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Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is India's largest political party, with around 20 million Ordinary Members and about 4 million Active Members. In June, BJP announced its goal to become one of the most high-tech political parties in the next two years, and free and open source software (FOSS) will play an essential role in this project.

Motorola is reportedly working to create its first Android-based smartphone. The first phone based on Google's open mobile operating system -- T-Mobile's G1 -- will show up Oct. 22, and Motorola will apparently be joining the party at an undisclosed later date. Still, a fashionably late entrance could be just fine.

The Linux Foundation - the non-profit consortium that gives Linus Torvalds his paycheck and facilitates the growth of Linux and Linux standards - has announced the first beta of the Linux Standard Base 4.0. There are many Linux variants, and they use different kernel releases and software libraries, depending on the technical preferences of the people putting together the distros. Variety may be the spice of life, but it can cause compatibility issues if it is taken too far, and the LSB effort has established many years ago to provide a consistent set of specifications that allow the many distros to remain compatible despite their individual choices and, using LSB tools, to test operating system and application code to ensure that they adhere to the specs.

There is still a day left for the first Android based Device, T-Mobile G1, to come out into the hands of general public but I was in a for a small surprise as I went through my Google Analytics report for the last week. It had a mysterious number of 2 sitting at the bottom of my “Unique Visitors by Operating Systems” filter report. The “mysterious” part coming from the fact that the left most column displayed Android

If you were born before 1975, you may have a collection of records that you want to convert to digital format. Some open source software and a cable are all you need to convert your prized vinyl to something portable. If all you want to do is create MP3 files from you LP tracks, the only software you'll need is Audacity. If you want to convert vinyl to CD, you'll need cdrdao and cdrecord as well. All are readily available in most distributions' package repositories or from the projects' sites.

Last week, the Linux Foundation held its first Linux Foundation End User Summit in New York. Representatives from many companies were in attendance, including Merrill Lynch, Fidelity, JPMorgan Chase, Dreamworks, the NYSE, and folks from the U.S. Navy were there, too. The folks at the Linux Foundation sent over some highlights of the summit, which you'll find here.

Is it really possible that Apple is -- in some respects -- worse than Microsoft when it comes to respecting the fundamentals of software freedom? Christopher Tozzi, a blogger on Works With U, the independent guide to Ubuntu, makes his case against Apple. Here's the scoop.

A press release issued by Mandriva and Turbolinux today announced they are joining the Moblin project and continuing their collaboration through Manbo Labs. Manbo Labs employs Mandriva and Turbolinux engineers to develop the core components of a Linux distribution tailored for Atom processors.

As a small creature living in the Sahara, the fennec fox (vulpus zerda) has to be satisfied with very little. This is equally true of Mozilla's own Fennec that is to feel at home with the scant resources of hardware on mobile devices.

Only ten days after the release of Linux 2.6.27, the SimplyMEPIS project has decided to work the new kernel into its next release. The project today used the kernel in both 32- and 64-bit versions of the third beta release of SimplyMEPIS 8.

The World's largest Python event returns to Chicago. PyCon 2009, the seventh annual Python community conference, will take place March 27 to 29 at Chicago's Hyatt Regency O'Hare hotel.

LinuxPlanet Classics: Want to get rid of the evil caps lock key without mutilating your keyboard? Want to give those silly Windows keys useful jobs, or put all those extra multi-media keys to work? Want to become a powerhouse keyboarding commando? With Linux you can do all of these things.

WFTL Bytes! is your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Oct 20, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Today's stories include evil in our governments (US and Canada), Microsoft threatens again, why copy protection is stupid, the cost of policing P2P in schools, and making good OS choices.

Microsoft is now spending $300 million to counter Apple's "I'm a Mac" ads. Does Linux need its own ad campaign? It has been fascinating to see Microsoft roll out its (can you believe it!!) $300 million ad campaign, the one that counters the now famous and effective “I’m a Mac” ads. With those ads, the Apple folks have done a great job of defining a narrative for Microsoft and, in the parlance of advertising, affecting their brand image. The top dog at Microsoft for managing the brand image of Windows said “[Apple has] made a caricature out of the PC.” Given the stakes in the marketplace, Microsoft had little choice but to invest a ton of resources and get their own message out into the public realm.

Ever wondered why your new computer feels sluggish -- or afraid you'll blow your overclocked processor to smithereens? The Inquisitor testing platform wraps the best of open source benchmarking tools in special scripts to help you test and diagnose your hardware. It's simple to use for desktop users, and if you are a computer reseller or vendor, you can also use it to stress-test thousands of computers simultaneously before shipping them off. Inquisitor, originally developed by ALT Linux and released under GNU GPL in mid-2007, is a set of shell scripts that wrap around popular open source tools such as Bonnie++, IOzone, UnixBench, and BYTEmark.

Due to known bug virt-install was broken on Ubuntu 8.04 since day of it’s GA and never has been fixed as far as to my knowledge. However, xen-enabled ISO’s like RH’s ones allow to perform PV Guest install via pygrub and repository placed on Apache Server running at Dom0. Notice, that virtual frame buffer would work fine for CentOS PV at Ubuntu Hardy Dom0 (2.6.24-21-xen).

In my last article on this topic, I gave a detailed description how I activated the update-notifier process on a non-privileged user's desktop. I fully expected to see updates notices appear on that desktop as I had on the older 6.06 version. After an extended period no update icon appeared, I became suspicious. I ran some tests that indicated, indeed, no updates were needed. Hence, I was given a false sense of confidence, when the reality was I ran the wrong tests. I later learned that while I had seen the update-notifier running as a process once, it was not active on the unprivileged user's desktop upon a fresh startup. Therefore, my efforts were ineffective.

The Linux Foundation is set to release a report on Wednesday estimating that the Linux ecosystem is now worth $25 billion. Of that $1.3 billion is from Google and its use of Linux for the Android mobile OS.

Steve Ballmer doesn't seem to have learned the art of shutting up, which is fairly odd given that he is the CEO of a huge corporation. Ballmer gave a talk last week at the Gartner's Symposium ITxpo in Orlando where by all reports he let go not one, but two major gaffes. One involved Yahoo! The other involved his embattled OS: Vista.

One commonly-stated barrier to Linux adoption is that it looks different to the regular computer environment people are used to. Yet, one of the strengths of Linux over other operating systems is that its user interface can be totally replaced to suit any occasion. Here is how to trick it out like MacOS's Leopard, and trick your friends.