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Asustek Computer Inc. in September plans to launch the Eee Monitor, a PC built into a monitor designed to rival Apple Inc.'s iMac, the company's CEO said Monday. The new device joins the Taiwanese company's popular Eee family of products, which started with the low-cost mini-laptop, the Eee PC. Asustek has expanded its laptop line to include products with different configurations and sizes supporting various operating systems, including Linux and Windows XP. The company will launch two new Eee PCs at Computex Taipei 2008 today: the Eee PC 901, which boasts nearly eight hours of battery life, and the Eee PC 1000, which has a 10-inch screen and regular-size keyboard.

The phone rings. You pick it up, and it is the recruiter for your dream job. Your palms begin to sweat as the technical interview starts. “You want to know the run-levels for Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® or Fedora®?” You pause, thinking. “Well, I use Linux every day, and I know single user mode is level 1…”. You stammer a bit, and say you’re drawing a blank for the rest. The recruiter thanks you in that “sorry” tone-of-voice, and hangs up the phone.

Has Microsoft lost the confidence of value added resellers with regard to profitability after it fails to make the top three in server operating system awards ceremony?

So, you have all this wonderful FOSS/Linux know how and a passion for it. Your passion is so great that you want to make a living doing it. That is sooo cool. But before you do, you need to learn how to boil to water and develop a solid business model around it so you can actually make money.

The appeal filed by India against OOXML is not yet available, but you can get a pretty good idea of what it likely is about by reading this open letter, Finally, My open letter on OOXML happenings in India by Dr. Deepak B. Phatak, a member of the committee, written to members of the LITD 15 committee of BIS, India. Among the issues Dr. Phatak raises are that OOXML is "not mature enough for acceptance as an ISO standard" yet; that there's no final draft available; the standard has been broken up into parts, and new conformance criteria introduced; and that the BRM meeting "failed in its basic objectives of resolution through technical discussion" since there was insufficient time to discuss most of the issues and in the end, most of the NBs abstained.

To keep up with the growing popularity of the recent wave of small, low-cost, flash-drive-equipped, wireless "netbook" computers, Ubuntu Linux today announced a specially modified version of the Linux operating designed to run on such machines. Called Ubuntu Linux Remix, the new operating system will be aimed at hardware manufacturers that are building netbooks for the consumer market, said Gerry Carr, marketing manager for Canonical Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu around the globe. Ubuntu Linux Remix is built to be compatible with Intel Corp.'s new Atom processors, which are miniaturized, low-power CPUs that can be used in smaller netbook chassis, Carr said.

The IT Service Center Berlinhas announced the development of a desktop system for the public services in Germany's capital (Google Translate to English). This is yet another public body making the switch to the Free Desktop system. The announcement talks about the good integration of KDE with their current infrastructure, which is partly based on Microsoft's software. According to the ITDZ's press release, the integration phase has successfully finished and the KDE-based client for Berlin's administration is now ready for prime time.

Yet another law firm flies the FUD flag alleging that you can't use open source and make money due to the "...the irreconcilable conflict between open-source software and its widespread use by for-profit companies.""

Johnathan Zdziarski's book Open iPhone Application Development is a guide writing applications for the iPhone without engaging the restrictions of Apple's official software development kit (SDK). The book takes readers on a concise tour of iPhone jailbreaking, setting up the free compiler tool chain, writing basic Objective-C apps, and the available libraries and APIs. Apple might not like this book, but if you need to develop for the iPhone or just want to learn more about how it works, you'll be hard-pressed to find a better practical resource.

Right now, as you read this, there are at least 100,000 people in Sony’s fantasy worlds. They’re pretending to be elves, or trolls, or ninjas, or pirates, or cheese makers, or any of a thousand other fantastic things; and they’re all paying a monthly fee for the privilege. So when massively multiplayer fantasy role-playing games go online, they need proper change management, good network architects and customized remotely deployable Linux installs to do it.

There’s a system that's on my self, and I've come to realize that I no longer remember the password for this machine. Rather than reinstall the system, I used a much easier method utilizing chroot.

Over the past two years, I've reviewed free software first-person shooters including Tremulous, Alien Arena, and Nexuiz -- all top-notch games. Now we can add Urban Terror to that list. While the first three sport other-worldly, sci-fi-style opponents, Urban Terror goes for realistic opponents -- as realistic as today's headlines. You're fighting terrorists in Algiers and other locations around the globe, and you're using realistic weaponry to do it.

The world's third-largest PC vendor has announced a "netbook" based on a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Centrino processor and Linpus Linux. Acer's $380 Aspire One offers 512MB or 1GB of RAM, 8GB flash, an 8.9-inch, 1024x600 display, WiFi, webcam, and an optional 80GB hard drive.

Pat Volkerding and the Slackware team released the latest version of Slackware Linux, 12.1, on May 2. Even though it is a "point one" release, the list of new features reads like what other distributions would consider a major new version. Slackware 12.1 features the latest KDE 3.5.9, Xfce 4.4.2, and a number of improvements, especially to udev. The full list of updated features is in the official product announcement. From a user's perspective, version 12.1 is a true refinement of the previous version.

If you've been an Open Source advocate for any significant amount of time, you've no doubt heard someone say, with a sneer in their voice, "You get what you pay for". Let it be noted, I really hate that cliche. It does make me think, however, about what you really get when you purchase the license to use a commercial operating system like Windows or OSX.

When I make videos, I almost always use Ogg to encode the audio. Storing the audio in Ogg saves space on my machine without sacrificing quality. However, I invariably need to loop, concatenate, or change the audio in some way, which can be difficult. For many of these tasks I turn to the OGMtools suite to make the process easier.

Many people have gotten the impression that they have to "be somebody" in order to participate or represent their distro during LINdependence 2008. Not only is that untrue, it would probably be counter-productive. Herein we talk about one everyday distro user who saw the value of participating in this project and jumped in with both feet. It will be surprising to many what this small effort is going to yield for his/her distro of choice.

This guide explains how to set up WebDAV with Apache2 on a Debian Etch server. WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allow users to directly edit files on the Apache server so that they do not need to be downloaded/uploaded via http://FTP. Of course, WebDAV can also be used to upload and download files.

Over the last few years there has been a lot of fanfare around open source companies and their liquidation events. Most of the news has been around Sun's billion dollar acquisition of MySQL or the Citrix acquisition of Xen and even Yahoo's acquisition of Zimbra. In contrast there was little attention paid to the SourceFire. Actually if you ask most open source users about SourceFire they would probably answer "SourceWho?" If you ask open source users if they have heard of ClamAV or Snort they probably would be able to tell you that they are the leading open source software for virus protection and intrusion detection respectively. Recently, SourceFire has been in the news a bit lately as Barracuda Networks has made a bid for their open source competitor.

Jeff Yan and Ahmad Salah El Ahmad, at the School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, England recently published a research paper entitled “A Low-cost Attack on a Microsoft CAPTCHA“, demonstrating how they’ve managed to attack the Microsoft’s CAPTCHA used on several of their online services such as Hotmail and Windows Live, with over 92% recognition rate. Here’s a summary of the research :