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After running some successful pilots, the Russian government has decided to make open source the standard for *all* schools. Depending on the uptake, that could be up to one million more machines running free software by 2010.

Chrome, Google’s new browser, was barely out of its wrapping before Internet pundits began writing it off. As the first wave of early-adopter enthusiasts lost interest in their experiments and returned to their original browsers, so analysts began to declare Chrome dead. But there is a far more interesting set of dynamics at work. Google is not after Microsoft’s share of the browser market: it’s after something much bigger.

This document describes how to install a Postfix mail server that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. I will also demonstrate the installation and configuration of Courier (Courier-POP3, Courier-IMAP), so that Courier can authenticate against the same MySQL database used by Postfix. The resulting Postfix server is capable of SMTP-AUTH and TLS and quota. Passwords are stored in encrypted form in the database. In addition to that, this tutorial covers the installation of Amavisd, SpamAssassin and ClamAV so that emails will be scanned for spam and viruses. I will also show how to install SquirrelMail as a webmail interface so that users can read and send emails and change their passwords.

The Computer History Museum on Tuesday night honored three legends in the industry, including Linux creator Linus Torvalds, whose operating system became the catalyst for the open source software movement that challenged traditional concepts of intellectual property. Along with Torvalds, the museum honored at its annual Fellow Awards ceremony Jean Bartik, one of the first programmers of the ENIAC computing system that later evolved into the first stored-program computer; and Bob Metcalfe, who led the invention, standardization, and commercialization of the Ethernet local area networking system for PCs.

Shared libraries that are dynamically linked make more efficient use of disk space than those that are statically linked, and more importantly allow you to perform security updates in a more efficient manner, but executables compiled against a particular version of a dynamic library expect that version of the shared library to be available on the machine they run on. If you are running machines with both Fedora 9 and openSUSE 11, the versions of some shared libraries are likely to be slightly different, and if you copy an executable between the machines, the file might fail to execute because of these version differences.

The opening keynote speaker for the 2008 Linux-Kongress was James Bottomley, who presented his views on the Linux community's values. What these values are, says James, is not entirely obvious. Related groups - the free software community, for example - have well-articulated value systems which define them. The Linux community's values are not so clearly expressed, but, he says, they are central to what we do.

Now here is a dissenting opinion if I've ever seen one. Andrew Keen is arguing that the economic crisis will "give open source a good thumping." That flies directly in the face of our prediction that open source will flourish in the downturn, and we're not alone in predicting that. There are several reasons why I don't agree with Keen's view of things.

Linux powers both of my computers, and Simply Mepis is the distribution of choice for many reasons. I have been using Simply Mepis several years, and and have no desire to even test other distros; there were some brief stints with Linux Mint and PCLOS, but Mepis is my OS - final answer. I’ve never understood the need or desire to hop around, trying every flavor of Linux under the sun that hits the Distrowatch list. Again, I’ve tried a few, but always come back to Mepis.

Buzz is going around about a new report from the Linux Foundation, which finds that "it would take approximately $10.8 billion to build the Linux community distribution Fedora 9 in today’s dollars with today’s software development costs." You can get the complete findings here. Here are some of the highlights from the report, and what's missing.

How to remove existing local zone file systems on Solaris 10. Today's post is a follow-up to our very recent posts on modifying existing local zone filesystems and creating new file systems in a local zone on Solaris 10. Today, we're moving to completion with this simple how-to on removing filesystems on local zones. We'll follow up with another simple post on how to create and destroy (all in one) local zones on Solaris 10.

Google officially opened its Android Market Wednesday and promised that beginning next year, programmers will get the lion's share of revenue from applications sold on the download site for the company's mobile phone operating system. The first incarnation of the Android Market has more than 50 applications available for download, but they're all free. Google said the site will be able to distribute paid applications early in the first quarter of 2009.

Have you got some loose change in your pocket, and dreams of building a better operating system? It would take about 25 years, nearly 60,000 developer-years, and $10.8B to re-create a distribution like Fedora 9, according to a new report from the Linux Foundation. One implication of the study seems to be that companies wishing to economize, in these tough economic times, would do well to leverage all of the value in free and open source software. That value, the Linux Foundation report discloses, is considerable. For example, the Linux kernel alone would take $1.4B to build, and an estimated 16 years to complete. No wonder the Free Software Foundation never got anywhere with Hurd.

In a recent report of the European Union's IDABC agency, numerous software tenders in Europe run against regulations in that they favor proprietary software. If it were up to the IDABC, the tendering organizations would be liable for these practices.

After loitering around for so long, I finally got my lazy bum off the bed and installed Hardy Heron (8.04.1) onto my aging laptop. I’ve never been a sucker for eye-candy stuff, prefering to have more resources available for real work, instead of ooh-aahing over nice looking things all around my desktop. Well, but then I fell prey

“What's in a name?” some bloke in the sixteenth century once asked. As Microsoft knows, quite a lot. What you call something can have a major influence on how you think about it. So how Microsoft talks about free software is important – not least for the clues that it gives about its latest tactical move to defang the open source threat.

Today, the Linux Foundation is releasing a report that shows just how valuable FOSS can be. The authors find that recreating Fedora 9.1 (the free distribution upon which Red Hat's current Linux release is based) using traditional proprietary methods would cost $10.8 billion. They also find that the cost of creating the Linux kernel alone would be $1.4 billion.

Mozilla released the first workable alpha version of its new Fennec mobile browser last week, showcasing a new interface optimized for small-screen devices. Despite the slimmed-down look, however, Fennec makes use of the same Mozilla technologies under the hood that are well-known in Firefox. In my testing on my own handheld device, I found Fennec an enticing browser with a well-thought-out interface.

After many years of being an Amarok fan, I was introduced to Banshee. Banshee fast became my media player of choice, due to its ability to handle video and audio files, as well as stream internet radio and podcasts.

While listening to the Transforming Education Panel at the Microsoft ICT for Development Conference, I was struck by how much this conference is a direct result of the hype around One Laptop Per Child. If it wasn't for Nicholas Negroponte's vision for a whole new technology application, low-cost laptops for education, I doubt that Microsoft would be courting the development community so intensely or expanded its Unlimited Potential program. It sure would not have extended Windows XP's working lifespan.

When Ben Rousch joined Van Dam Iron Works close to a decade ago, it didn't take him long to move off a proprietary network operating system and start experimenting with a Linux server. He changed horses again, to a Windows server, but today Van Dam is back in the Linux fold -- lesson learned. Rousch, manger of information systems at the metals and structural steel fabricator in West Michigan, says that the company's IT network largely consisted of a Novell server and Windows 98 clients when he arrived back in 2000.