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Our pattern is to present to you a family or child that has received one of our computers then highlight the "Walk a Kid Home" member who made that installation possible. We're going to break from the norm from time to time...there is someone I want to bring to your attention. And if this guy isn't a Linux Luminary in the first degree, I'll buy you lunch.

In an eWEEK interview, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says his company is "defining a whole new business model" by applying collaborative principles similar to those behind Facebook and Wikipedia. Whitehurst speaks out on open source business models, RHEL 5.4's KVM hypervisor, and the cloud. The Whitehurst interview, conducted by eWEEK's Chris Preimesberger, arrives as the Linux distribution and services giant preps for its annual Red Hat Summit on Sept. 1-4 in Chicago. The company is expected to make a major announcement about Red Hat Linux Enterprise (RHEL), writes Preimesberger.

Rolex, movies, Gucci, and even Sharpie pens, among other consumer goods, are well known for reaching a level of ubiquity where people start producing fakes or knock-offs. From our industry, even Steve Jobs’ personal brand warranted a knock-off in the form the FakeSteveJobs blog. Linux, too, has reached that level of ubiquity and maturity. We all use Linux every day via our bank ATMs, our cars, our netbooks, the Internet (Google, Facebook and more), and the list goes on. Thus, the Linus Torvalds knock-offs have naturally come forth.

What does your home computer lab look like? Do you have a dedicated office, a corner of the living room, a lounge-in-bed setup? Maybe you're set up more like an old-fashioned terminal server, with a big workstation in a closet and several remote PCs. Maybe you have whittled your computing herd down to a single sleek laptop.

Two whirlwinds blew into Buenos Aires this week: the hundreds of Wikipedia supporters, editors and administrators here for their annual Wikimania conference, and the free-software activist Richard Stallman, who was in town as part of his never-ending tour of the globe to promote his cause. The two are set to meet Wednesday, when Mr. Stallman gives the keynote address at Wikimania in a theater across the street large enough to accommodate the expected crowd. But they don’t exactly blow in the same direction.

This howto was written when I needed to run some php based web applications and the only system around was FreeNAS. Although many people are using php and MySQL on a FreeNAS box successfully I couldn't find any simple tutorial for the purpose, so I wrote one in case anyone needs it.

Continuing ABLEconf's drive to showcase free and open source software for business, we are seeking presentations for our Saturday, October 24th event.

As Novell prepares to announce quarterly results on Aug. 27, the company offered this tidbit of information: More than 2,000 independent software vendors (ISVs) have signed up for the SUSE Appliance Program. Pretty darn impressive.

I have tried Chromium Web Browser in Ubuntu before and it was a huge disappointment. I was not even able to maximise the window while using Chromium . I think that was a few months ago and after reading some encouraging reviews elsewhere, i decided to give google chrome another try in my Ubuntu machine.

The news started to emerge in various Twitter feeds and personal blog posts Monday: David Recordon, a Six Apart developer and prominent open standards advocate, has left the blog software company to take a job at Facebook.

Australian sales of mini-notebooks jumped a massive 398.4% in the second quarter of this year, compared with 12 months ago. It's clear evidence that consumers prefer mobile PCs, even when they come with a higher price tag than a desktop equivalent.

There are some great distributions in our wonderfully cluttered Linux distro landscape. Some are very similar to others, and some are wildly different from the rest. The one thing to remember is that while these distributions may be amazingly well thought out, and amazingly well put together their obscurity will present two problems. First, smaller communities will not be as capable of helping you with every problem you face. Second, with fewer users you also have fewer contributors. This means that releases may be infrequent and irregular, and package repositories will be sparse. If these problems are not crucial deal breakers for you, read on.

Data persistence is a cornerstone of scalable application delivery in enterprise environments. In this final article of his series introducing Google App Engine for Java™, Rick Hightower takes on the challenges of App Engine's current Java-based persistence framework. Learn the nuts and bolts of why Java persistence in the current preview release isn't quite ready for prime time, while also getting a working demonstration of what you can do to persist data in App Engine for Java applications. Note that you will need to have the contact-management application from Part 2 up and running as you learn how to use the JDO API to persist, query, update, and delete Contact objects.

The New Zealand Open Source Society is launching a project to demonstrate the viability of free open source software on public sector desktops.

From the "How Long Does It Take Linux Vendors To Patch?' files: On August 14th, I wrote about a Linux NULL security flaw affecting all Linux vendors. Linux founder Linus Torvalds had a patch for the kernel the same day, but how long did it take the big enterprise vendors? You might be surprised. I know I was.

I plucked this from the noise on Twitter: A new project dubbed AerieBSD is starting, some say as a fork of OpenBSD (and from the looks of the planned architectures, I'd say they're right).

A friend of mine suggested that I should include as boilerplate in my security stories, a line like: "Of course, if you were running desktop Linux or using a Mac, you wouldn't have this problem." She's got a point. Windows is now, always has been, and always will be insecure. Here's why.

About two months ago, Intel and Nokia announced a strategic partnership without mentioning any concrete products. The first product announcement followed today: With the Booklet 3G, Nokia will offer a 10-inch netbook (and its first netbook altogether) – equipped, of course, with an Atom processor.

While the KDE community busied itself with preparations for the 4.3 release, KDE 4 continued to spread to new platforms with ReactOS user Davy Bartoloni reporting (machine translation of original Italian) some success in running KDE applications on that operating system.

An SSL portal isn't as secure as a real VPN (virtual private network) such as OpenVPN, but it's easier to set up. The Untangle gateway makes setting up and managing an SSL-based Web portal fast and easy; Eric Geier shows how.