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The Android Open Source Project continues to go from strength to strength as the Open Handset Alliance announces a batch of new members. Amongst the 14 new companies to sign up and demonstrate support for Android as an open mobile platform, are Sony Ericsson and Vodafone.

Unison Technologies, with an assist from Canonical and Ubuntu Linux, says it is “launching a major threat to Microsoft Exchange” and Cisco PBXes. The effort involves free unified communications software running on Ubuntu. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

GNOME's Vala programming language lets you use the GLib2 object system at the heart of the GNOME desktop without having to do object-oriented programming in ANSI C. Unlike Mono or Java, a Vala program does not require any virtual machine or runtime libraries, so people who use your Vala objects don't even have to know they are not written in C.

Open Invention Network along with a series of powerful partners ranging from IBM to the Software Freedom Law Center to the Linux Foundation has unveiled Linux Defenders, a federated effort to shield the open source community from patent trolls. The program calls for open source developers large and small to contribute new open source software inventions to the group's attorneys and engineers so that they can help build moats to to keep out people pushing dubious patent infringement charges. Here's why this is a good idea, where the concept has worked very well before.

Previously, talking to Exchange without using Microsoft products was pretty much out of the question. The binary MAPI protocol is proprietary and poorly documented. Exchange supports IMAP and POP, but these protocols only give access to emails, not the calendar, address book, todo lists etc. But beginning with version 2007, Exchange now ships with a SOAP interface called Exchange Web Services, or EWS. This interface gives us access to the functions necessary to write clients in any programming language on any platform. This article describes a PHP program to look up, delete and insert items in an Exchange calendar.

Machines like Linutop can make a rather neat mini server which you can use to host virtually any application base on the LAMP stack.

Black Duck offers services for managed and secure implementations of open source software, and maintains a giant knowledgebase of over 170,000 open source projects. It's doing very well even in this economic environment, as seen in the story linked to above. Today, the company sent along a collection of myths about open source, responses for which answer some interesting questions.

HP and Novell today jointly announced that HP will pre-load Novell's SUSE LInux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) on its Compaq dc5850 desktop PC for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Additionally, Novell announced it will maintain a repository of educational software for SLED users, including dc5850 buyers. HP's dc-5850 is a small form-factor PC typically available with FreeDOS, or else various versions of Windows. Ordering the machine with Linux pre-installed will not add to the cost of the PC, which HP lists as starting at $520.

The last time we looked in-depth at HDMI support on Linux was last December when talking about HDMI with the ATI Catalyst Linux driver. Since then there has been improvements in a number of drivers for different hardware. In this article we have a brief overview on the status of HDMI support in the Intel, NVIDIA, and ATI Linux drivers.

Sometimes, df's best estimate can be off by more than several Gigabytes... give or take ;) Today we're going to look at a little something that is a fairly hot-running-water issue on most of the Linux and Unix boards lately (actually, probably always has been, but our research staff quit on us ;) This post will be similar in focus to our previous post on the differences between sar and vmstat with regards to free memory/swap reporting.

Just as the world's economies started to tank, Australia's Governments got themselves into an economic bind by promising to supply public school children with laptops. However, a leading systems integrator has issued a blueprint for an affordable blanket laptop roll out using Linux and netbooks.

Red Hat this week is expected to announce an investment in Jaspersoft, an open source business intelligence company. Here's the scoop, from The VAR Guy.

The Linux Foundation (LF) announced the results of its Technical Advisory Board (TAB) election. Six new members were elected to the ten-member TAB, originating from companies including Intel, Oracle, and Red Hat, says the LF. The TAB participates in LF events, including its Annual Collaboration Summit, which next year takes place in San Francisco. The TAB will also participate in the first-annual LinuxCon conference, scheduled for next fall.

The last time we looked in-depth at HDMI support on Linux was last December when talking about HDMI with the ATI Catalyst Linux driver. Since then there has been improvements in a number of drivers for different hardware. In this article we have a brief overview on the status of HDMI support in the Intel, NVIDIA, and ATI Linux drivers.

A startling development is being reported by the BBC in the UK. It seems that the Internet Watch Foundation which looks like a quasi governmental organization, has taken offense with an album cover on Wikipedia and is “blocking” access to it. IWF claims it is an issue of child pornography, Wikipedia is calling it censorship.

I haven't booted the Power Mac G4/466 running Debian Etch in a while, but I did so today because I'm about to move the box and its massive LaCie electron22blue monitor. So I wanted to power it up, do a software update and get it on the cart. This is a nice box on which to run Debian. I've complained at length at how poorly Fedora 9 installed and autoconfigured on this box and how startlingly better Debian Etch did with that same task. Sorry to repeat that, but it bears repeating.

Vim is an advanced text editor, used by many free software fanatics. It is highly configurable, beside the default features it has a way to be enhanced using the built-in interpreter. Read more to see how to convert the standard Vim editor into a keyboard trainer program.

In this first of a multi-part series of articles, XML Schema 1.1 is introduced with an overview of the features in this emerging standard.

Bit by bit, the Microsoft monopoly on office productivity applications is receding -- and one of the most important ways this is happening is through the proliferation of open source productivity suites. The most obvious example is OpenOffice.org, now in a landmark third release, but they're also not the only ones in town anymore.

LXer Feature: 10-Dec-2008

A few weeks ago, I installed Debian for the first time on the desktop. Once, a friend and I installed a console-only version on another desktop and we connected remotely to his hosted game server which also ran Debian, so I hoped I should be a bit familiar with it. I have to note however, I have run Gentoo for the past four years, and most of the times it's hard to 'learn' something else. However, I still liked to try and find out for myself if Debian was an easy distribution to use. So, how did I fare?