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The Australian subsidiary of the non-profit One Laptop per Child (OLPC) organisation today said it would commence a local "Give 1, Get 1" program on November 30 that would deliver the machines to both geeks and disadvantaged children. The initiative will provide a XO laptop to a child in remote Australia or the Pacific Islands for each laptop purchased. The cost of a laptop is US$399 (plus shipping and GST). The devices can be ordered online.

The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of "Caterpillar", (a.k.a KDE 4.2 Beta 1), the first testing release of the new KDE 4.2 desktop. Caterpillar is aimed at testers and reviewers. It should provide a solid ground to report bugs that need to be tackled before KDE 4.2.0 is released. Reviewers can use this beta to get a first glance at the upcoming KDE 4.2 desktop which provides significant improvements all over the desktop and applications. With 885 bugs closed in the past week, the KDE community is now in bugfixing mode in order to provide a smooth KDE 4.2.0 to end users in January.

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install VMware Server 2 on an Ubuntu 8.10 desktop system. With VMware Server you can create and run guest operating systems (virtual machines) such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. under a host operating system. This has the benefit that you can run multiple operating systems on the same hardware which saves a lot of money, and you can move virtual machines from one VMware Server to the next one (or to a system that has the VMware Player which is also free).

Why would you ever need to do this? Why, indeed... ;) The first question you might be asking yourself is "Why in the world would I ever want, or even need, to do this?" Since I'm a somewhat-honest guy who writes from the hip, I'll tell you that, depending upon where you work and what kind of setup you have there, you may never ever need to do this. If (worst case) you can get a console connection to your server (which you'll need for this method, anyway) and have onsite staff that can pop a cd in a working drive, you probably wouldn't even want to do this. So, the simple answer is: Why not?

The Ubuntu developers have announced the availability of Ubuntu 9.04 alpha 1, the first prerelease for this version. Ubuntu 9.04 is codenamed Jaunty Jackalope and is scheduled for official release in April. The initial plans for Jaunty were published in September, prior to the release of Ubuntu 8.10. Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth aims to boost the software experience and make the popular Linux distribution more competitive with Windows and Mac OS X on the desktop. Canonical intends to push the platform into the mainstream by putting its resources into upstream usability improvements.

Xavier is the latest K-12 school to deploy hundreds of Ubuntu Linux desktops. Here are some quick details about the deployment, from WorksWithU, the independent guide to Ubuntu.

People have been using Alfresco to manage web content since the early days of the product. In 2007, Alfresco released its formal web content management functionality that added features most people expect when they think of a Web Content Management (WCM) offering, including templating, site preview, snapshots, virtualization, and deployment. WCM is a specialized subset of the larger Enterprise Content Management (ECM) umbrella that is focused specifically on authoring, managing, and publishing files used to produce a website. In this article we will discuss how to create a web project and define web forms using XML Schema to allow non-technical users to create content.

The other day, a client called upon me to perform a hardware and software inventory on all of the computers on his network. There weren't that many machines to inventory, but we needed to gather quite a bit of information about each one. The client was a Microsoft shop and so I had to deal with about an even mix of Windows XP and Vista with a few Windows 95, 98, and ME machines thrown in for good measure. So off I went, with an Excel spreadsheet in hand. I visited each machine in person. For each machine, I wanted the network configuration, the workgroup configuration, and the hardware configuration.

LinuxPlanet Classics: Your CUPS-based Linux printer server can easily serve multiple subnets with some simple tweaks. Carla Schroder shows you how.

The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project on Tuesday released Fedora 10, the latest version of the free Linux-based operating system, with a wide range of improvements in areas such as virtualization management, networking, boot time and security. The release also bundles in OpenOffice 3.0, the most recent edition of the open-source productivity suite. The new virtualization features include the ability to manage virtual hosts and storage remotely, which should appeal to network administrators with fragmented teams. "These features combine to make administration of remote hosts much easier, even in cases where direct physical access is limited or non-existent," the Fedora Team said in a recent blog post on Red Hat's Web site.

Netbooks are a new category of laptop computer, defined mostly by their small size and cheap price. The category started only a year ago and has evolved drastically since. I tried the first netbook, an Asus Eee PC with a 7-inch screen and didn't like it; the keyboard and screen were much too small. But many disagreed with me, and the popularity of that first Eee PC led to dozens and dozens of imitators.

Talk about a market disruption: Hewlett-Packard is fuming mad with GroundWork Open Source, because GroundWork claims to cost up to 80 percent less than HP's various network management tools. This is the latest example of an open source company disrupting traditional, expensive, closed-source solutions. Details at The VAR Guy.

All sorts of misconceptions, misunderstandings, propaganda, and FUD swirl around Free and Open Source Software like autumn leaves. Bruce Byfield addresses and debunks the twelve most prevalent FOSS myths.

Making labels for DVDs and their cases is an often overlooked task. Many discs are lucky to have some terse information quickly scrawled on them after burning. But there are some fine open source applications available for creating labels for CD-ROM and DVD disks and printing jewel case inserts, including gLabels, kover, and cdlabelgen. Fedora 9, Ubuntu Intrepid, and openSUSE 11 all provide packages for gLabels 2.2.3 and kover 3, but cdlabelgen 4.1.0 is left out in the cold by all three distributions. I used the packages for the first two projects and built cdlabelgen from source on a 64-bit Fedora 9 machine.

I would love to go through 2009 and never have to use the tag “legal” on an open source blog post. Wishes do come true. SCO has lost, to the tune of $2.54 million, plus interest. The era of obvious business method patenting may also be over, along with Microsoft’s patent threats, thanks to the decision In Re Bilski.

While I was writing last Friday's editor's note, "Linux Should Copy Amiga", I kept thinking what a different story it would have been if Amiga had been released under a Free Software license. I'm sure I'm not the only one with that thought. Then I ran across osCommerce is Dead: Long Live the NEW osCommerce Project. While the circumstances are different, this is also a story of a software project in trouble. But it has a different ending, because osCommerce is licensed under the GPL.

I'm wondering how many nails have to be pounded into SCO's coffin before people finally just take a stake and pound one through its heart. But one of the last nails has been driven in and sealed over: SCO's lost toNovell in a way that may be, gratefully, irreversible.

Despite the economic turmoil, Wyse Technology generated record sales in October. Apparently, thin clients running Novell SUSE Linux are in high demand. Here's the scoop, only from The VAR Guy.

"If you look at our original schedule we were supposed to release around Oct. 28 and here we are, four weeks later than what we expected," Paul Frields, Fedora's project leader, told InternetNews.com. The outage itself lasted about three weeks, he added, "and during that time, our infrastructure team nuked our infrastructure and rebuilt the entire thing."

SUSE Linux Enterprise now has more than 2,500 software certified applications and is recommended as a preferred platform for leading ISVs including Microsoft and SAP Novell today announced more than 2,500 software applications are now certified on the latest versions of SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise, with an average of 140 new applications being added each month. Based on publicly available information, SUSE Linux Enterprise 9 and 10 have the most certified software applications when compared to the latest releases of all other commercial Linux* distributions.