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The Linux Foundation on Wednesday plans to announce an event enabling Linux users to interact with the Linux community, including high-level maintainers and developers. The first Linux Foundation End User Collaboration Summit is planned for Oct. 13 and 14 in New York. During the free, invitation-only summit, there will be discussions between end users and Linux maintainers, including Andrew Morton and James Bottomley.

I received an invitation to a cool event the other day and thought this might be of interest to some of you since it looks like a fun way to spend a weekend: "Partly because we're starting to see the fruits of Box2D (an open source 2D physics engine) running on the XO and partly because we just haven't had a good one in a while, the OLPC Physics Game Jam competition is being held August 29th-31st, 2008 in Cambridge MA. Participants, in teams of 2-4, will have 48 hours to construct physics-based games for the XO laptop.

The most frequently cited market share numbers for Linux are less than 1%, but those numbers are no better than any others, just better publicized. Other pieces of information show Linux's share much higher.

Mozilla Labs launched a new prototype Tuesday aimed at giving Internet users new ways to create mashups of online content. Dubbed "Ubiquity," the technology is Mozilla's solution what it sees as a common and time-consuming problem Web surfers face when they try to compile information from the Web.

The next time somebody tells you Ubuntu Linux is just for the desktop, check out Egressive Limited, a solutions provider in New Zealand that’s gaining traction in the Ubuntu Server market. In fact, all of Egressive’s support customers now have Ubuntu servers at the center of their networks, and Egressive uses Ubuntu exclusively as the company’s hosting system. Is this part of a bigger “hidden” trend? The VAR Guy sure seems to think so. Here’s why.

The Nokia N810 alarm interface allows developers to efficiently and easily set alarms programmatically. Peter Seebach illustrates how a small command-line program can hook into this API and make good use of it.

NASA has confirmed that a laptop aboard the International Space Station has been infected with the W32.Gammima.AG worm, and admits this isn't the first time it has happened... Well, what do you know, it seems that the latest International Space Station mission has an uninvited guest in the shape of a worm that managed to stowaway for the ride.

So Microsoft and Novell are extending their two year old partnership. Is anyone really surprised? Similar, if smaller, deals are announced by other partners on an almost daily basis. The truth is, the deal is not nearly as insightful as the reactions to it in the free and open source (FOSS) community. I'm not talking about the extreme reactions here. On the one hand, you have the market-speak of Novell, which ignores the profound uneasiness that the community has about deals that, in the words of Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian, concern "building a bridge between proprietary and open source software," let alone involving a company that is perceived with profound distrust.

One of the goals of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) is to become a center for education in free and open source software (FOSS) legal issues. As part of this effort, the SFLC has already published "A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects." Its latest effort in public education, released last week, is "A Practical Guide to GPL Compliance," a 15-page guide for FOSS projects on how to avoid violations of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The guide is a practical summary of its subject, but its wording is unnecessarily legalistic, and its structure and omissions sometimes fall short of the goal of being a standalone reference.

gscan2pdf is a simple but a very efficient GUI to scan documents of multiple pages and convert them into PDFs or DjVu format. You can also import images from image files into PDF files and vice versa. gscan2pdf only takes two clicks are required to scan several pages and then save all or a selection as a PDF file, including metadata if required.

Adium, an open-source instant-messaging client for OS X, has released its latest version (1.3). Adium, like the Pidgin IM client, makes it possible to use a single IM program, rather than run multiple clients simultaneously for AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and several other networks. Adium's latest release includes support for the Facebook IM client, providing desktop access to this otherwise Web-only communications channel.

US researchers have found a way to thwart hack attacks which intercept data passing from a PC to a website....To spread the word about their defence the trio of researchers have signed up a series of sites to act as notaries and have developed software worried web users can install to help protect them. Currently the software is only available as an add-on for the Firefox browser, Apple's OS X on Intel machines and Linux.

I've been trying to mount a Linux filesystem in OpenBSD 4.2 for awhile, and finally I figured out how to do it (and do it automatically at boot) without screwing up either my OpenBSD or Linux partitions. I have a tutorial on this about 1/2 of the way done, but this was another situation where the excellent OpenBSD FAQ and man pages, as well as a couple of good general Linux/Unix online resources gave me all the help I needed. (I can never remember quite how to make chmod do what I want without looking it up.)

The Linux Foundation (LF) announced its first summit for Linux end users. The Linux Foundation End User Collaboration Summit runs from October 13-14 in New York City, and will "provide end users a direct connection and voice to the kernel community," says the LF. Held at the Desmond Tutu Center, the event offers an opportunity for "sophisticated" end users to "learn and interact with leaders from within the Linux community, including the highest level maintainers and developers," says the non-profit organization.

But to my way of thinking, Nominum didn't fix a thing. The article describes combining four techniques for foiling what they are now calling the Kaminsky Attack. I guess "cache poisoning" isn't glamorous enough. The techniques sound questionable, and the fixes only applies to their expensive, closed proprietary caching server. Nobody else benefits from this fix. So it's not a fix at all- it's as though they were claiming to have cleaned up a small volume of water in a large swimming pool.

Last year ASUS had christened the Eee PC as a cost-effective but well built sub-notebook that ended up being extremely popular with more people than just computer enthusiasts. The original Eee PC 700 series had shipped with Intel Celeron hardware, a solid-state drive, and a Xandros-based Linux distribution. These units have been selling extremely well but back in June ASUS had unveiled the Eee 901 as well as the Eee 1000 series. These newer models now use Intel Diamondville-based Atom CPUs, which we have been quite fond of for their technological advances. In this article we are providing our first look at the Eee PC 901 along with a few bits of information and sharing some of our plans for the Eee Linux testing in the near future.

This post from Matt Asay on whether open source needs consolidation asks an interesting question, and some of the comments that came in on it were interesting. This comment caught my eye: "No. Open source does not need consolidation. Open source needs product managers." Product managers, of course, drive improvements in commercial and proprietary software products, and listen carefully to what businesses need. At the end of our recent interview with Sun Microsystems' Ken Drachnik, regarding Sun's GlassFish app server, he also called for business synergy to advance open source projects. Here are three ways that open source projects can benefit from a bit of Business 101.

No one saw this coming. Cisco, the networking giant, announced today it was buying PostPath, maker of the Linux-based Exchange server replacement PostPath Server. PostPath is best known as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange. Unlike other would-be Exchange competitors Scalix and Lotus Domino/Notes, which use a Outlook-compatible Mail Application Programming Interface (MAPI) on the client PC, PostPath actually reverse-engineered Microsoft's MAPI and Active Directory (AD) protocols. This means that, from the network and Windows PC's viewpoint, PostPath actually appears to be an Exchange server.

Quebec's open-source software association is suing the provincial government, saying it is giving preferential treatment to Microsoft Corp. by buying the company's products rather than using free alternatives. The lawsuit by Facil was lodged with the Quebec Superior Court on July 15 and made public on Wednesday. In it, the group says the provincial government has refused to entertain competing bids from all software providers, opting instead to supply public-sector departments with products bought from proprietary vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle Corp.

I've had a bit of a difficult time with my OpenBSD 4.2 installation on the $15 Laptop — a Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 144 MB RAM, a 233 MHz Pentium II CPU and 3 GB hard drive. Since I upgraded the memory from 64 MB to the 144 MB maximum for this machine, things are running much, much better. But I'm running out of room in the /usr partition. I'm not sure whether or not OpenBSD can be installed in a single partition, but since the install FAQ tells you to set up separate partitions for everything, that's what I did.