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Got Job? Get a Linux-related one. Polish up your resume and go to class in San Francisco next month.

Is free and open source software (FOSS) a way to cut business costs? As concern about recession - even depression - deepens, more and more companies are asking this question. However, many have trouble knowing how to begin to find an answer.

I think the most eagerly anticipated demo at Demo 09 here will be Always Innovating's Touch Book, slated for late Monday afternoon. It's yet another Netbook, granted, but it's got a cool detachable (and optional) keyboard, and a magnetic mount for sticking onto a refrigerator. I got a quick demo video (left) with the company's CEO, Gregoire Gentil, who is French. He couldn't show me the user interface on the prototype hardware he had with him, but says it will be easy to use with big, fat American fingers (he didn't actually say that). The product will run a Linux OS, Gentil said, and it's the first Netbook based on an ARM CPU, not the typical Atom found in most Netbooks. He says users can expect 10 to 15 hours of battery life. The product will be $299 without the keyboard, $399 with. It ships this spring, but you can preorder now.

Hard economic times have resulted in good economic news for makers of open source PBXs. In a study released by the Eastern Management Group based on a survey of 6,000 IT executives, open source-based PBX products and overall solutions now account for 18% of the private branch market

Celtx 2.0, an open source media pre-production and screenwriting application, has been released. Celtx is an XUL application writing tool that includes several built in project templates to help users develop their stories. The application helps users get their ideas from concept to production, using pre-visualisation tools, like storyboards. Version 2.0 includes several new features, changes and bug fixes. Celtx is released under the Celtx Public License Version 1.3 (CePL) which consists of the Mozilla Public License Version 1.2 with additional amendments.

Psion Teklogix has filed a counterclaim against Intel in response to the chip giant's attempt to get its Netbook trademark nixed in the US. The complaint - filed, like Intel's, with the US District Court for Northern California - wants Intel brought to book for allegedly infringing said trademark. "Intel has acted willfully and maliciously, has unlawfully attempted to trade on the tremendous commercial value, reputation and goodwill of the Netbook mark, and has deliberately and intentionally confused and deceived the public as to an affiliation, connection or association of Intel with Psion, and/or as to the origin, sponsorship or approval of Intel’s goods and/or services," the PDA pioneer alleges.

Even as the global server market contracts by 14 percent, and Linux server sales decline 7 percent (Windows dropped 17.8 percent), according to IDC, Red Hat's Linux server business is swimming against the current. A February 11 Piper Jaffray report ("Red Hat Inc.: Buy. Survey Shows Red Hat Will Be a Top Share Gainer") says its "survey of 89 domestic Oracle applications customers indicates that Red Hat is gaining IT budget share."

In the "Linux Rescues Windows From Itself In Yet Another Creative Way" category we have all these newfangled Linux-powered instant-on environments. Hit the on switch, and in a few seconds you're connected and Web-surfing. Phoenix Technologies HyperSpace stands apart from the herd; follow along as your faithful correspondent torture-tests it.

Due to the tough economic conditions around the world, Novell last month began slashing some of their workforce. With that reduction, a good percentage of the paid OpenSuSE developers were laid off. As a major blow to the development of the open-source ATI graphics stack, one of the key RadeonHD driver developers has been lost. The key xf86-video-radeonhd developers from the start of this driver have been Luc Verhaegen, Matthias Hopf, and Egbert Eich. Well, there are now just two key Novell developers left working on the RadeonHD project.

LXer Feature: 02-Mar-2009

In this week's LXer Weekly Roundup DeviceGuru talks about how Lenny brightened up an old laptop, Linux has a marketing problem, how RMS may be looking at the internet the wrong way, Microsoft sues TomTom and all the rest of the previous week's big stories.

If you believe the results of the first annual Fiasco Awards then the answer would appear to be an unequivocal yes considering that Vista got a rather staggering 86 percent of the vote for the worst performing IT product of the year.

Microsoft got things seriously wrong when it released Vista and the company knows it. In the past, the absolute market dominance of Windows on the desktop has allowed Redmond to get away with such mistakes. That may no longer be the case now that Google has entered the operating system market with its Linux-based Android platform.

This program converts line endings of text files between MS-DOS and **IX formats. It detects binary files in a nearly foolproof way and leaves them alone unless you override this. It will also leave files alone that are already in the right format and preserves file timestamps. User interrupts are handled gracefully and no garbage or corrupted files left behind. ‘flip’ does not convert files to a different character set, and it can not handle Apple Macintosh line endings (CR only). For that (and more), you can use the ‘recode’ program

Eucalyptus is an open-source infrastructure for the implementation of cloud computing on computer clusters. Its name is an acronym for "Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems". The current interface is compatible with Amazon's EC2 cloud computing interface. Tom Callway speaks to Rich Wolski, the project's director, about how Eucalyptus can be leveraged by enterprises and where it sits along side proprietary alternatives like Windows Azure.

Pricing for open source software products remains a hotly debated topic of interest. Dave Rosenberg argues in a recent post on Negative Approach that there is consensus that the price of open source software should be 10 to 20 percent of the price of equivalent proprietary software. He does not attribute that to anyone, and in our echo chamber of technology bloggers and tweeters, such a statement will quickly come to be seen as a long-established fact. Initially, my intuition told me that Rosenberg's thesis was wrong, but I didn't want to dismiss it without doing my own research. I looked into it a bit more and uncovered some interesting facts that argue both for and against the 10-to-20 percent range put forward by Rosenberg.

Usually, there are topics of discussion galore to choose from in the open source blogosphere, but once Microsoft filed suit against TomTom, it seems you couldn't read about anything else. TomTom faces a patent challenge over its use of the FAT file system in its Linux-based GPS units. Some see the suit as an attack on Linux itself.

Linux shop Xandros is launching the Presto "instant-on" platform for PCs and laptops at the Demo 09 conference. When I saw my first PC with an alternate, quick-boot Linux operating system (DeviceVM), I was impressed. But I no longer think this is a viable market. I do not believe consumers want to run two operating systems on their computers--one fast to boot but limited, and one slow but capable. They want what they know, and for most of them, that means Windows. That's why Windows XP has become the popular operating system for low-spec Netbooks. And with computers on the whole getting more powerful, and Windows 7 getting such great reviews even on midrange PCs now (which will be low-end in months), I just don't see much of a market for two-OS computers.

The recent release of DRBD 8.3 now includes The Third Node feature as a freely available component. This document will cover the basics of setting up a third node on a standard Debian Etch installation. At the end of this tutorial you will have a DRBD device that can be utilized as a SAN, an iSCSI target, a file server, or a database server.

I spoke to Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, who is openSUSE Community Manager, about FOSS license FUD. Brockmeier explains in detail what you need to understand when using open source software, and that it's really no more complex than the commercial stuff (and usually less so).

My brain is mushier than usual after putting in hours day and night all weekend. Enjoy the pictures :)