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On a superficial level, Novell’s third quarter, which ended July 31, 2008, didn’t look that good. A closer look reveals though that Novell did quite well in general and extremely well with its Linux business. According to the company press release, “For the quarter, Novell reported net revenue of $245 million.” This was up from Novell’s net revenue of $237 million for the third fiscal quarter 2007. “Income from operations for the third fiscal quarter 2008 was $1 million, compared to a loss from operations of $10 million for the third fiscal quarter 2007. Loss from continuing operations in the third fiscal quarter 2008 was $15 million, or $0.04 loss per share, due to a $15 million impairment charge related to our auction-rate securities.”

I received an email recently from a young man in Brazil who wanted me to come to his university and talk to the students and faculty about using Free Software. I am normally happy to advise universities to use Free Software, but usually this is done in conjunction with some large conference held at the university or some other venue. I just do not have the time to visit each and every school. But I did investigate the university of the student and found that Microsoft was indeed a sponsor of the University. In fact, the university had a large banner on the front page of their web site talking about Microsoft as a partner. It was the first time I saw a university advertising a commercial firm on their home page.

"Poky Linux" and Matchbox developer OpenedHand announced that it has been acquired by Intel Corp. The U.K.-based embedded Linux services team will join the Intel Open Source Technology Center, and will focus on Moblin development for mobile Internet devices and other mobile devices.

SimplePie is a PHP library that can fetch, cache, parse, and normalize RSS and Atom feeds. It allows you to display the newest articles from websites with RSS or Atom feeds on your own site. This is a great way to add new, fresh, and relevant information to your site. This guide shows how you can set it up for your own web site.

You may recall, just a few days ago (I think...), we put out a script do language translation using Yahoo/AltaVista's Babelfish interface. I mentioned, briefly, in that post that, when translating something into a foreign language, I always like to do a "reverse translation" using the translated output from my original query, and see how close the back-translation comes to what I originally wrote. It can make for hilarious results. In fact, unless you're entering something like "hello," it's almost guaranteed to come back goofy when translated back to English (or your native language).

been able to have OpenBSD's /etc/fstab automatically mount the ext2 filesystem on my Compaq Armada 7770dmt's hard drive with no difficulty lately, but every couple of days or so I get a message while booting OpenBSD that says the Linux filesystem is not clean and that I should run fsck on it. I then boot Puppy Linux 2.13, run e2fsck on the partition, the errors are cleared up, and all is well until a few more days pass.

This is a site that looks like it is attempting make wireless for linux better.

Exaile is a music player aiming to be similar to KDE’s Amarok, but for GTK+ and written in Python. It incorporates many of the cool things from Amarok (and other media players) like automatic fetching of album art, handling of large libraries, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm submission support, and optional iPod support via a plugin.

Not only do the French have a different word for everything, they also have a strong Open Source leadership position. The French have done much to foster the growth and acceptance of Open Source software--especially Linux. The Mandriva Linux distribution was born and raised in France (now in its 10th year), the French government offers tax incentives to encourage more Open Source development, and more 175,000 memory sticks with Open Source software were given to Parisian high school students last year.

A decade ago, European countries leapt out of the gate to take the lead in the radical open source movement -- none more so than France -- and left U.S. developers in the proverbial dust. Through policies and high-profile projects, the French Republic for years has been advocating for all open source all the time, in government and education. And France is not stopping: This summer, an economic commission set up by French President Nicolas Sarkozy recommended tax benefits to stimulate even more open source development.

Minsk, Belarus-based product development firm Promwad has announced a design win for a Linux-based home-automation touchscreen panel. Promwad says it designed the "smart home multimedia control panel" in eight months, for a Swiss automation start-up called Incyma, using a Cirrus Logic EP9307 processor and Poky Linux.

Quite often, Steve Jobs is given all the credit for the original Macintosh - but in reality, it wasn't Steve Jobs who made the largest contribution to the project; in fact, he didn't even come up with the idea. Jef Raskin envisioned an easy-to-use computer with a graphical user interface, and somewhere in 1979 he got the green light to start the Macintosh project, and together with Bill Atkinson he put together a team to develop the hard and software. It wasn't until much later that the project caught Steve Jobs' eye, who realised the Macintosh project had more potential than his own brainchild, the Lisa. One of the people on the Macintosh team was Andy Hertzfeld, and O'Reilly News interviewed him a few days ago.

According to a recent IDC report highlighted by ZDNet, Linux is booming. At just 9.4 percent of the overall server market in terms of revenue in 2007, Linux has now climbed to 13.4 percent of the overall server market, with Unix at 7.7 percent and Windows at 36.5 percent. If Linux server vendors want to continue to grow, at some point they're going to have to come to grips with Windows, rather than eating into the low-hanging Unix fruit.

Over three years, the OpenSolaris project has gathered some community under Sun Microsystems Inc. (SMI) guidance. The whole project resides at http://www.opensolaris.org and is focused on the open flavor of Solaris operating system, licensed under CDDL. But what is OpenSolaris, after all?

Few recent trends in storage have had as much momentum as Network Attached Storage (NAS). A NAS device can make a network more efficient and secure by supplying file-based data storage services to networked devices, or it can be used for applications such as streaming media. FreeNAS is free, lightweight, open source network-attached storage server software, based on FreeBSD. You can find a good tutorial on how to set up a free NAS server with it here. We recently caught up with Olivier Cochard-Labbe, FreeNAS founder, and Volker Theile, project administrator.

PDF files are a lot like democracy, to paraphrase Winston Churchill. PDFs are a lousy way to move documents around, but the alternatives are worse. I hate PDF files. Portable Document Format is a benevolent monopoly by Adobe, which created the format and sets the standards for its development.

Mentioned Xen port to CentOS 5.2 (64-bit) brought up daemons libvirtd and dnsmasq at Dom0. It makes patching of libvirt,libvirt-devel,libvirt-python packages and brings utility virt-install along with Xen 3.3 Hypervisor to system at a time.

KDE 4.1, released last month, brought a great number of improvements to the popular desktop environment. It's the best desktop I've ever used -- but that doesn't mean it couldn't be better. 2009 will see the release of KDE 4.2. Here are 10 features that would be great additions to a future KDE release that I hope the developers will consider.

How to react to the news that an earlier flaw in Debian's random-number generator has been used to fuel an honest-to-Linus exploit, especially after yesterday's post? Welcome to the tip of the iceberg. It's been said, somewhat cynically, that one possible good reason we don't see more Linux exploits scurrying around in the wild is because Linux doesn't represent the same kind of attack surface for criminal hackers as Windows does. True, Linux still doesn't have the desktop market share of even the Macintosh -- but it's become that much more interesting as a target because of the number of server and infrastructure systems that use it.

The city administration awarded the school toppers with free laptops. Thanks to the organizers for the Ubuntu screens (otherwise we wouldn't have known).