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Kicking off what promises to be a month packed full of good Linux releases, Mandriva Linux will today release Mandriva 2009, the latest incarnation of its popular Linux desktop. This is what you can expect.

Regardless of all its hype, security in cloud computing is not a revolution; rather it's an evolution of the age-old business model of outsourcing. The concept of cloud computing has evolved from the concepts of grid, utility, and SaaS, and these models evolved from the application service provider in the mid-early '90s.

eBay is not going through the happiest of times. Not only has it found it necessary to make 1000 people– 10% of its workforce –redundant, it has had toown up to a serious breach of trust with its Internet telephony program, Skype.

Opera Software has launched launched Opera 9.6, the newest version of its Web browser. Opera 9.6 includes improvements in the built-in email client as well as better browser synchronisation

A handy chart to keep track of what init script run when you type your favorite command to change Solaris run levels. Today's post harkens back to an earlier post we did on clearing up some common misconceptions about Solaris run levels. That post took care of going through the in's and out's of what the differences between boot, reboot, init, shutdown, etc, all mean and has a lot of good practical examples to demonstrate each point.

GNOME project co-founder Miguel de Icaza discusses the recent release of Mono 2.0, in this detailed interview with Henry Kingman, executive editor of DesktopLinux. The conversation spans Mono's history, current state, and future, with stops along the way for status reports on Moonlight and Mono Develop.

Wildcards in bash are referred to as pathname expansion. Pathname expansion is also sometimes referred to as globbing. Pathname expansion "expands" the "*", "?", and "[...]" syntaxes when you type them as part of a command, for example..

openSUSE and SUSE Linux sets default values for some of the network related Kernel parameters. With Kernel 2.6 (default in recent releases of openSUSE & SuSE Linux), there are some fine tuning you can do to improve Network performance and get that extra out of your system.

This is Linux Dynasty's first review of any BSD flavor out there. Now I'm pretty new to the BSD scene, so I will not talk much about this distro except for the fact that it was quite easy to install and the installer looked quite professional. I personally have much to learn about BSD's port system, well BSD in general! I might give it a whirl but not probably with PCBSD. I do want to use OpenBSD but as a server system and maybe try FreeBSD for my desktop ( We will see what happens ).

Hacking into systems (albeit for testing purposes) is apparently getting easier with the upcoming open source Metasploit 3.2 framework, according to its creator. During a packed presentation at that SecTor conference here yesterday, Metasploit creator H. D. Moore detailed some of the new features in the upcoming Metasploit 3.2 release. They include names such as Browser AutoPwn, Metasploit in the Middle and the Evil Wireless Access Point. "For http we do a whole bunch of evil things to a browser," Moore said,

Here's a very good question: why are people (including me) nasty to Mono, but nice to Samba? The PR aspect may have something to do with it, but I don't think it's the main reason. To understand the principal difference between Samba and Mono, we need to explore what they do, and how they do it.

The Swedish Standards Institute (SIS) approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as a national standard, the ODF Alliance reported this week. "Sweden now joins Brazil, Croatia, Italy, South Korea, and South Africa as countries whose national Swedish Flagstandards bodies have formal approved this standard", the ODF advocacy organisation writes in this week's newsletter. SIS press officer Erika Messing called the approval "routine". SIS was one of the national standardisation organisations that took part in the procedure at ISO to approve ODF, she said. "ISO approved it in 2006 and now SIS has made it a national standard."

The International Standards Organization (ISO) is up in arms over the fact that documentation for Microsoft's OOXML data format is now publicly available on the Internet. Meanwhile, ISO members are nervously watching IBM's behavior in the standardization process. Activists in the Boycott Novell forum have exposed the more than 5,500 page document in PDF, HTML, Microsoft spreadsheet, and various other formats on their website.

Few free and open source software projects have attracted such a range of reactions as Mono. On one hand, as an implementation of Microsoft's .Net that's sponsored by Novell, it has been vilified both for the company it keeps and as a possible source of patent claims, should Microsoft choose to get nasty. On the other hand, Mono has been the platform of choice for such major projects as Second Life, which uses it to increase the efficiency of its servers. This week, as the Mono project reached version 2.0, Miguel de Icaza, the project's founder and maintainer, talked with Linux.com about the history of the project, its application and the criticism leveled at it, and where the project goes from here.

Yahoo has unveiled a new dynamic calendar service powered by open source developer Zimbra. Yahoo Calendar offers standard Web 2.0 information-sharing options along with an updated drag-and-drop interface and a handful of unique options. The program is available in beta to Yahoo users as of Wednesday.

Open source software is thought to be one of the driving forces in overcoming the fragmentation in the health IT market. However, barriers like lack of long-term professional support [editor's note: this may be universal for all health IT] or uncertainty of cost saving capability hinders open source software to gain a reasonable market share. The workshop "Open Source in European Health Care" is conceptualized as a forum where existing open source projects or initiatives are invited to present their work or their experiences in the field of open source in health care. Submissions from all over the world including position papers are highly welcome.

Dana Blankenhorn makes some good points in a post from today titled Open Source in a Time of Recession. One of the better points is that, despite the incredible turmoil in global markets and economies, we actually haven't met the official definition of a recession yet here in the U.S., which would be two consecutive quarters without economic growth. Nevertheless, the financial gloom and doom we're seeing will cause constricted business spending on software, and open source stands to benefit from that in several ways. There may also be some unexpected events in the works.

As I walked through the war zone that is Wall Street yesterday on my way to a Red Hat meeting, I assumed the worst. I scanned the rooftops for Paul Cormier, Red Hat's EVP of Products and Technologies, ready to catch him if leaped. I scanned the cardboard boxes along the pavement, expecting to see Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens claiming a cozy spot on the curb. Finally, I dug through dumpsters in search of Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's CEO and no stranger to market meltdowns as the former COO of Delta Air Lines.

Your occasiodaily dose of FOSS and Linux news as delivered by your host, Marcel Gagné (aka WFTL). Today's news features a case of Mono for Linux, two projects to sync your BlackBerry to Linux, a LinuxWorld RIP, RMS on clouds, and a super fast booting netbook.

If I had had SpeedCrunch or Qalculate! during high school, finishing homework really would've been child's play. From breaking down complex algebraic equations, to solving your calculus problems, to performing geometric computations and providing statistical answers, SpeedCrunch and Qalculate! are tools that offer quick solutions to difficult questions. SpeedCrunch is the lesser of the two beasts. It runs not only on Linux but also on Windows and Mac OS X, and offers over 50 mathematical functions, unlimited variable storage, automatic completion, expression history, and more. It's available in the software repositories for most distributions, or you can grab the tarball from the project's Download page.