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Ask not what Linux can do for you-- ask what you can do for Linux. Carla Schroder cuts through the misconceptions that plague Free Software and reveals what it's really about.

Cynthia, the daughter of my friend Sue, has cerebral palsy and uses a small touchscreen with picture icons to speak. Sue explained that this is a costly piece of equipment at $6,000, with a $400 fee when it needs service - expenses that many middle-class families with special needs children in even the developed world cannot afford. I had just received my OLPC through the Give One Get One program and had a sense of curious excitement about this new platform, and little idea of the possibilities. "Hi Matt, what's that thing?" asked Sue. The green laptop had caught her eye. After I explained, she immediately thought, “Could this help my daughter?”

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Monday, November 24, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Stories for today include the end of the road for SCO, (honest, finally, really) first tenuous hops from Ubuntu's Jaunty Jackalope, a brighter than bright future for ASUS, Google and Apple netbooks, and why you aren't safe online.

Over the past month, two things struck me as indicative of our current time in space, and both are related to the availability of technology. I live and work in Washington, DC, where we have had issues with the homeless in the past. This has lead to a number of laws and a certain cynicism about their presence. But lately I have noticed fewer of them. At first I simply thought it was the natural cycle. We got cold quickly this year and that tends to drive them indoors. Then I thought it might have something to do with the inauguration and a cleaning up of the city so that it will look good for the camera. But I was accosted the other day, and I began to think that it might be in reaction to technology.

Perhaps you're tired of getting beat up by malware, high prices, lack of interoperability, and poor performance. Maybe you're intrigued by the idea of software that is open, friendly, and that doesn't treat customers like criminals. Maybe you're just curious. Whatever your reasons for wanting to give Ubuntu Linux a try, Eric Geier shows you several easy ways to give this polished, powerful system a test drive. You don't even have to install it to your hard drive.

Novell now claims to have more certified software partners than rival Linux providers. The chest pumping represents Novell’s latest thinly veiled attack against Red Hat. But take a closer look at Novell’s claims and you’ll see why Red Hat may take issue with some of Novell’s statements. Here's the analysis, only from The VAR Guy.

Once upon a time, there was a little company named SCO that lived in the town of Unix. Now, one day SCO went into the woods. And, horrors, it ran back into town shouting that that the big, bad wolves--IBM, Red Hat, and Novell--had attacked it with their big nasty Linux penguin buddy, Tux the Destroyer! And-oh no!--they had stolen SCO's picnic basket of Unix intellectual property goodies.

Once again, a federal judge has ruled that SCO owes Novell over $2.5m, insisting that the Utah shell-of-a-software-company was unjustly enriched by a 2003 licensing agreement with Sun Microsystems. On Thursday, as reported by Groklaw, judge Dale Kimball issued his final judgment (PDF warning) in the seemingly-endless legal face-off between SCO and Novell. The judgment kills SCO's attempt to waive certain claims and then resurrect them on appeal, and it reiterates a July ruling that SCO must pay Novell $2,547,817 (plus interest) for unilaterally agreeing to amend Sun's license for the Unix SVRX copyrights. Interest exceeds $900,000.

In this article we will be focusing on migrating from Apache to Lighttpd web server. Lighttpd is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems, as it has a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set, such as FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting, and many more. Apache is still the most common web server used today, so while we wait for Lighttpd's world domination, the migration from this server warrants its own article. As this article is on Lighttpd and not on Apache, it assumes some knowledge of the Apache configuration.

When Maine State Employees Association SEIU Local 1989 needed software to safeguard confidential information and ward off online threats, it found an open source solution. The labor union, which represents more than 15,000 public and private sector workers throughout the State of Maine, chose Untangle's open source Gateway platform, a solution that not only helps keep confidential data away from prying eyes, but also protects against spam, spyware, phishing, and viruses.

Migrating from high-end Unix-based systems to commodity x86/Linux platforms has been a popular idea for the last few years, at least in theory. But it turns out that not everyone thinks going full-on with Linux is the best solution -- at least not yet. Dan Blanchard, vice president of enterprise operations at Marriott International Inc., is serious about Linux. He says his company's transition from HP-UX and IBM AIX is ongoing -- and inevitable. "We're migrating and we have a strategy to continue deployment of Linux," he says. "A 100% transition will take place over several years and will be completed as technology is refreshed and as other opportunities arise."

Corporate America is increasingly leaving computing to the experts. Why go to the trouble and expense of building and managing complex systems to handle your spiraling data-crunching needs when another company can do it for you? And who better, faster, or cheaper than Google? That's just the kind of conventional wisdom Debra Chrapaty wants to change. As Microsoft's vice-president for Global Foundation Services, Chrapaty wants to prove that her company is no less capable of running the sprawling data centers to offer software doled out via the Internet. The company is especially keen to handle the ubiquitous Microsoft software that consumers and corporations have been running for themselves for the past few decades. "Google has done a great job of hyping" its prowess, Chrapaty says. "But we're neck and neck with them."

Kuali, an open source ERP system, is catching on in multiple colleges and universities. And a savvy integrator called rSmart is leading the push.

As so many wise persons say, migrating from Windows on your computer desktop to Linux is all about having the right applications. Eric Geier introduces KompoZer as a good option for users wanting to find a Microsoft FrontPage replacement.

Last week John "Maddog" Hall visited the Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco. It made him wonder... He writes in his blog: "One of the few examples of people talking about developing nations was Nokia, who talked about some of their services that they are rolling out for people. The reason why I found this ironic was that if the number of mobile devices that were going to roll out reached their promise, then most of that expansion will have to come from "developing nations", yet very little of the conference focused on that, or how FOSS could help those nations."

An online web directory that tracks pages about installing Linux on specific laptops and notebooks says the Internet now has over 8,000 such pages. And, according to Werner Heuser's TuxMobil.org site, the number of online Linux guides has been "rapidly increasing" during the current year.

Standards-based technologies are rapidly being adopted by the telecommunications industry, and for good reason. Using standards-based solutions allows telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs) and network equipment providers (NEPs) to use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software systems across multiple network elements - speeding time-to-market, saving money, and freeing up key resources to focus on competitive differentiation. Equally important, the adoption of standards-based elements enables new and emerging hardware to plug into an existing network infrastructure without extensive retooling and associated costs. It also encourages use of best-of-breed technologies without imposing vendor lock-in.

The Bash Debugger Project (bashdb) lets you set breakpoints, inspect variables, perform a backtrace, and step through a bash script line by line. In other words, it provides the features you expect in a C/C++ debugger to anyone programming a bash script. To see if your standard bash executable has bashdb support, execute the command shown below; if you are not taken to a bashdb prompt then you'll have to install bashdb yourself.

Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc. believes that its new partnership with Japanese computer manufacturer Fujitsu Ld. could accelerate migration from Unix to Linux for mission-critical applications in Japan and ultimately in the U.S. But industry analysts said this is nothing new for the industry and expressed doubt that the move will have a global impact. Red Hat and Fujitsu have extended Long Term Support from seven to 10 years and committed to faster support response times. Under this program, the two vendors will extend the bug fix support periods for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 and offer emergency assistance within 24 hours, Tier 1 aid within a half-hour and Tier 4 help for less severe problems within four hours. The program specifically applies to environments running RHEL on Fujitsu Primequest and Primergy servers.

The computer user and the operating system are melded into one, once he or she sits down at the machine. It is the user that makes an operating system successful or not. If you care to disagree, let's take a look at general public opinion concerning Vista. As unkind as it may seem to many of you, there are some stark realities we must face in going forward.