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In a recent interview, Linux founder Linus Torvalds offered some of his thoughts on the progress of the Linux kernel so far and some ideas as to where development was headed for the year ahead.

Most people lock their doors and windows, use a paper shredder to protect themselves from identity theft, and install antivirus software on their computers. Yet they routinely surf the Internet without giving a second thought to whether their browser is secure and their personal information safe. Unfortunately, it's easy for someone with nefarious intentions to use a Web site to glean data from -- or introduce spyware to -- your computer. Even worse, sometimes all you have to do is randomly click on a site to have your data probed in a most unwelcome way.

In a role created for him in February this year, Red Hat's president for the Asia-Pacific region is vocal about the power of "talent attracting talent" which, he believes, is vital to growing the business. "Since I joined the company earlier this year, we've brought in some executives who are veterans. We want this leadership to attract high-profile executives, to inspire, set the direction and to talk with key clients," Messer said.

Ravi Simhambhatla's latest project employing open source has been to juice up the web site for Virgin America, the US's newest carrier, so travelers can surf smoothly and purchase tickets without waiting for pages to build. Virgin America relies heavily on the power of virginameica.com, which pulls in 80 per cent of sales, with 150,000 unique hits a day in the week and 100,000 at weekends.

Launchpad Personal Package Archive gives developers space to collaborate and publish their own software for multiple architectures running Ubuntu Linux.

LXer Feature: 25-Nov-2007

How do you release your version of Linux without actually releasing it? Just ask Google, whether by coincidence or design Walmart has started selling computers pre-installed with a version of Linux called "gOS" that is seriously Google centric and guess what? Its not a bad little distro and the computers? They're selling like hotcakes. We have some Linux gaming news, One shoppers Linux inspired assault on Black Friday, Macedonian Students start to get there Edubuntu computers and a funny take on SCO's lawsuit.

Almost a year on from the release of Microsoft's Windows Vista, only 13 percent of companies say they expect to move all desktops to the operating system, according to a survey released this week. Furthermore, adoption of Linux continues to gather pace, with a particular emphasis on the desktop emerging.

A new version of the ATI/AMD Linux display driver was released last night for both x86 and x86_64 platforms. This release is a bit special, as it includes support for Ubuntu 7.10. Moreover, starting with this version, the ATI Catalyst software suite does not support the Linux kernel 2.4, XFree86 4.3 software and workstation hardware.

Space is filling up fast for the not-for-profit Harris County Health Information Cooperative(HCHIC) sponsored, intensive, vendor-neutral Educational Conference:"Introduction to WorldVistA EHR System Administration". December 7th-9th, 2007 in Houston, Texas. 10% of the proceeds benefit the not-for-profit WorldVistA organization with the rest of the proceeds benefiting the not-for-profit HCHIC. More information and enrollment informationhere.

The GNOME Foundation has issued a statement in response to recent accusations that it has been supporting the acceptance of Microsoft's Office Open XML format (OOXML) as an ECMA standard at the expense of the Open Document Format (ODF), the open standard used by OpenOffice.org, KOffice and other free software office applications. However, whether the statement's attempt at logical rebuttal will do anything to reduce the emotions or altruism behind the criticisms is anybody's guess.

Many people have suggested that I submit some of my many aerial photos to Google Earth. I'd love to do that, but after looking at the instructions for adding photos, especially the "acceptance policy", I have to wonder if it's worth the effort, or even the Right Thing To Do. First, I have to upload photos into Paroramio, which was bought by Google earlier this year.. Since I've already uploaded 17,310 photos into my Flickr account, I'm not in the mood to do that again, least of all into a silo'd service — which Panoramio appears to be, while Flickr is not... at least not as much as Panoramio.

The Society of Imaging Informatics in Medicine recently released a special edition of the Journal of Digital Imaging focused on open source. While they are published in Springer, all the articles on major open source packages in imaging informatics are open access. SIIM saw it fitting that open source articles shouldn't be locked into a proprietary publisher.

We are now on the home stretch of the road to KDE 4.0, but KDE still needs extensive user testing to make sure everything arrives in the best possible shape for the release. There is a pressing need for users to be able to get hold of very up-to-date builds of KDE, especially if they want to participate in Krush days and pick up last-minute regressions, confirm proposed fixes, and avoid re-reporting recently fixed bugs, preferably without having to wait for their chosen distro to provide packages. KDE4Daily VM aims to provide such a service.

Although some companies and government agencies have embraced open source, the level of adoption in Singapore is still low by most counts, industry observers say. According to Red Hat, open source adoption has grown over the years in Singapore--but not at a rate where it can or should be.

Use of the Linux operating system on desktop machines is continuing to grow with small and medium business showing the most enthusiasm for the open source software.

Skype recently released Skype 2.0 beta for Linux, which includes the ability to make video calls, a feature the Windows and Mac versions have had for some time. I tried the beta on two systems running Ubuntu 7.10 -- my desktop PC with a USB webcam and a MacBook Pro with its onboard iSight webcam -- with mixed results. Probably the hardest part of using Skype or any other VoIP application as a video phone is finding a webcam that is supported on Linux. As I noted in my review of the Ekiga videophone earlier this year, the Creative Labs Ultra NX works flawlessly.

While the mobile Linux community has reacted positively to Google's Android, the new platform has also given it some cause for concern. The arrival of a giant player area with very clear ideas of role it wants mobile Linux to fill was bound to ruffle a few feathers and, despite public proclamations of "welcome" and "support", the Linux establishment is showing a few cracks.

Immediately after the release of KDE 4.0 RC1, the KDE office suite KOffice today announced the release of version 2.0 Alpha 5. As with the previous alpha versions of 2.0, this is a technology preview more than a version for users to test out. Nonetheless there are some exciting new features and developments here. Read on for more information.

This past weekend, November 16th through the 18th, Zaragoza Spain was the home of Akademy-es 2007. The conference began early Saturday morning and finished Monday with a Hackathon. Akademy-es 2007, hosted by Hispalinux, Wireless Zaragoza, and the Zaragoza council, was a conference specifically for KDE developers and users from around Spain.

What do Linux users want from their desktop? The Linux Foundation's survey has the answers. While the LF's third annual desktop Linux survey doesn't officially end until November 30th, the number of daily respondents have shrunk to a trickle and the Foundation is working on analyzing the results. This is an early look at the raw data.