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The Institute for Justice has filed a lawsuit on behalf of computer repair guy Mike Rife against the Texas Private Security Bureau (PSB) arguing that a new law unconstitutionally denies computer repair companies the right to work in their chosen profession. This based around the Texas Constitution which protects the right of Texans to earn an honest living without unreasonable government interference.

[Not FOSS related but I thought it would be of interest - Scott]

BusinessWeek's Steve Hamm and Geri Smith have written One Laptop Meets Big Business, a good article summing up the recent history of the OLPC project and it's difficulties with sales numbers, fading promises, Intel, and its internal strife over the Microsoft decision. None of that information is particularly new, but the article continues and goes in to some insightful problems with the educational model of the OLPC project formulated at 1CC, the OLPC headquarters; namely, hubris.

A couple of weeks back, a small New Zealand-based company, OnlineGroups.Net, released the source code for its online collaboration platform, GroupServer. When a big company releases source code for anything, it's often termed a risky move. For a small company, the risks are more or less the same.

The popular social networking site Facebook just announced a Chinese version, but similar Chinese-based Web sites such as Xiaonei and Hainei have been struggling there. However, since April, UCenter Home, an open source social network service based on PHP and MySQL, is pushing open social networking in China. Like other successful follow-the-leader Web sites in China (take Baidu, for example, which is a counterpart of Google), UCenter Home lacks innovative ideas but is good at localization. Its social network framework copies Facebook's, but it brings a style to the Chinese market that is more welcomed by local people than other foreign and domestic competitors.

Well, since I've gone through both Ubuntu and openSuSE Linux, and my curiosity about Unix systems in general has really started to kick in, I've decided to go through a few more variants to see what they are like, how they load on my laptops, and whether I might prefer one of them over my current favorite (Ubuntu). I might end up regretting this decision, but I assume there will be plenty of adventure and frustration along the way, and perhaps some learning and enlightenment.

How to attempt to work around the fact that Solaris 10 zones, living on zfs rooted filesystems, can't be handled properly by Sun's Solaris 10 upgrade!

LinuX-Gamers Live is a live DVD from Germany based on Arch Linux that includes nothing but games. Version 0.9.3 was released in June and provides an excellent means of sampling Linux games or setting up a home arcade, although a few of the games wouldn't run on my machine. There are no productivity tools, Web browsers, or package managers here; this disc is all play and no work. Because it's a live DVD, no hard drive is required to run the games. Once you burn the downloaded image to a DVD, you have a portable arcade that will run on any x86 system with 512MB or more of RAM. A 3-D accelerated video card is also required for most of the games. Proprietary drivers for Nvidia and ATI-based video cards are included, so you can enable acceleration for those types of cards by simply answering a few dialogs during the boot process.

A private school in St. Louis, Mo. is increasingly choosing Linux for the computers it supplies to students and faculty, according to laptop supplier Lenovo. Students at the Whitfield School are using Linux about 86 percent of the time now, Lenovo says, up from 50 percent three years ago. Lenovo has supplied about 600 laptops to the Whitfield School, it says, including systems that run both Linux and Windows. Whitfield started its PC program in 2005, and this year achieved its goal of supplying each student in grades six through 12 with their own laptop, it says.

Today's IT managers face tough choices. PCs that run fine today have an uncertain upgrade path, now that Microsoft has chosen to discontinue Windows XP. Upgrade costs associated with Vista, coupled with the ever-escalating cost of application licenses, make switching to desktop Linux an increasingly attractive option. For many businesses, however, it's difficult to know where to begin. The Linux market is broad and thriving, with myriad options to choose from. Most organizations will want to phase in Linux gradually, which in many cases will mean supporting a heterogeneous computing environment for the first time. As a result, it can be hard to predict where software incompatibilities might affect critical business processes.

Linux is a hacker’s dream computer operating system. It supports tons of tools and utilities for cracking passwords, scanning network vulnerabilities, and detecting possible intrusions. I have here a collection of 10 of the best hacking and security software tools for Linux. Please always keep in mind that these tools are not meant to harm, but to protect.

Today Linux desktop manufacturer Xandros acquired Linspire for an undisclosed amount. Xandros will also be keeping existing engineering, support, and key sales employees and long-time Linspire employee and CEO Larry Kettler will be joining the Xandros executive team as the VP of Business Development. While Xandros didn't mention their total employee numbers Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos claims Xandros to be the third largest Linux company in the world after the acquisition. Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony has some harsh criticism of the deal on his blog.

A controlled dial-on-demand router is a convenient tool. An uncontrolled dial-on-demand router is not. The Wireshark network protocol analyzer helped me track down the cause of some strange and unwanted dialup connections. Wireshark is a 20MB download. The GPL-licensed utility runs under Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows. The problems I needed to solve were all with a Windows client. My SMC Barricade 7004AWBR wireless router has an RS-232 port and can control an external modem, which I use for Internet connectivity. While there is quite a bit of Ethernet traffic on my network between several Windows machines and a Linux server, only a small portion of the traffic is addressed to the gateway, calling for an outside connection. Connections are made automatically if required, and if the connection is idle for a specified interval, the router quietly drops the connection and waits for later requests to dial out again.

Venture funding for open-source companies rose to $115 million in the second quarter, a 14 percent increase over the same period a year ago, according to The 451 Group. And funding for the first half of the year is up 62 percent over the first half of 2007. That's all the good news. The bad news is that seed and series A funding remains anemic and may continue to remain so while venture-backed companies struggle generally to find a public exit, i.e. an initial public offering. In the second quarter, there were exactly zero IPOs for venture-backed companies--whether they were open source or otherwise.

There's something strange going on. As Bill Gates steps down from active involvement in the day-to-day running of Microsoft, there's a natural tendency to speak about the “end of an era”. That's certainly true enough, but people are going beyond this factual statement to indulge in some serious revisionism.

If you need a very easy to install, feature complete Linux distribution, do not look any further than PCLinuxOS. This gem of a distribution is an absolute joy to use.

A simple command line procedure for making one-off backups of some large files to DVDs or a USB drive. Update and correction.

Why pay $650 for Adobe Photoshop when you can have 97 percent of the functionality of Photoshop for free? That's a question software developers and distributors plan on addressing at "Lindependence 2008," a free event in Felton starting July 13, which promoting the Linux operating system and other Free/Open Source Software.

Microsoft Corp. today unveiled projects to improve data portability between Office 2007 and other document file formats, including the design of a new translator for exchanging OOXML (Office Open XML) and HTML documents. The company also posted the 1.0 version of technical documentation for protocols in Office and other software that enable those applications to interact with third-party programs.

Apple's OS X, which has been an official certified Unix system for some time now, is often installed onto Internet-exposed or intranet-only Web servers for serving up dynamic content. I've worked with such configurations for a couple of years, and with GNU/Linux alternatives for even longer. There are at least three reasons why GNU/Linux systems do the job better. Web servers are key corporate assets, and systems administrators are supposed to keep them humming along, but that's not always easy. Security is always an issue for sites, as shown by daily vulnerability reports and security advisories. Performance, in terms of load time and response time, is another key issue. Customers get frustrated if it takes longer to add something to their browser's shopping cart than it would take them to visit a nonvirtual shop to buy it there. Sysadmins also must focus on availability. If your site is down, you'll lose all the benefits an otherwise well-administrated Web site provides.

Back in March we had looked at the Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 mobile processor with its Penryn core and 6MB of shared L2 cache between its two cores clocked at 2.50GHz. We were very pleased with the performance of this mobile processor on Linux, which was found within a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook, and today we are looking at the Penryn's desktop counterpart. Intel's Core 2 Duo "Wolfdale" E8000 series processors were released earlier this year with 6MB of L2 cache, 45nm manufacturing, a 1333MHz FSB, and support for SSE 4.1. The processor from the Wolfdale series we are looking at today under Linux is the Core 2 Duo E8400.