’s you play a simple version of Space Invaders, titled StarWars Galaxy, so if you are working with openoffice and you need a break, you know what to do ;).

D-Link unveiled its soon-to-be-released “Boxee Box” at Boxee’s preview of Boxee Beta in New York last night. Few details have been disclosed other than that it runs Boxee on Linux, provides HDMI and both analog and digital audio outputs, and hooks up to the Internet via either WiFi or Ethernet.

Mozilla has announced the availability of version 3 of its popular open source Thunderbird email and news client for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Mozilla Thunderbird 3 brings awesome features like:

Now that Google's Linux based ChromeOS has been fully revealed and is actually available for some machines, one thing appears clearly: ChromeOS is more like a Smartbook OS than a Netbook OS. Let's sum up what ChromeOS is about: it is the Chrome Browser as an operating system. Remember a few years ago when people said that the browser would become the OS? That's what Google did! Let's look at what this means...

Even the simplest project can quickly get out of hand if you don’t keep tabs on it. That’s why an application that can help you to deal with various aspects of managing your projects can prove indispensable…

This how to will allow you step by to configure a Postfix mail server with with virtual hosting. Virtual hosting means that you can add as many mail domains as you want and sub sequentially as many mailboxes for these domains as you want. Here we we use an LDAP backend for both the MTA (Postfix) and POP3/IMAP server (Dovecot), and a web based management interface. Optional in this how to is the use of Roundcube webmail and proftpd.

You’re confident your RFID passport is safe in its signal-blocking wallet as you pass through immigration. What you don’t know is that the man behind you is recording the data sent by your passport’s RFID chip as it is scanned.

Here is LWN's twelfth annual timeline of significant events in the Linux and free software world for the year. 2009 offered few surprises to those that have been following Linux and free software for as long as we have. As expected, there were new releases of many of the tools and underlying infrastructure that we use on a daily basis. There were also lawsuits over software patents, arguments over licensing, and various security flaws found and fixed. Distributions were packaged up and released, more phones and other devices with Linux and free software were sold, and so forth. All part of the march to "world domination". We look forward to 2010—and beyond.

How do you apply the principles behind open source to open hardware? It's not easy, but early examples are beginning to emerge, including not one but *two* open source car projects. As ever, a big problem is finding the right kind of licence.

Tomorrow will mark the first alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04, and while there is still a long journey ahead for this Long-Term Support release before it officially makes its debut in April, we could not pass up the opportunity to provide some early benchmarks of the Lucid Lynx. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS has already pulled in X.Org 7.5 with X Server 1.7 and other updated graphics packages along with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel that it will be using in the final build, which already presents some core differences from the current stable release, Ubuntu 9.10.

I've been thinking the last few weeks about the evolution of the GPL violation. After ten years of being involved with GPL enforcement, it seems like a good time to think about how things have changed. Roughly, the typical GPL violation tracks almost directly the adoption and spread of Free Software. When I started finding GPL violations, it was in a day when Big Iron Unix was still king (although it was only a few years away from collapse), and the GNU tools were just becoming state of the art. Indeed, as a sysadmin, I typically took a proprietary Unix system, and built a /usr/local/ filled with the GNU tools, because I hated POSIX tools that didn't have all the GNU extensions.

Using open source software offers schools a unique opportunity to advance the information society that is fair and free, says Cenatic, Spain's resource centre on open source and open standards.

Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computer technology for the design of objects whether 2D or 3D, real or virtual. It is heavily utilized in many applications, including animation, automotive, shipbuilding, aerospace industries, industrial and architectural design, prosthetics, and many others. Because of its enormous economic importance, CAD has been a major driving force for research in computational geometry, computer graphics (both hardware and software), and discrete differential geometry.

In the last decade, I've done plenty of formal research into corporate adoption of open source. For example, I designed a survey and wrote up the results of one research study about business open source use. So I can say authoritatively: At least as of that 2008 research, the major business executive barriers to FOSS adoption are product support, the awareness of available solutions (that is, vendors come calling with a sales pitch, but the CIO might not know an open source option is available), and lack of support by management (i.e. "the boss won't let us"). I've also written the Evans Data open source report for several years, so I know that developers' FOSS perceptions of what's important are very different than the murmurings on the deep-plush-carpeted executive floor.