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Don't complain about your situation; do something about it. That's the gist of what Danese Cooper, senior director of open-source strategies at Intel, said in her keynote at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention here. Cooper said her talk, titled "Why Whinging Doesn't Work," was initially written for women, and she gave a version of it at a women's conference recently. Cooper said she came up with the idea for the talk after receiving an e-mail from Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, saying, "Can you girls please stop whinging about this?'"

Finding hardware that works with GNU/Linux is hard enough. But if you also want a completely free system -- one that requires no proprietary drivers or firmware to run -- then the task is almost impossible. While resources like OpenPrinting and the SANE database for scanners offer guides to simple functionality, advice on free systems is almost non-existent. To fill this gap, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been developing its own hardware list, and, as the next logical step, has been working with Los Alamos Computers (LAC) to develop a line of free (as in speech) computers pre-installed with GNU/Linux.

Whenever I write about software liabilities, many people ask about free and open source software. If people who write free software, like PasswordSafe, are forced to assume liabilities, they will simply not be able to and free software would disappear. Don't worry, they won't be. The key to understanding this is that this sort of contractual liability is part of a contract, and with free software -- or free anything -- there's no contract.

Results of a recent poll show that the stagnant economy may be leading more organizations to adopt open-source software to save on licensing fees, according ot the Open Solutions Alliance. Customers also are concerned about interoperability between open-source software and Microsoft Windows.

Last October we were the first to deliver a full-review of DeviceVM's SplashTop which was an instant-on embedded Linux distribution at the time found on a lone ASUS motherboard. Since then there has been a commitment to SplashTop on all ASUS motherboards and even on ASUS notebooks. While ASUS has been the primary partner with DeviceVM up to this point, other manufacturers are exploring this market. One of our few gripes about SplashTop is that it's limited in the current applications available and doesn't allow for much tweaking with no terminal access. However, members of the Phoronix Forums have hacked SplashTop. They have been able to run SplashTop from a USB stick on non-ASUS motherboards, boot SplashTop within a virtual machine, run custom applications, and launch a terminal within this proprietary Linux environment.

To help developers audit Web application security, Google has released an open source tool called ratproxy. It is a non-disruptive tool designed for Web 2.0 and AJAX applications that produces an easy-to-read report of potential exploits.

Recently Greg Kroah Hartman showed some very interesting Linux kernel development stats. I decided to do some too and the result are 5 cool things you probably didn’t know about the kernel code ;-) These aren’t anything I’ve seen so far about the kernel.

Bordeaux 1.4 was released today and its a significant upgrade over the prior 1.2 release, version 1.4 comes with support for Microsoft Office 2003, Visio 2003 and Project 2003. Version 1.4 has improved Office 2000 menu support and Cellar support fixes. There has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks on the backend to improve the speed and reliablity of all the supported applications and games.

KDE 4.1 was finally released to the public today. After all the controversy since the release of KDE 4.0, I'm happy to announce that KDE 4.1 simply rocks. The introduction of KDE 4 marked the introduction of the new Plasma desktop, which provides not only the panel that you interact with, but also widgets (or "plasmoids") that extended the desktop further. In KDE 4.1, one of the most welcome changes to Plasma is the return of multiple and resizable panels from KDE 3.

"Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation [ASF]. This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software," said Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft. He announced the move on Friday in a speech at the Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon. Ramji also noted Microsoft's support of Apache on the software company's Port 25 blog.

Microsoft has installed a software development laboratory in the Bandwidth Barn innovation hub that is currently the only one that offers open source developers the opportunity to test their software running on a proprietary system. Called the Microsoft Innovation Centre and Interoperability Laboratory, it will combine various software approaches to assist in developing solutions for various sectors within the local economy. The initiative is also aimed at start-ups and incubators that want to take their products and services to market in the near future.

Dan Kaminsky earlier this month announced a massive, multi-vendor issue with DNS that could allow attackers to compromise any name server - clients, too. These two articles explain how you can fix a BIND9 nameserver on Debian Etch and Fedora/CentOS so that it is not vulnerable anymore to DNS cache poisoning.

In the battle for which operating system runs best on the $15 Laptop, Puppy Linux has pulled out front as the fastest system with the most features I need and best functionality on this 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt.

Knowing different languages is always an added advantage. If our website is able to communicate with people of different languages, globally the popularity of the website would go up. With Moodle, we have the option of making our site more interactive as it offers support for different languages. In this article by William Rice, we will see how to configure different languages on our Moodle website and also look at some of the available language settings.

A panel of embedded Linux specialists will discuss the pros and cons of commercial vs. do-it-yourself (DIY) embedded Linux implementations, at next week’s LinuxWorld conference. The session is part of the conference’s Mobile and Embedded Linux track. Moderated by DeviceGuru.com blogger Rick Lehrbaum, the hour-long session will explore the advantages and disadvantages of using embedded Linux distributions and tools from vendors such as MontaVista, Wind River, TimeSys. This approach will be contrasted with the alternative of creating customized embedded Linux platforms based on freely downloadable source code from silicon vendors, board vendors, or community repositories such as kernel.org or the Ubuntu or Fedora projects.

IDG World Expo has teamed up with open source security gateway provider Untangle and electronics recycler Alameda County Computer Resource Center (ACCRC) to host an Installfest for Schools at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco next week. Volunteers will refurbish older discarded computers with free and open source software (FOSS) before they are donated to schools in need.

An introduction to the sysctl command and its configuration file /etc/sysctl.conf

The sluggish economy is contributing to commercial open source sales, but customers still rank interoperability with proprietary software and vendor viability among their top concerns, according to a new survey from the Open Solutions Alliance. Most of the companies surveyed, including independent software vendors (ISVs) and system integrators that vary in size and business model, showed a clear increase in sales and services related to open source, with 83 percent of respondents on track for a year-on-year revenue increase this year, the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) said.

A company is now selling what it calls the "world's cheapest laptop," which, at $130, is not a bad deal if you can bear some hardware limitations. The Impulse NPX-9000 laptop has a 7-in. screen, a 400-MHz processor, 128MB of RAM and 1GB of flash storage -- but you need to buy 100 of them.

The other day when I was in Vancouver and using the XO while sitting in a nice café someone started asking me about the machine and the current state of OLPC. When I mentioned that Give 1 Get 1 was going to make a comeback in autumn the person asked me whether I would recommend him donating this time â??round since he missed out back in December 2007. I have to say that I scrambled for a couple of seconds before being able to give him a real answer.