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Seeking to stave off final defeat, SCO has brought a (fourth) new reorganization plan to bankruptcy court. The company has proposed an asset sale to raise funds for paying off the rest of its debts and implementing a new business plan.

By many of the accounts we've seen, the star of last week's Consumer Electronics Show was Palm's new Pre smartphone, a Linux-based offering with all the features we've come to expect from post-iPhone devices and a few innovations of it's own. Indeed, iPhone appears in reviews of the Pre perhaps more often than Palm, with terms including iPhone killer" and "iPhone-like" popping out of paragraphs like coins from a slot machine. Among the iPhone-like attributes are the ubiquitous touch-screen display, along with 3G service, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, on-board camera (reviews differ on whether it is a 2.0 or 3.2 megapixel offering), and third-party applications, while tossing additional specs, including a G1-like slide-out QWERTY keyboard, to the mix.

The world and their dog seems to be talking about Windows 7 at the moment. Ironically, in part that's because it's proving almost impossible to download the beta that has just been released: you can't help feeling that Microsoft has let this happen on purpose just to create a little demand. But while everyone is looking forward, I want to look back, at Windows Vista – more specifically, to the FSF's BadVista campaign.

If you're a Twitter user, you know how much power you can put into a mere 140 character message, especially if it contains a link. Who you follow (which can include a "what" such as O'Reilly.com or Linux Journal) can mold your entire Twitter experience and provide you with up-to-the-minute information on your favorite topics. Recently, Tim O'Reilly, who I follow on Twitter, posted a link suggesting that you follow the Bash Cookbook.

The Debian project has voted to allow the use of binary blobs in the upcoming release of Debian 5, codenamed Lenny, says a news story. The decision is said to have followed a contentious debate over the issue, with open-source purists arguing against the move.

Debian Lenny’s release is getting closer and closer and many people will want to upgrade their Debian Etch servers to Lenny.This is currently in testing so it is not recommended to use these instruction in production.This tutorial will explain how to upgrade from Debian Etch (4.0 ) to Lenny (5.0)

While the current economy presents challenges, the upcoming So Cal Linux Expo looks to be be very successful.

On January 5, Doc Searls asked What would you use Exchange for? A good question and based on the number of comments, it is generating a lot of discussion. As someone currently embedded in a primarily Windows environment, I want to know where the enterprise management tools for the Linux desktop are?

This article explains how you can protect your piece of digital content—whether it be documents, audio tracks, video clips, or cropped images that end users can download with their favorite browser.

We are preparing to release Phoronix Test Suite 1.6 "Tydal" later this month, which is our largest and most significant update to date. Phoronix Test Suite 1.6 has quite a few changes internally as well as a number of new features and added tests. While there are over 200 changes making up this release codenamed Tydal, in this article we are sharing some of the most significant work in this forthcoming release.

In addition to moving forward with the Windows 7 public beta, Microsoft says the beta no longer has a 2.5 million user limit. It begs the question: With demand so hi for the beta, is Microsoft really losing momentum? Not if beta testers are an indication.

It seems that much drama roils behind the OpenOffice scenes, with some saying it's a dying mess thanks to Sun's mismanagement. Then there is Go-OO, which could be a sneaky attempt to implant nasty Microsoft technologies into an important FOSS software suite. Bruce Byfield heroically attempts to sort out the whole mess and figure out what's really going on.

The Linux Foundation (LF) is now accepting 60-second video entries for its "I'm Linux" contest, which spoofs recent Apple and Microsoft commercials. The winner will receive a free trip to Tokyo to participate in the LF's Japan Linux Symposium in October 2009, says the nonprofit group.

Want to know who the major contenders are in the virtualization space?

I took Ric Storms' suggestion to remove the Opera Flash plugin from my OpenBSD 4.4 installation to see if that will keep the Opera Web browser from crashing either itself or the whole of X and leaving between two and four errant processes running in its wake.

The New York Times has published an interview story on Mark Shuttleworth, apparently made during Canonical's Ubuntu Developer Summit last month at Google's Mountain View headquarters. Ashlee Vance, story author, appears to view Ubuntu -- despite many successes -- as the flashy but flawed plaything of a quixotic billionaire.

Code::Blocks is a complete, cross-platform integrated development environment for C and C++, built using the wxWidgets toolkit. Code::Blocks is available on Linux, Windows and OS X, so you may find it useful on Linux if you switched and are already used to it or an IDE like Dev-C++, for example.

In my last post I wrote about the premature failure of my Sylvania g Netbook. I also noted that the dealer, J&R Music World of New York City, offered an immediate exchange. I called to follow up this morning and I should have my replacement on the way very shortly. I also am being reimbursed for the shipping and insurance charges to return the netbook. In addition the price has dropper by $40 since I ordered mine and I am, in fact, receiving a $40 credit as well.

This last Christmas, I refurbished and installed computers for two of my children. As we still have a pile of old games in a drawer, I wanted to provide multi-boot systems. This was much easier and more satisfying than the last time I set up a Linux/Windows dual boot system (with LOADLIN.EXE, which I can’t really recommend today). I also wanted to test out the current state of FreeDOS (a GNU GPL-licensed operating system that emulates parts of MS-DOS 3.3 and MS-DOS 6.0). I did try installing ReactOS 0.3.7 instead of Windows on one of the systems, but I ran into installation problems I couldn’t work around (a topic for a later column, perhaps), owing no doubt to the immaturity of the (“alpha”) software. Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine.

Bluefish, long-favored among DesktopLinux editors, has come out tops in a "shoot-out" between seven different text editing software packages for Linux. Evaluated in the context of HTML authoring, Bluefish is praised for its broad multi-language support, built-in reference material, and ease of use.