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It's said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but I guess being the kind of organization that people love to leak news about might be the next. That seems to be the case with the Linux Foundation, which for the second time in a matter of weeks has seen an enterprising reporter scoop the opposition (and our own internal planning) by releasing a story ahead of our planned schedule. Who knew that an open source foundation could attract paparazzi?

In the last several days Microsoft has shown that despite claims of acquiring a newly found respect for open principles and technology, developers should be cautious in believing promises made by this “new” Microsoft. When it counts, it appears that Microsoft still actively seeks to undermine those technologies or standards that are truly open, especially when those technologies pose a significant threat to their business. Yesterday, Microsoft announced with a formal press release a settlement of a nuisance patent case filed against a smaller company. Despite Microsoft’s protestations to the contrary, the press release makes it clear that the motivation behind this case was the fear, uncertainty and doubt Microsoft hoped the suit would create around the use of Linux. Linux is, not coincidentally, one of Microsoft’s strongest threats in the server, embedded and desktop computing arenas as evidenced in recent remarks make by its CEO Steve Ballmer.

Life without walls is the title of microsoft's new advertising campaign. It is yet another example of microsoft taking someone else's idea and trying to claim it as their own.

Asus has announced a netbook that includes an integral optical disk drive. The Eee PC 1004DN (left) has an Intel Atom N280 processor, a 10-inch display, a 120GB hard disk drive, up to 2GB of RAM, and weighs 3.19 pounds with a six-cell battery, Asus says.

Even Ubuntu has left a little April Fools joke, right in their operating system, but you have to unlock it.

The patent war between Microsoft and TomTom may be resolved in court, but it hasn't ended. At least that's what the lawyers at the Software Freedom Law Center think, and Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation is further considering the implications.

Yahoo has released Sideline, an open source Adobe AIR-powered application that allows users to watch, search and monitor the Twitter public time line. The Sideline application, built with the Yahoo Interface Library, is a customised Yahoo interface to monitor Twitter, the popular microblogging service, for the latest trends and news.

Using a combination of open-source technologies, you can build an unattended network-based OS installer that can save you huge amounts of time and even can install Windows.

Not only has GNOME decided to switch to using git. We have learned that development at Microsoft is based on git too.

I've been writing about Intel's Moblin since 2007. The basic idea is that it's a mobile Linux distribution as well as a community for mobile Linux developers. For Intel, it is a key effort as it works hand in hand with their Atom CPUs. Now after two years of going it on their own, Intel is transferring the effort to the Linux Foundation. Considering that initially at least, Moblin was not something that was welcomed by embedded Linux vendor MontaVista, the move to have Moblin be more open is a good thing.

An overview of no less than 14 most popular text editors for Linux.

Debian developer Ana Guerrero, as spokesperson for the KDE team, has announced that KDE4 will appear during the first week of April 2009.

Ubuntu has arguably changed the landscape of desktop Linux since its initial release of Warty Warthog in 2004. Since then, its momentum has inspired the creation of numerous Ubuntu-based derivatives---Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu---just to name a few. These newcomers typically offer alternative desktop environments or sets of packages that differ from the standard Ubuntu selection. All target specific sub-audiences; be it KDE-folks, multimedia users, footprint minimalists, economic stimulus recipients, or Barrack Obama.

The Conficker worm has infected several million computers since it first started spreading in late 2008. In this paper German developers presented several potential methods to repel Conficker. The approaches presented take advantage of the way Conficker patches infected systems, which can be used to remotely detect a compromised system. They also provided freely available tools including source code on their website. They also described how to use these findings which allows system administrators to quickly and easily scan their networks for infected hosts and to create rules for use in intrusion detection systems. Developers already started to integrate these findings in their network security scanner and equivalent tools like Nmap and Nessus. This article shows how to use four different methods to scan for Conficker infected machines in your network.

Syntax highlighting is incredibly useful for any kind of coding or scripting; comments, quoted strings, code, and markup are shown in different colours. Juliet Kemp shows us how Kate supports syntax highlighting for a multitude of languages, configuration file types, and even some applications like MySQL and diff.

Now we're driving hard towards completing CrossOver 8.0. We've done a ton of work that is going into CrossOver 8; we've got Internet Explorer 7 running, and we're working on 8. We've got a huge number of fixes for Microsoft Office, notably Outlook. And most importantly, we've got Quicken 2009 working along nicely. That's critical, because Quicken 2006 goes out of support in 30 days here.

Setting up an electronic “card catalog” for my books always seemed like a lot of work, so I hadn’t really attempted it before; lately, I happened across a KDE program called Tellico that made it so easy and fun that I completed my inventory in under a week. Plus, I finally found a use for that “CueCat” scanner I’ve had collecting dust for the last several years! Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

The other day I was told to check and see if VMware Tools was installed on every Virtual Machine in our Cluster. I figured this was the perfect time for me to write another script to do this. Here are a list of things that I want to have in the script... List all Virtual Machines and the VMstatus and Version if installed 1- Check for toolsOK 2- Check for toolsNotInstalled 3- Check for toolsNotRunning 4- Check for toolsOld 5- And last but not least, able to do this either on a per Virtual Machine or on the entire Cluster

The Ardour developers have released version 2.8 of their Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). New features include track and bus templates, which allow specific recording configuration settings to be saved and reused, as well as the improved support of audio plug-ins that comply with the Steinberg VST standard. The release also includes a number of bug fixes. More details about the release can be found in the release notes.

A cloud OS simply refers to an operating system (or an interface filled with a complete suite of desktop applications) that resides on the Web and you can access to it anytime, anywhere as long as you have an Internet connection. While there are plenty of cloud OS out there that you can sign up and use for free, there might be instances where you want to have your own dedicated cloud OS. First of all, signing up a free account with third-party cloud OS often means that you have limited file storage space and all your data are stored in other people’s server. Next, the connection speed is dependent on the number of active users at any time. The more popular the site is, the slower it will get when you are using it.