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SAN FRANCISCO - 09 Aug 2005 - This is the 10th or 11th LinuxWorld Expo I've attended. Or is it the 12th? Anyway, I've been to all the U.S. ones and they're starting to blur together. Two seconds after I came through the door I ran into Mae Ling Mak and Clay Claiborne of Los Angeles-based Cosmos Engineering, two old friends from LinuxWorlds past, and we tried to estimate the percentage of people who were here because they were committed GNU/Linux advocates vs. the percentage who were here because they were paid to be here as part of their jobs. We figured at least 85% of all attendees were here for their jobs.

When you install a new Linux server distribution, you can often install all of the daemons you'll need to run on that machine at install time. Distribution vendors present a "ready to go" distribution by supplying initialization scripts for all of the services you might run. But what happens if you're building from source, and no init script is supplied? What if you're writing the source and haven't ever built an init script? Here are a few ways to cope when you're faced with this challenge.

Release should lead to debate of near-religious fervor over future of license that governs much free and open-source software.

Chipmaker releases a simulator designed to prod development of software for upcoming processor features.

Company will collaborate with universities to move its high-end but rarely used product line closer to the mainstream.

Previously supporting only Mozilla and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Big Blue's Workplace desktop software now also supports the Firefox browser.

Within next five years, half Oracle's customers may be running Linux, says Oracle President Charles Phillips.

The buzz over breaking the Windows stronghold has died down considerably, but it hasn't been silenced.

"Free software needs free documentation." With this preamble, the Free Software Foundation released the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL) in March 2000. Even with a revision in November 2002, the license has had mixed reviews in the free and open source communities, especially when compared to the widespread enthusiasm for the GNU General Public License (GPL). Some accept the FDL with a few reservations, while others reject it as not being free enough. Both attitudes seem likely to persist at least until the license's next revision.

OpenExchange's product, long tightly tied to Novell's Suse Linux, adds a version for rival Red Hat's OS.

It's a common story: You leave the comfortable confines of the university computer lab, where you've become accustomed to your Unix/Linux cocoon over the past four years. You're been thrust into the cold, hard reality of your first real job, where you are left to fend for yourself in the unfamiliar, and subjectively unfriendly, environment of Windows. Your handy shell scripts no longer do your bidding, all the useful tools to which you've become accustomed are nowhere to be found, and just where the heck do they hide /usr/bin on these machines, anyway?

Despite today's impressive array of media PCs, low-latency frameworks, and revolutionary gold-plated sound cards, most people still prefer to watch television and movies from the comfort of their living rooms rather than in front of a computer monitor. Thus, for computer-acquired video, conversion to a video disc is often the order of the day. That's a task for tovid, a free suite of open source tools to make that trip from the hard drive in one room to a DVD player in another completely painless.

The OSCON Open Source Convention wrapped up Friday with a feminine touch as some of the community's most prominent women discussed the possibilities, problems, and parenthood aspects of open source software participation.

Novell will provide support for Siebel Systems' business applications in its Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

LinuxWorld is now a venue for all sorts of open-source wannabes and rubberneckers.

FVWM, the F Virtual Windows Manager, is a window manager for computers running the X Window System. While KDE and GNOME offer more features, they are also heavy on memory usage. FVWM is light and fast, and you can customize it to meet your needs, and apply these customizations throughout your organization.

The confab's not just for Linux anymore. Instead, the open-source operating system acts as a focus that draws a certain desirable audience.

Linux developers with the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) are getting back to full speed after last spring's interruption to kernel development from the BitKeeper affair, and the organization is shifting gears to focus on intellectual property and European growth, leaving behind the SCO suits against Linux users and providers, which are now "dead," OSDL CEO Stuart Cohen says.

Recently our LUG mailing list experienced a significant quantity of messages which many participants considered to be off topic. During the several days of exchanges, one person voiced the opinion that to him Linux has always been as much about the free exchange of ideas as it being a developing operating system. There are reasonable arguments both ways.

Novell is to move its SuSE Linux Professional to a community-driven development process with a project called OpenSuse. The move follows the strategy of RedHat's Fedora.