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In this video interview Open Source Initiative co-founder Bruce Perens talks to German Linux-Magazin Online. He discusses Open Source licensing and the characteristics of individual licenses such as GPLv2, GPLv3, BSD, Apache and Affero GPL. Besides that he reveals an interesting feature he develops for his Blog technocrat.net and why Debian releases have such funny names. Although this is a German website the video interview is in English.

Recently, I wrote a review of the note-taking application Tomboy. Though I find Tomboy exceptionally useful, I had a minor issue with the inability to create new notebooks from within a note. Within hours of the review appearing on Linux.com, Boyd Timothy, one of the app's developers mentioned in the article's comments that my idea had merit and said he would add the feature to an upcoming build. True to his word, he did. This is a shining example of one of the most valued yet sometimes overlooked features of open source software: it really is for the people, by the people.

It is fair to say that distributed source code management systems are taking over the world. There are plenty of centralized systems still in use, but it is a rare project which would choose to adopt a centralized SCM in 2008. Developers have gotten too used to the idea that they can carry the entire history of their project on their laptop, make their changes, and merge with others at their leisure. But, while any developer can now commit changes to a project while strapped into a seat in a tin can flying over the Pacific Ocean, that developer generally cannot simultaneously work with the project's bug database. Committing changes and making bug tracker changes are activities which often go together, but bug tracking systems remain strongly in the centralized mode.

The Asus Eee PC in subnotebook format has been the hit portable computer of the year, with the recent 900 series upgrade only brightening the Asus star. Now word comes that an Eee desktop – with the same Linux OS – will be launched at Computex and on sale later this year.

A year’s research on Novell and the openSUSE project is now published as a master’s thesis at the University of Oslo. “Managing Firm-Sponsored Open Source Communities” details the collaboration between Novell and the openSUSE community. Community members and employees in Novell have participated in the study. The study deals with the tension between openness and control often found in projects that mesh corporate entities with the open source community. On the one hand, Novell wants to enable participation and contributions from external contributors, but cannot turn over full control to the community because it produces its enterprise product from openSUSE.

Currently, Debian users have two main choices of software to install to synchronize their PCs' clocks to online NTP servers — Ntpdate and NTP. I tried to use Ntpdate several different times in both Debian Etch and Lenny, but it didn't work for me. I could open up a root console and type a command to manually make Ntpdate synchronize my PC's clock, but Ntpdate could never find my specified time server when I booted my PC — that's the only time that Ntpdate automatically tries to synchronize. In contrast, NTP uses a daemon that runs at boot and then continues to run all of the time, to continuously keep a PC synchronized to within a few thousandths of a second of the exact time.

Psychonauts is based on the exploits of Raz, a young boy gifted with psychic abilities who escapes the circus to try to sneak into a summer camp for those with similar powers in order to become a "Psychonaut". He finds that there is a sinister plot occurring at the camp that only he can stop from happening. The game is centered on the widely strange and imaginative minds of various characters that Raz enters as a Psychonaut-in-training in order to help them overcome their fears or memories of their past in order to gain their help and progress in the game. Raz gains use of several psychic abilities during the game that are used for both attacking foes and solving puzzles.

My Asus Eee PC 701 is a brilliant low-cost ultraportable notebook, but it has a really small screen (seven inches diagonally). I needed to find out how to make the best use of the available area when I was using the Firefox Web browser. I used F11 to toggle the browser's built-in full screen mode, in which a modified navigation toolbar and optional tab bar are all that is displayed above a Web page, but I yearned for something even better. I found two add-ons that could meet my needs. With the FullerScreen extension, when you press the F11 key the current Web page is displayed over the entire screen -- no menus or toolbars. If you move the mouse pointer to the top or bottom of the screen area, the extension will display a full screen navigation bar, the status bar, and, if appropriate, the tab bar.

Lazarus Ide is now included in Ubuntu Hardy/Intrepid and can be easily be installed and then can be used with Firebird

This tutorial describes how to set up a TeamSpeak server on an Ubuntu Server system. Teamspeak has the ability to make more than one server by setting different ports for each server. The user that controls all these servers is called the SuperAdmin, he has the ability to make more servers and users with or without their rights.

There's a debate brewing over what to do if companies offer open source code in a software-as-a service model, then duck their obligation to contribute changes back to the community. The risk involves a company taking a product based on open source code, significantly modifying it, and using it as the foundation for selling a service over the Web. Technically, SaaS doesn't distribute code to end users, so the provider isn't required to contribute code changes to the community at large, the way Red Hat must when it resells its version of Linux.

Do consider asking your national standards body to join the complaint of South Africa. [...] This opportunity to stop or slow down OOXML is rare and the days that are left to do so are few. We ought to take advantage of this while it lasts.

This scenario is designed to accelerate access to the web server and provide a layer of defense for the web server that did not exist previously.

With the release of 4.1 on the horizon, and initiatives such as Krush days, recent call for help with documentation, and the perennial need for localisation it is very useful for end users to be able to easily get their hands on up-to-date builds of KDE4, preferably without having to wait for their chosen distro to provide packages. As was the case with the run up to KDE4.0, KDE4Daily VM aims to provide such a service.

Japanese television technology that will give viewers access to high-speed broadcasts over the internet could render conventional television obsolete and transform the media landscape within years, analysts have predicted. The country's electronics and telecommunications industries are developing a technological standard for a new "internet television" set, which will let users browse websites and watch streaming programs at the touch of a remote control.

The government-led Korean digital textbook project will adopt Linux. The Ministry of Knowledge Economy and the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology of Korea announced their decision to choose the open software for digital textbook, the key project for the government's digital education policy. The digital textbook provides the contents of conventional textbooks, reference books, workbooks and terminologies in the form of video files, animations and virtual reality. It is the main learning material for students with various interactive features that cater for the needs of learners with different levels of capability.

Welcome to this year's 21st issue of DistroWatch Weekly! An interesting week that brought two big enterprise Linux updates (SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP2 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, both released on the same day) and a number of smaller distribution releases, of which Absolute Linux 12.1, Ultimate Linux 1.8 and TinyMe 2008.0 seem the most impressive. But the big focus of the coming weeks is undoubtedly openSUSE 11.0 - the most innovative Linux distribution release for some time. Do help with testing, though, if you can. In the news section, Paul Frields and Mark Shuttleworth talk to various publications about their respective distributions, CentOS explains why it takes three weeks to build a new version of its distribution, Xubuntu plans to add some of the much-requested features into Intrepid Ibex, and Famelix GNU/Linux receives undue attention from Microsoft's anti-piracy body. Also not to be missed: our first look at OpenSolaris 2008.05 and an update on Zenwalk's package management utility, Netpkg. Happy reading!

Linux vendor Red Hat has updated its enterprise Linux version with features for big servers and some green improvements. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 includes virtualization support for bigger systems and more memory architectures. The new version supports up to 64 CPUs and 512GB of memory, and can virtualize across non-uniform memory access (NUMA) systems. It also has new drivers to improve support for x86/64, Itanium, IBM Power and IBM System Z.

Currently, bash only supports one dimensional aways, however there are several different ways to emulate associative arrays in bash.

Earlier this month we announced that AMD would soon be releasing their Stream SDK for Linux, and just before the start of the weekend this inaugural release had occurred. The Linux release of the AMD Stream SDK v1.1 Beta brings both CAL and Brook+ for those using ATI/AMD graphics hardware. This v1.1 Beta release is also in tune with the new beta release for Microsoft Windows XP.