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One key issue that RHEL 5.3 addresses is Windows Vista interoperability. Red Hat has updated and improved the Samba (define), Linux to Window file sharing technology so that it will support Window Vista. "We have seen demand for Vista compatibility in 2008 and it became a problem that we didn't have really good support for," Riek admitted. "We did some changes on the Samba side to get the new Vista enablement there we also did some work on CIFS (define) side so Linux can work as a client to Windows servers."

CherryPal announced an Atom-based "Bing" netbook that runs Linux or Windows XP, and offers a claimed five hours of battery life. The company also announced an upgraded version of its Linux-based nettop, the CherryPal C114, and launched a "Green Maraschino" open-source Linux distribution supporting the Bing.

Taiwan-based hardware manufacturer Shuttle has released a series of mini-desktops running Linux. The next generation will have power-efficient VIA Nano processors.

The South African State IT Agency’s (SITA) Free and Open Source Software Programme Office (FPO) will host the second annual chief information officers (CIO) workshop on February 24. The one-day workshop will bring together all government IT decision makers to share ideas and experiences regarding FOSS implementation in government.

Enrico Zini is a long time Fellow of the FSFE and a prominent Debian developer. He has been involved in many different projects relating to Free Software and is deeply concerned about social issues. I had a nice chat with Enrico and asked him about some of his favourite causes.

The incoming president of an alliance of open-source companies hopes he can persuade big-name proprietary ISVs to join rivals in his group to further interoperability. Recently named Open Solutions Alliance president Anthony Gold told The Reg that his goal is to take the two-year-old organization to the "next level" by turning it into a destination for practical advice on interoperability between proprietary and closed-source software. To get there, Gold hopes he can persuade Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and others to join the group, even though the OSA membership includes JasperSoft, Ingres, and Talend, that challenge Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM in business intelligence, databases, and integration.

Opengear, which develops open source-based network management tools, plans to double the size of its channel partner program in 2009. Here's how, reports The VAR Guy.

Canonical has released its third alpha version of Ubuntu 9.04. It brings a few new features to test, including notification settings in the user interface and the much publicized ext4 filesystem support.

Inspired by the wonderful Enigma desktop by Kaelri, featured at Lifehacker, I decided to port at least some of the beautiful design to my Linux desktop.

Opera 10 is the next generation of the popular, closed-source web browser built in Qt, and available on UNIX (including both Linux and FreeBSD), Mac and Windows platforms. In this review I used the Qt 4 version of Opera 10 alpha, build 4102 (the .tar.gz package), but Opera 10 will be available using both Qt 3 and Qt 4 toolkits, so you can choose which one you prefer. I ran Opera in Debian Lenny (KDE 3.5.10) with all the updates to date.

Apple has had marked success with the 'I'm a Mac' advertising campaigns, and Microsoft is back banging it's head against a seeming brick wall of indifference with the ongoing 'I'm a PC' marketing drive that has featured both Bill Gates and Steve 'Monkey Dancer' Ballmer. Now, it would appear, that the Linux Foundation is feeling left out and so has decided to join in the fun with an 'I'm Linux' advertising run.

The latest stable release of the GNU Restricted User Shell (Rush), version 1.5, includes new configuration offerings and a notification feature.

"Buying a ready to ship Linux machine" ... "Shipped with the Linux distribution & additional programs of your choice pre-installed. That can also be shipped customized to be a web server or personal computer." Sounds pretty good.

Linux is a powerhouse audio production platform, and while you have to shop carefully, there is a lot of good-quality audio recording hardware that works well with Linux. The M-Audio MobilePre USB is popular with Linux users; Carla Schroder takes a look to see why.

With the final release two months away and an alpha version available, it's time to look at OpenOffice.org 3.1's new features: eye candy, better charts, replying to notes in the margin, overlining, macros in Base, RTL improvements for Arabic and Hebrew, and (believe it or not) better sorting. Download and report any bugs you find.

Phoronix Media today released Phoronix Test Suite 1.6, which is an incremental update to its flagship testing software. Phoronix Test Suite 1.6 (codenamed "Tydal") makes it easier for ISVs, IHVs, OEMs, and independent users to benchmark Linux, OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X computer systems. Introduced in this update are new options to autonomously carry out tests and to analyze the generated results, expanded test coverage, and other features to more effectively test software and hardware on supported operating systems.

Canonical's ambitious plan to create a mobile internet device (MID) market based on Ubuntu appears to be behind schedule and facing numerous challenges. Here's the scoop from Works With U, the independent guide to Ubuntu.

There's a story making its rounds across the 'net about a woman who missed several online classes, and failed her semester, and she claims this happened because she bought a Dell laptop with Ubuntu on it - instead of Windows. She didn't know what Ubuntu was, and was surprised to see that her Windows software, such as Microsoft Office, didn't work. While this isolated case sounds a bit ridiculous, there is still a bigger problem here.

[This talks about the real problem, which of course was not the girl, not Ubuntu, or even Dell.. It's the entrenched view of the ISPs and the Educators, the, so called, facilitators of technology and learning. - Tracy]

Yet another reason why ALOM, ILO and/or a serial console is always a good thing to have hooked up ;)

Red Hat has released version 5.3, the third update of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 operating system first introduced in March 2007. In addition to various bug fixes, RHEL 5.3 also offers a number of new features and improvements. Several improvements affect virtualisation. The x64 version of Xen now supports up to 126 processors and a Terabyte of memory. The paravirtualised network and mass storage drivers for fully virtualised RHEL-5 guest systems have moved into the kernel, and a separate installation is no longer required. Virtio drivers improve the performance of guest systems under the KVM alternative. Features like extended page tables that are included in recent x64 processors are now supported, which is likely to increase the performance of fully virtualised guests.