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So Psystar has denied Apple's allegations of copyright and other infringements associated with the sale of its Open Computer. Psystar's Open Computer is assembled from generic parts, and offered for sale with Mac OS X preinstalled as one of the operating system options. Is Psystar putting up fallacious arguments in its defence and counterattack or are its arguments justified?

The PSMon utility lets you specify which processes should be running, how much of resources such as CPU or RAM each is allowed to use when it runs, and how many instances are able to be run. PSMon will then ensure that these processes are running and kill off a process if it starts to use too many resources, and possibly restart a process if it has crashed.

With the Open Source Conference (OSCon) and IDG's LinuxWorld show in the rearview mirror of 2008, it is clear that open source is no longer just a trendy conversation. What has happened is a clear evolution of a community that has grown up and produced intelligent, cutting-edge technologies with an eye on making computing faster, smarter and cheaper for corporate users. Companies like Openmoko are challenging the mobile device market with its notion that users should control what applications are installed. Others like XAware and SnapLogic are opening up data integration possibilities, and still more are tangling with virtualization, databases, and trading systems. Along with a company accurately called Untangle, the companies' point is to make computing less complex. The decision is no longer a question of open source, but about what product is best at solving computing problems regardless of how it was built.

State IT organisation representatives from Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and Paraguay have signed a declaration expressing their dissatisfaction with the International Standards Organisation (ISO). The countries signed the declaration at the CONSEGI conference in Brazil over the weekend in response to news that the ISO/IEC had rejected the appeals from South Africa, Brazil and Venezuela and India to the ISO process to adopt Microsoft’s OOXML format as an international standard.

In one of the less likely combinations of talent, Stephen Fry has been called in to be part of the 25th anniversary of the GNU operating system. Fry, a popular humorist, actor and novelist features in a five-minute long film in which he explains the history of free software and its importance in the world. In true style Fry is entertaining and offers one of the best - and most understandable - explanations of free software and the the GNU is not Unix philosophy.

Despite their critics, analysts at their best can bridge a significant gap between vendors and software users. Vendor marketers who create information for prospective customers are understandably sales-driven and rarely grasp how their products are deployed. The result tends to be material strong on superlatives and weak on substance. Certain features are emphasized while the processes involved in implementation are largely ignored, even though these may be more significant and costly than the software itself.

Criticisms of the Ubuntu distribution and Canonical, its corporate sponsor, are not hard to come by. Depending on who is speaking, Ubuntu and Canonical are guilty of profiting from the free software community without giving back to it, forking important projects or distributions, legitimizing the use of binary-only system components, and more. Of all of these gripes, it is the "contributing to the community" complaint which is heard most. If one believes these complaints, Ubuntu is a parasitic operation which does not understand how the community works and which is harmful to the community as a whole.

The creation of an automated article listing on the central column of the OpenSourceToday's home page would have begun by running the called php source specified in the action attribute of the input form. The php scripts would have begun by creating the text of the article summary that contained the publication date, the linked title, the author's name and the capsule summary. The entire string described would be enclosed within a div tag pair when written into a new text file. The next task would have been creating a backup copy of the original listing, then appending its content into the new file that contained only the newest article summary. Finally this completed new listing would be copied over the original. That is the process I describe here, in detail.

Search giant Google has confirmed it will shortly unveil a new Web browser dubbed 'Chrome' and based on code from the Webkit project. After rumors broke out all over the Web about the new software, Google confirmed the plans this morning in a blog post here. Word first surfaced of the plans in a Web comic book introducing Google Chrome, the search giant's long-rumored open source browser project. While the illustrations, created by cartoonist Scott McCloud, were not announced by Google, they do contain the quotes and likenesses of 19 Google developers.

Several weeks ago, I was flying west past Chicago, watching the ground slide by below, when I spotted the signature figure eight of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, better known as Fermilab. I shot some pictures, which I put up at the Linux Journal Flickr pool (Flickr also uses Linux). I figured Fermilab naturally would use Linux, and found that Fermilab has its own distro: Fermi Linux. Its public site provides a nice window into a highly professional and focused usage of Linux. Within Fermi Linux, specific generations are known as Scientific Linux Fermi, each with version numbers and the code names Charm, Strange, Top, Bottom, Up, Feynmann, Wilson and Lederman.

Intellectual property rights (IPR) are usually associated with large software or music companies. This impression can easily obscure the critical connection between open source and property rights. Just because software is given away, it does not mean all property rights are thrown out of the window. In fact IPR is critical to the health of the open source movement. Many open source developers are ill-equipped to deal with IPR but one who did tackle the issue was Robert Jacobsen, whose case against US company Kamind was recently decided in the US Appeal Court.

I follow a lot of mailing lists…all of them either Linux or open source in nature. Some of these lists I have been following for years. And from those lists I have seen trends come and go. I have seen technologies blossom and die. I have met a lot of people, some wonderful some not so wonderful. But the one constant that I have noticed throughout this journey is that the Linux and open source community hold some common bonds. One of those common bonds is etiquette.

A common topic of discussion in the Windows world - in fact, in any operating system - is boot performance. Many systems take a long time to reach a usable desktop from the moment the power switch is pressed, and this can be quite annoying if it takes too long. In a post on the Engineering 7 blog, Michael Fortin, lead engineer of Microsoft's Fundamentals/Core Operating System Group, explains what Microsoft is doing to make Windows 7 boot faster.

Linux users have always vocally encouraged major hardware vendors to unbundle the Windows operating system or offer Linux pre-installation. Although several prominent vendors are beginning to embrace this concept, they only support it on a limited subset of their hardware offerings. This means that Linux users often pay for a Windows license that they never use, and it also means that Linux users are forever attempting to recoup the "Windows tax."

The world of Linux distribution has traditionally associated the arrival of September with the start of a grand testing period as all major projects are about to finalise their feature lists, freeze their development trees and begin fixing any remaining bugs. So what can we expect when the final products eventually hit the download mirrors? We'll take a look at the feature lists of all major distributions to see what's coming up in the next few months. In the news section, Debian announces the code name of its post-Lenny release, Novell launches SUSE Studio - a web-based tool for building custom distributions, and Linpus Technologies releases an installable Linpus Lite live CD for netbooks. Also among the interesting web links, a user reports how Xubuntu has managed to turn an OLPC into a perfect travelling companion, while the developers of FreeNAS tell us why their FreeBSD-based distribution is an excellent way of storing important files on a remote machine. All this and more in this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. Happy reading!

Korean company MIZI Research, a developer of mobile application platforms based on embedded Linux, has been bought by US based Wind River, a developer of tools claimed to "reduce effort, cost and risk and optimise quality and reliability at all phases of the device software development process, from concept to deployed product." MIZI has 65 employees and, according to Wind River, is one of the earliest Linux pioneers in the mobile market.

Almost one-third of the 25 top-selling laptops at Amazon.com are sold with Linux. (Shown is their top-selling Linux laptop, an Asus EEEpc 900 unit.) When I last reported on my search for such a laptop, we learned that this is not something you just go into a store and ask for, unless you like blank stares from clerks. But a correspondent linked me to an Amazon page showing a number of Linux-based laptop configurations, mostly from MSI and Asus. So I asked their nice PR lady about it.

LXer Feature: 31-Aug-2008

Happy Labor Day, hopefully you have an extra day off this weekend to relax and catch up on things, thus I present this week's LXer Roundup for your reading pleasure. This week we have 5 unpopular desktop environments, 25 killer Linux applications, 10 must have cheat sheets for those of you who are low on mental "RAM" (I know, its a groaner, but its all mine), in a new twist to the Apple-Psystar saga, Psystar claims they are going to counter sue Apple claiming anticompetitive business practices. A computer on the International Space Station gets infected with a 'worm' (guess what OS it was running?), Carla Schroder asks the question "Does attracting hordes of Windows users to your FOSS project benefit your project, or help the advancement of FOSS?" and to wrap things up I have a couple pieces of FUD I came across.

This article will tell you how to install and use Webmin, a web user interface mainly used for administering servers. If you are not a sysadmin, don’t run away: Webmin can also be used on a single desktop too. You may struggle to remember all the command line operations to manage, say, run levels or various daemons and prefer to do it the GUI way. One of the best reasons for using Webmin is to circumvent the sheer number of command line variations from distro to distro and the different locations for configuration files that you would otherwise require to memorize (manpages notwithstanding). Please keep in mind that it is still essential to know how to use basic Unix commands. Using Webmin without some system literacy is just asking for trouble. It should be used as an additional tool, not a replacement—because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. On that basis, let’s look at what Webmin modules can do for the desktop user.

By rights, copyright really shouldn’t apply to binary executables, because they are purely “functional” (not “expressive”) works. The decision to extend copyright to binaries was an economically-motivated anomaly, and that choice has some counter-intuitive and detrimental side-effects. What would things in the free software world look like if the courts had decided otherwise? For one thing, the implementation of copyleft would have to be completely different. Hypothetical? Academic? Not if you’re a hardware developer! Because this is exactly what the law does look like for designs for physical hardware (where the product is not protected by copyright).