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Red Hat announced today that it has settled a patent dispute with Firestar and DataTern over two patents, including one that covers object-relational database mapping—a technique that is used in Hibernate, a component of the JBoss middleware stack. Red Hat says that the terms of the settlement will offer broad protection for upstream developers, all derivatives, and downstream distributors, as well as Red Hat's customers.

Beating Firefox 3.0 to the opening night accolades is Opera 9.5, the latest version of the free browser from the Norwegian browser company, available for Windows, Macs and Linux PCs. Time for a standing ovation?

There are some disturbing developments and they are happening in the key components of our systems: the desktop. KDE has spawned a new release. People are not only complaining about its instability, but also about its direction. Gnome is in trouble as well. There is the Mono controversy and some people feel it has become a dead project, because it has ceased to be "exciting and innovative".

Wall Street firms increasingly are buying into Linux, but some still need convincing that open source licensing and support models won't make using the technology more trouble than its worth. Linux providers, speaking this week at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) conference in New York City, stated their cases that Wall Street firms have nothing to fear about diving into open source. Red Hat and Novell argued that's especially true now that specialized Real Time Linux has been developed that meets strict low-latency and messaging requirements of brokerages and trading firms.

This document describes how to install and use gDesklets on Ubuntu 8.04. Taken from the gDesklets page: "gDesklets is a system for bringing mini programs (desklets), such as weather forecasts, news tickers, system information displays, or music player controls, onto your desktop, where they are sitting there in a symbiotic relationship of eye candy and usefulness. The possibilities are really endless and they are always there to serve you whenever you need them, just one key-press away. The system is not restricted to one desktop environment, but currently works on most of the modern Unix desktops (including GNOME, KDE, Xfce)."

Rarely does one find the proprietor of a company that is closely connected to any kind of software getting on mailing lists to try to correct public perceptions of his product. In that respect, Mark Shuttleworth stands apart from all his peers. Even when the allegations are not exactly founded on fact, Shuttleworth retains his cool. Add to these variables, the fact that Shuttleworth shuns bizspeak when answering his critics through this medium and you can see why he enjoys rock-star-like status among a whole crowd of Linux users.

How to use ntysyv, rather than chkconfig, to manage Linux services at specific run levels.

Asus' Atom-powered Eee PC 901 will go on sale across the UK on 1 July for an Eee PC 900-beating £319, Register Hardware has learned. The 900, which went on sale back in April, was priced at £329. The new model not only sports a more advanced processor, but also includes Bluetooth, 802.11n Wi-Fi, a two pick-up microphone array and a six-cell, 6600mAh battery.

Linux is the best kernel there is, and the OSes built off of it are the best around. Period. There, I said it. Normally if I was to write an opinionated piece about Linux, I’d explain the history of Linux, the importance of open source and open standards, and ramble on and on about the benefits of it’s lack of cost, but that’s not what this is about, and usually this site strays away from opinion but I couldn’t resist this time.

Where on the Web do you go for free education and training materials? A project called Science, Education and Learning in Freedom (SELF) has created a site where educators and students can upload and download courseware without charge, or create courseware collaboratively. It maintains free-as-in-freedom content, and is intended for courses on free/libre software.

Patent Failure examines the current state of the American patent system based on the way it has traditionally been treated–as a type of property system. Using the yardstick of property rights and the economics they influence, Bessen and Meurer analyze the costs and benefits of patents to innovators. Their qualification: “If the estimated costs of the patent system to an innovator exceed the estimated benefits, then patents fail as property.”

The KDE Project today announced the eighth alpha release of KOffice 2, a technology preview of the upcoming version 2.0. Work continues in the same vein as before, with a strong focus on finishing and polishing our new features that will set KOffice. This is a work in progress, showing the changes that have been made over the last month by the KOffice developers. Most features that will be part of the final release are present now, and bug reports are welcome for the more stable components.

The days of parsing configuration files with awk and making quick changes to configuration files with ad-hoc scripts may finally be at an end. With Augeas you can forget about the parsing and focus completely on what settings must be changed. So if the configuration file moves a piece of data to the fourth column, you don't need to care; Augeas will still show it to you as it did before.

Microsoft is going to become an OSS company, not a FOSS company. We are already seeing the early signs of this. They have created a couple of open source licenses and have submitted them for approval successfully with the Open Source Initiative. Microsoft has pledged to become a more open company. Although the said pledge has been received with a lot of skepticism, I think they really mean it. They have to. Microsoft is now hard at work trying to convince the world that they really have changed. Is all this going to be enough? I don’t think so. They have to still go a little further. Lets see why.

I recently had the need to embed a file in an executable. Since I'm working at the command line with gcc, et al and not with a fancy RAD tool that makes it all happen magically it wasn't immediately obvious to me how to make this happen. A bit of searching on the net found a hack to essentially cat it onto the end of the executable and then decipher where it was based on a bunch of information I didn't want to know about. Seemed like there ought to be a better way...

As I was perusing the Linux forums this morning, I found a thread that was started by someone who was interested in learning about Linux server administration. He mentioned a (ahem!) certain commercial website that specializes in selling Linux training courses. His basic questions were, "Does anyone know anything about this outfit?", and "Are their training courses worth the price?" A few people answered positively, but a few others, who hadn't had any experience with this site, answered with "Why spend the money, when there are lots of free training courses on the Web?"

Fifteen years in the making, everyone's favorite software to run Windows programs on Linux and Unix, Wine, is almost ready for its 1.0 release. If all goes well, Alexandre Julliard, Wine's lead developer, says that Wine 1.0 should appear on June 20, two weeks after the program's fifteenth birthday. While at this point there are about 1,300 Windows applications that will install and run on Wine to some degree, only four sets of Windows applications -- Photoshop CS2, PowerPoint Viewer 97 and 2003, Word Viewer 97 and 2003, and Excel Viewer 97 and 2003 -- are considered critical for the 1.0 release.

Rickford Grant has revised his book, Ubuntu for Non-Geeks, to cover Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron. Published by No Starch Press, which is offering a free sample chapter, the third edition counsels beginners on topics ranging from working with removable storage to interfacing with iPods.

Laptop installation has traditionally been one of the biggest challenges faced by Linux users. These systems come with no end of special-purpose hardware, and they bring particular needs of their own. More recently, getting a laptop into a basic, working state has become less of a challenge - at least, for carefully-chosen systems. Life has gotten much easier in this area.

One of the most often mentioned concerns at the KDE booth at LinuxTag was the question if Plasma would force the user to have a black panel. While we did have a second machine showing another theme to resolve all doubts it showed that not all users now yet the power of Plasma theming.