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The first phone using Google's Android operating system will debut Tuesday, a model from T-Mobile, and more are set come. But some Android partners say the software will use more broadly than just phones. "We're starting to see Android get designed in on devices that extend way beyond the phone--things that might go in the automobile or things that might go in the home," said John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer at Wind River Systems, a Google ally that helps phone makers build and customize Android for their phone hardware.

The openSUSE Project recently announced the availability of openSUSE 11.1 Beta 1 for wide scale testing and bug squashing. This development release is available in x86, x86-64 and PPC architectures as a DVD disk image (liveCDs are not available for the current beta). The 11.1 beta provides a decently solid look at where the final release is heading. As with any development release, there are known bugs that vary in severity and new or updated features that the development team is encouraging users try out, in order to find and resolve any bugs and suggest changes and improvements.

KStars and XEphem can answer pretty much any question about what's where and when in the night sky. But they don't really give you the feeling of being there like a couple of newer entries on the Linux astronomy scene: Stellarium and Celestia. Grab your red-blue 3D glasses, and follow Akkana Peck on a celestial tour.

Open Source companies have been granted official permission to supply software to the UK public sector for the first time in British history. At least two Open Source software suppliers have been awarded places on the £80 million Software for Educational Institutions Framework, making them official suppliers to UK schools and scoring a victory in what has been a long and frustrating battle against favouritism shown to conventional commercial software companies in UK politics and procurement.

After a decade of converting every piece of music I've purchased into digital formats and (lately) buying digital music directly and skipping the CD step altogether, managing my music library has gotten to be a big chore. It's easy enough to organize my music library on a single computer, but it's been years since I had just a single computer. My music files are more or less together on my home file server, but then there's my wife's collection on her iMac. There's also the fact that I don't use my file server as an everyday desktop machine. My laptop is the machine you can usually find me behind while at home. The reason my music is on the fileserver is because of space, it has the room to keep it all together. The issue then is to make my large and growing audio collection available to all of the computers I use. At home this is easy thanks to a protocol called DAAP.

Sun has released the first update to its recently purchased desktop virtualization program, now called Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0. While not a major update, it does bring improved performance and 64-bit operating system support to the popular open source virtualization program. VirtualBox, now part of Sun's xVM series, runs on a wide variety of host operating systems, including 32- and 64-bit versions of Linux, Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, Solaris, and Windows. However, while the manual claims that it supports 64-bit Mac OS X, the program doesn't actually support it yet. That said, VirtualBox runs a remarkable number of operating systems on any of these platforms, from MS-DOS and Windows 98 to OpenBSD and OS/2.

Saudi Arabia is building a supercomputer that could rank among the 10 most powerful systems in the world. And the country isn't stopping there. It has plans to turn this marquee system for the Middle East into a petascale system in two years, and, beyond that, an exascale system. The move represents a big leap for Saudi Arabia and the region generally, which, despite massive oil wealth, has not had much of an impact on information technology, except as consumers.

After announcing its first event for "end users," the Linux Foundation has begun to promote "individual memberships." Available now for $50 a year, memberships include a T-shirt, quarterly newsletter, and the "ability to run for and vote for a Linux Foundation board seat," says the organization.

So Ubuntu is taking a little heat for not being the world's largest contributor to the kernel.org community. BUT they are about to finally join a major effort to improve Linux kernel quality for all. Ubuntu is on the verge of fully participating in the Kernel Oops project run by Intel's Arjan van de Ven

In a move reminiscent of its “Get the Facts” anti-Linux campaign, Microsoft is waging war on VMware with a customer-focused Web site that provides the Redmondian spin on how its products stack up against the competition. Microsoft refers to its anti-Linux playbook to attack VMwareThe Burton Group Data Center Strategies blog highlighted Microsoft’s new virtualization site, with the URL

We’ve covered many tips and tricks about working between OpenOffice.org (OOo) and Microsoft (MS) Office, however now we’ll address the formatting issues experienced when converting between the two formats. We’ll give you a few ways to make your documents convert better, so you can share your work with those who only use MS Office. You’ll also discover the Navigator in this tutorial. This window in OOo can help you jump from here to there in your document and gives you a quick way to modify the structure. Lets get started!

Having given in to gravity, America's elite graduate schools are taking on open source. In recent research published in Production and Operations Management, Deishin Lee (Harvard Business School) and Haim Mendelson (Stanford Graduate School of Business) teach would-be business executives how to "Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology Under Network Effects."

I have another list, and this is a much more fun list. It is a large list that is always growing. We could also include the free BSDs- FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, whose contributions to Linux and FOSS are well-deserving of more recognition. This is "What Linux Can Do That Those Big Ole Proprietary Innovators Can't".

Due to known issue attempt to virt-install OpenSuse 11 PV DomU at Xen 3.3 CentOS 5.2 Dom0 from nfs share fails immediately at startup. Approved procedure via Internet repositories for OpenSuse 10.3 requires internet connection speed at least 700 Kbit/sec to take reasonable time. OpenSuse 11.1 (with pygrub implemented) is due only in December 2008.However, pygrub coming along with current Xen Release 3.3(3.2.1) does allow to load OpenSuse 11 DomUs at CentOS 5.2 (RHEL 5.2) Dom0 with no problems.

With libfaketime you can tell a process that the current time is something different from the machine's system clock. This fake time setting affects not only the functions directly related to reading the system time, but also file timestamps such as modification times. With libfaketime you can test how a program will respond when it is running in the future or in a different timezone without having to change your machine's system clock. Timezone testing can be useful for network applications where a certificate may have already expired in a given timezone but might still work in your local environment.

In this article I'll briefly review ten of my favourite CLI (command-line interface), not necessarily the most popular or most powerful of them. So if you don't find your personal favourite, (e.g. Midnight Commander or mp3blaster), it's because the article includes the tools I use more often. So here it goes:

In part one of this tutorial I looked at installing and configuring greylistd alongside Exim to help combat the evils of Spam. In this second part I will look at getting some information out of greylistd — handy if you need to troubleshoot why the CEO’s “urgent” message hasn’t arrived yet! Read Part Two of Ryan Cartwright's article on Exim and greylistd at Freesoftware Magazine.

When you think Red Hat, you think Linux. Maybe, if you're a developer or a CTO, you also think JBoss. Red Hat, itself, now wants you to think virtualization.

This article by Tarek Ziadé focuses on a repeatable process to write and release Python packages. We will focus on how to install, uninstall, develop, test, register, and upload a package.

I have one last item I would like to discuss pertaining to the use of html forms. That is, the question on how to store unvetted, input data. I will show it makes sense to store the news items as formatted, ready to publish summaries as separate text files each containing one story. I further suggest they be deposited in an off site directory with severely limited access rights. The formatting for news items is simple, using either a template or an informed (trained) user. I show how I would have implemented a simple file naming structure to make news items easier to work with in an inherently date / time ordering. For this particular, limited instance, I think my model would have worked.