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Linux Against Poverty is much more than an installfest. It is an effort between the Free Software Community in any given place and the greater community that holds it. Lynn Bender's people will now begin soliciting companies and corporations in the Austin area for physical donations. He has secured the swank and popular nightspot known as Union Park for both the actual event and the party afterwards. The Park will be full of volunteer Austin Geeks, ready to accept the incoming machines, triage them and place them into different staging areas. One of the brightest tech guys I know, Andy Krell from nFusion will be there in person to lend a hand.

FTP, file transfer protocol, is widely used on the Internet for transferring files. Though FTP has a terrible security record it continues to be very popular, mainly because it is so simple to setup and use. This course is designed to take you step by step through the proper setup of a FTP Server on CentOS.

The PostgreSQL developers have published a first release candidate for version 8.4 of the free database system with a final version due later this month. The release candidate from the PostgreSQL Global Development Group includes a number of bug fixes to the previous beta release, including the elimination of some crashing bugs and changes in the handling of NULL values being passed to internal functions to prevent denial of service attacks.

IDG World Expo has announced speakers for its inaugural OpenSource World 2009 show (formerly LinuxWorld) on Aug. 12-13 in San Francisco. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen will keynote the conference, which will feature presentations on Linux desktops, netbooks, Android, mobile devices, enterprise, security, troubleshooting, and numerous "cloud" topics.

If you haven't heard the words "smart grid" before, that's likely to change soon. That's especially so if you live in the U.S., where billions of dollars in incentive spending is pouring into making the smart grid a reality. As you might expect, since I'm talking about it here, the smart grid will rely on standards to become real. A whole lot of standards, in fact, and that's a problem.

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Wireshark 1.2 introduces a few "new and exciting" features for its network protocol analyzer software. Wireshark's trend in its new release is toward geo-targeting features: the tool now does GeoIP database lookups on demand for geographic locations for IP addresses and integrates the results with OpenStreetMap.

Open source doesn't mean open to all. New open source-powered commercial products from Red Hat are set to roll out -- but for now, it's only for an invited few. The actual products that Red Hat is making available to its private beta customers include the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers and the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops.

An annual call for help...

The trouble with the present FOSS brand is that it is not created by those with a stake in it; rather, it is created and controlled by those who oppose FOSS and all that it stands for. Bruce Byfield reports on the importance of defining the FOSS brand outside the community.

Back in May we shared that NVIDIA was readying its OpenCL Linux driver and had submitted their OpenCL 1.0 NVIDIA drivers to the Khronos Group for certification. As of this morning, NVIDIA has now released its OpenCL driver for Linux (and Windows), but it's only available if you are a registered NVIDIA developer...

Small screen? Crummy touchpad? Not a problem for Conkeror. Conkeror is a Web browser with an Emacs-style look, feel and configuration. It uses Firefox's HTML rendering engine and works with most Firefox extensions, but it provides a keyboard-driven interface and makes excellent use of screen space. It's a fitting Web browser for Netbooks with their imprecise touchpads and small screens. Conkeror uses the same free software license as Firefox.

Time for another distro review, and this time I thought I’d look at the latest version of a distribution I’ve enjoyed a lot in the past. Linux Mint 7, AKA Gloria. I’m tempted to make references to Van Morrison here, but I’ll restrain myself. The last version I reviewed was actually Linux Mint 5, so I’ve missed a release. At the time I said it was the best Linux distribution I’d seen for new users, better even than the hallowed Ubuntu (upon which it is based). Would I still feel the same?

As Greg Maxwell nicely pointed out it appears Theora can compete with other formats used to distribute video content online. He compared output generated by YouTube's encoding mechanism with output generated by the new Theora enconder (as of writing libtheora 1.1alpha2 is the latest release). The result in a nutshell: Theora delivers similar performance to whatever encoder setup is currently used at YouTube - this means online streaming services can use open media technology without paying a significant price in bitrate or quality compared to current setups.

Today, I'm announcing my new Linux company, HookLineNSinker, Inc. (HLNS) which will produce a new commercial Linux distribution: Pricey Linux. HLNS products include Pricey Linux Enterprise, Pricey Linux Small Business Server and The Pricey Linux Desktop. There are also Pricey Linux Support options for those of you who need 24x7 support for your Pricey Systems. And to comply with Linux licensing, we'll also offer a free, community edition of our Pricey Linux known as BaitNSwitch Linux.

A community site dedicated to offering previews of open source applications has now added Ubuntu Linux 8.04 to its catalog. Click2try now offers over 40 virtualized open source applications in its online catalog, with both free and paid subscription plans available, says the company. The newly offered virtualized Ubuntu distribution is complete with all standard bundled applications, including OpenOffice, GIMP, Firefox, and Rhythmbox, says Click2try. Like the other software hosted by Click2try, it is served up via VMware virtual machines (VMs) that are said to be securely stored within a hardened network infrastructure at the company's data center in Houston, Texas.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is serious software. But xTuple, an open source ERP specialist, is injecting some humor into the conversation while building a channel partner program. Here’s the scoop from The VAR Guy.

My interest here isn't in what Microsoft and the EU agree to as an appropriate remedy for Microsoft's market dominance in web browsers or past legal transgressions. My interest is in ensuring an increase in the global competition in operating system platforms. In short, unbundle IE in Europe? Why stop there? Why not unbundle the whole of Windows from all OEM PCs shipped in Europe?

The W3C, custodians of web standards, have launched an appeal for prior art to contest an Apple patent that appears to cover any kind of automated updating procedure, including the Widget standard on which the group is working. The patent, filed in 1995 and awarded in 1998, and which Apple revealed to the W3C in March, covers an application contacting a central server to see if a new version is available, and downloading the replacement if it is.

Google Mail, Calendar and Docs could be vulnerable. That's the argument an open letter to Google's CEO Eric Schmidt makes, thereby asking him to adopt the HTTPS standard for data transfers for these applications.