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A seemingly innocuous change to the networking code that went into the 2.6.27 kernel is now causing trouble for various distributions. Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE are all buttoning up their packages for a release in the near future—with Ubuntu's due this week—so kernel changes are not particularly welcome. Unfortunately, if the problem is not addressed, some users may never be able to download a fix because their TCP/IP won't interoperate with some broken equipment on the internet.

Online learning is evolving into much more than discussions via Blackboard. Today's online learners are spending time engaged in discussions, meeting in virtual classrooms, and combining online and on-the-ground learning, even if they live time zones away from campus.

Over at Internetnews.com, Sean Michael Kerner points out an intriguing bit of information spotted at Groklaw indicating that SCO appears to be taking some steps toward reincorporating the Caldera International name. Insert copious amounts of wild speculation here.

Tips4Linux.com is a new Linux Tips site that brings a new interesting small how-to every day. Learn how to add extra SWAP space on the fly or convert videos for PocketPC devices. Unmount stubborn devices or block IP's with IPTABLES by adding them to a simple text file.

Service providers are all excited about "the cloud" and want us to buy into this vague, mysterious "new" service. But real geeks want details, not hand-waving. In this installment of the excellent classic Networking 101 series, Charlie Schluting tells us how competing service providers all have to cooperate for the Internet to work at all.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Friday, November 7, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Today's stories include Obama, the open source president, what follows the death of Windows, an Android cracked, what keeps Microsoft up at night, and HP rolls its own . . . Linux, that is.

Undoubtedly you've heard the old cliché that Windows is easier to maintain because it has GUI tools for everything while Linux requires commands lines and a terminal. Any experienced Windows administrator knows the point-and-click GUI tools don't cover everything.

These are good times for Linux users. Ubuntu's 8.10 release recently went live, Fedora's 10 release is coming up in mere weeks, and openSUSE will finalize its 11.1 offering in December. Even if none of these distributions are your first choice for daily use, they are popular and are frequently worth checking out on liveCD, even if you plan to continue using your current distribution.

Any political discussion can turn dangerous in a heartbeat, and they usually do, with foaming and fireworks more usual than relaxed give-and-take. So a lot of folks avoid any kind of political discussion entirely just to keep the peace. And this makes sense-- why pick unnecessary fights? Among my little social circle is a sub-group I call the Contentious Old Codgers. These old coots enjoy arguing for the sake of argument, and getting people riled up. They're not interested in discussion or finding common ground because they live for the thrill of combat.

IBM on Wednesday outlined the roadmap for its free office productivity suite, saying that future versions would be developed on the OpenOffice 3.0 open source code base, would run on Apple's Mac OS X and would supportMicrosoft Office 2007 file formats.

Yesterday, I noted in a post that the first extension has been created for Mozilla's Fennec mobile browser (Fennec means small fox). Mozilla quietly reported this news in a blog post. With this in mind, and for several other reasons, I think many people are underestimating the impact Fennec will have as a mobile browser. Here is why.

Why do people excitedly and unquestionably use proprietary software which most closely appear like a "socialist" dictatorship and how Free Software provides the only true way for Liberty.

There are many ways to share files with teams of people, but few require only a Web browser for access and let you choose from tens of different ways of authenticating user access to the files. Such lightweight and universal access is the promise of Gollem, a file manager that runs in your Web browser. With it you can connect to and manage your files on a WebDAV, FTP, or traditional filesystem or SQL database.

Yahoo was quite the chooser last spring when Microsoft offered to buy it -- the Yahoo board held out for a higher price. Now it's looking more and more like the beggar. Its relationship with Google is pretty much finished before it even had a chance to begin, and it appears Yahoo is reaching the end of its rope.

BIOS giant Phoenix Technologies will ship a fast-booting, power-sipping, Linux-based environment equipped with Opera Software's embedded browser, the companies announced. Due in January, and targeting "mobile PCs," Phoenix's "HyperSpace" product promises "instant-on" Internet access on mobile PCs, while the primary OS is booting, running, or shutting down, Phoenix says.

My employer, Warnbro Community Library in Western Australia, had a problem with wasted paper from printing. Library patrons often sent unnecessary print jobs to the printers, then refused to pay for them, leaving reams of unclaimed paper. The library needed a print queue to enable library staff to control patrons' print jobs. It needed to be easy to set up and maintain and cost nothing. We found the answer in using Linux as a print server. Our public network consisted of a simple local area network with 15 Windows clients connecting to the outside world via a dedicated proxy server, and one networked Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 5200. As there was no budget to purchase any special server hardware or software, that left out the option of a dedicated Windows print server, which in any case would have been overkill.

Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s open source point man, promotes the company’s efforts in the areas of interoperability and open source software at the Apache Software Foundation’s ApacheCon conference. In a keynote at the event, Ramji discussed various Microsoft interoperability efforts involving partnerships with WSO2, HBase, AMQP and the company’s “Oslo” modeling technology.

Linux users are not an easy bunch to profile or to count. Many Linux users download the operating system for free and never perform any kind of systems registration to enumerate their hardware. That's where Smolt may be able to help fill the gap. Smolt is an open source hardware profiling technology that is already being used by Red Hat's Fedora and is set for inclusion in the upcoming Novell OpenSUSE 11.1 release.Ubuntu is currently considering Smolt as well.

Much is being said about Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's comments on open source in Australia this week. As GigaOm notes, Ballmer took a bold swipe at Google's Android platform while speaking Down Under, but he also directly said he found open source browser engines "interesting." Among other things implied here, there could be some big changes in how browsers compete.

Sometimes just seeing what's laying about can be more interesting than you thought :) It's been a while since we touched on network port-knocking, like we did back in December in our post on non-maliciously scanning for open network ports. And, in all that time, we've gotten sidetracked so many different ways we're just now getting around to addressing the complement to mass-querying network ports on other hosts in our network (hosts run by folks who, of course, don't mind if we query all of their machine's ports.