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Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth urged development of a Linux desktop to rival what Apple Inc. has done and aired a vision of software changing the world. Shuttleworth, speaking at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (Oscon) in Portland, Ore., yesterday, also urged development of a new revenue model to fund free software and set his sights on a services-based mechanism. He also stressed the importance of interoperability with Windows.

Fedora has released its Asterisk-based Fedora Talk VoIP application for connecting Fedora contributors. Other news posted on a recent Fedora blog includes notes on a new automated test case management system, a SIG for ISVs, and new OpenID provider status for the Fedora Account System. Much of the news mentioned in the Fedora blog was revealed at the recent FUDCon Fedora user conference. FUDCon celebrated the new Fedora 9 version of the free and redistributable Red Hat-based Linux distribution, and looked forward toward Fedora 10.

Intel's project to put a Linux and open source stack on mobile devices is getting overhauled to attract developer support, having failed to generate much interest. A year after launching Moblin, Intel plans a second version of its open source stack in the next three weeks, sporting a new operating system, middleware, tools and graphical user interface (GUI).

I'm tired of waiting- I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. Nothing fancy like the Dell latitude XT, which costs $2,500. Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn't exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one. So let's design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them.

In the beginning, what was your guess: did you guess Word 2007 will be faster or slower? Well, here are all the tests rolled up together. Word 2003 burned 7.05 seconds to run the gamut after a cold start and 6.17 seconds after a warm start. Word 2007 consumed 16.12 and 12.13 seconds (respectively).

Along with 2.6.27 development ramping up, there is a variety of other Linux kernel news. Shortly after the release of Linux 2.6.26, someone on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) asked what sort of changes – either potentially or already in the works – might give rise to a 2.7 development series. Torvalds did not even wait 20 minutes to respond, "Nothing. I'm not going back to the old model. The new model is so much better that it's not even worth entertaining as a theory to go back."

Network Security Toolkit is one of many live CD Linux distributions focusing on network monitoring, analysis, and security. NST was designed to give network security administrators easy access to a comprehensive set of open source network applications, many of which are among the top 100 security tools recommended by insecure.org.

Django (for those of you who don't know and are just reading this out of sheer curiosity) is "an open source web application framework, written in Python, which loosely follows the model-view-controller design pattern". At least that's how Wikipedia defines it (it's also a 1966 Italian film directed by Sergio Corbucci and an album by The Modern Jazz Quartet, first released on LP in 1956, but I digress). Before you go any further, check your bag of tricks and make sure you have at least some familiarity with the Python programming language. You're going to need it for this book to be of any use to you.

Dell said it spent months in development and testing to deliver more peripheral support for features, including ATI video graphics, wireless networking and fingerprint readers.

Canonical is working on at least two mobile Linux projects. One called Ubuntu Netbook Remix, the other called Ubuntu for Mobile Internet Devices. So what's the difference between the two? Glad you asked. Gerry Carr, marketing manager for Canonical, described each platform during a meeting at OSCON. Here are the details.

Open source business intelligence firm JasperSoft on Wednesday announced its next-generation community platform at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. The new platform features tools to enhance community project developers as well as business users.

This article describes how to install and configure Nginx to accelerate an Apache server based on RHEL 5.2.

Doug Moran, one of Pentaho's founders, offers a fascinating description of how the company was created in part by bringing on board the chief architects of several other open source projects, offers not one but two explanations of the Pentaho name, and says more on the recent adoption of the GNU GPLv2 for its Business Intelligence platform.

In the two previous articles my focus was on the catching an error where it was impossible to generate any valid menu, even the many of the meta tags in the head(er) section were unknown. The next possible error of significance to be examined here is the case where the menu should exist, but the file that contains the appropriate listing and links is absent. Again it is impossible to generate the menu, but for a differing underlying reason. Moreover, the severity is no less than the first set, it is just found later in the process.

So far, I have come away with several interesting realizations, the more important of which are these: That people are more ready and willing to distance themselves from Microsoft than I had originally anticipated, and translating that into getting them to use Free/Open Source Software will have a huge effect on the digital landscape in this area and elsewhere â?? and let me emphasize the elsewhere because if it can happen here, it can happen elsewhere. So whoâ??s ready to make history in their community?

In this context, a one-liner is a set of commands normally joined through a pipe (|). When joined by a pipe, the command on the left passes its output to the command on the right. Simple or complex, you can get useful results from a single line at the bash command prompt.

A recent thread on the lkml discussed a blog entry stating that minimal ZFS support for GRUB was available under the GPL license, "we could now use that code to implement support for ZFS in the Linux kernel." Alan Cox explained, "no we can't. The GPL ZFS bits don't include the various methods that would violate the patent so there is no grant. I've several times asked Sun to simply give permission and they don't even answer. I can only read the Sun motivation one way - they want to look open but know that ZFS is about the only thing that might save Solaris as a product in the data centre so are not truly prepared to let Linus use it." H. Peter Anvin added, "from what I can see, it is an absolutely-minimal read only implementation."

When you buy a new PC today, unless you hunt down a Linux system or you buy a Mac, you’re pretty much stuck with Vista. Sad, but true. So, when I had to get a new PC in a hurry, after one of my PCs went to the big bit-ranch in the sky with a fried motherboard, the one I bought, a Dell Inspiron 530S from my local Best Buy came pre-infected with Vista Home Premium. Big deal. It took me less than an hour to install Linux Mint 5 Elyssa R1 on it.

Canonical has been in talks with Sun Microsystems and SpringSource to support one of their open source Java application server stacks in the Ubuntu core, to increase Ubuntu's enterprise adoption. Canonical told The Reg that it is in the process of selecting which open source Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) framework to make available in the main part of its popular Linux distro. Sun's streamlined GlassFish 3.0 and the modular Application Platform are contenders.

During OSCON, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth described how open source can drive innovation. And he called on the Linux community not to emulate Apple innovations, but instead to leap past Apple and make Linux a piece of art on the desktop within two years. Here's a recap from The VAR Guy.