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Nearly a year after the Free Software Foundation released an updated version of the General Public License - the GPLv3 - there appears to be a great deal of confusion about what the license actually means, if one goes by two recent publications.

Here’s a little sneak preview of some of the educational sessions at this year’s Summit. And who better to outline their talks than the speakers themselves? In this first installment, Rik van Riel talks about computing speed; Fedora developer (and Red Hat engineer) Bill Nottingham outlines his thoughts on the most recent Fedora release; and Tom Callaway sums up his plans to speak about the simplest ways to use RPM.

With the recent release of Puppy Linux 4.00, developer Barry Kauler and his team have provided a lightweight but functional Linux operating system. To help reduce size and include more functionality over the previous binary-package-based Puppy 3.01, Puppy 4.00 has been compiled from a Slackware 12-based source. Yet despite its small size -- the ISO file is a meager 87.1MB -- Puppy has an abundance of applications, with more than enough for an average user.

Media processing vendor Pika Technologies Inc. recently announced that its Warp appliance line is customer-ready and ready to slay the Nortels and Ciscos of the world in a bid for the small to midsize corporate telespace. Pika's hardware line, which includes the Appliance for Asterisk and Appliance for Linux, is bundled with an open-source platform that will let develops tweak the software to their telephony needs.

IBM announced the completion of a one-petaflop supercomputer that runs Red Hat Linux. Twice as fast as the previous record-setter, the IBM Blue Gene, the Roadrunner uses a hybrid design that combines 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron chips with 12,960 Cell processor engines.

When you think of Linux, you probably think of open source software and security, but not gaming. Most people think if you are into gaming, Windows is your only option. A few years ago this might have been the case but not anymore. So, if you are a Linux power user, or just prefer Linux, here are a few of your options for playing games on your Linux box.

Silos and walled gardens are giving way to collabetition in the mobile handset industry. Faced with customer demands to innovate at nearly light speed, mobile handset makers are discovering that collaborating and using open source software can help them develop products faster, writes Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation.

Lakin Hospital, a long-term nursing facility operated by the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, has adopted an open source electronic health record. The implementation is part of an ongoing project that will unite all of West Virginia's state-run healthcare facilities through a contiguous electronic repository of patient information.

Today -- just 212 days after the planned November launch date -- X Server 1.4.1 is finally released! Daniel Stone announced its release this morning on the xorg mailing list. X Server 1.4.1 has had 62 changes to it since the 1.4.1 pre-release, and that release had 46 changes, which brings the change total for this release up to 108. Even though X Server 1.4.1 has more than 100 changes, it wasn't enough to clear out the blocker bug, which still has two open bugs.

I've used Josh Grosse's jggimi live CD version of OpenBSD to test hardware compatibility recently, but now there's a new live CD project based on OpenBSD called BSDanywhere.

Apparently, Canonical is already attracting attention from OEMs that want to build small Internet devices running Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Here's the scoop from Works With U, a site that covers Ubuntu.

I had an ambitious plan to have a perfect knowledge of ffmpeg as well as possible. I have to admit that getting the most of this program is out of my reach at the moment. What does it have to do with Screencasts in Ubuntu? Well, everything.

Voice Internet Protocol (VoIP) Telephony refers to the technology used for making telephone calls over the Internet. The two major technologies used to implement VoIP telephony are Asterisk and OpenSER. This article by Flavio E. Goncalves compares Asterisk and OpenSER topic by topic and shows the differences between them.

I've probably written a dozen or more times about how I think that OpenOffice is the killer app of free, open-source software, and is the software suite that most worries the folks at Microsoft while empowering more and more regular people every day ... but that I have little call to use it myself. That has changed.

At the Geek Ranch we recently made a decision to implement some software in Python. Or, more accurately, I decided and there was no disagreement. Then Python gets picked as the best scripting language in the LJ Readers' Choice survey. That inspired me to write this article (and get ready for Perl and Ruby fans to start yelling at me). To understand my position, you need to understand my background and experience. Yeah, this is is going to be long but I think it is necessary.

Oracle and now IBM seem to have strange ideas about creating a business around open source software for the enterprise. First it was Oracle's Unbreakable Linux program, derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux sans its proprietary bits and supported for peanuts to beat RHEL and similar community projects such as CentOS. Now it's IBM, which has taken old OpenOffice.org code under the now-retired Sun Industry Standards Source License and released it as a proprietary closed source freeware office suite. The first stable release of IBM Lotus Symphony, released last week, has no obvious advantages over OpenOffice.org. The suite is targeted at enterprise customers, at the expense of free and open source alternatives.

The Red Hat Partner Summit kicks off in Boston on June 18, roughly 15 miles from Novell's corporate headquarters. Is it time for Novell to get aggressive, and actively market SuSE Linux to Red Hat Summit attendees? The VAR Guy certainly thinks so. Here's how Novell could steal some of the spotlight at Red Hat's own event.

What does Mozilla - arguably the most popular open source project in the world - use for its telephony solution? It shouldn't surprise you that they use a solution built in open source should it?

Project Gutenberg (PG) collects and maintains a library of public domain books in electronic text format, in an assortment of languages. That's all well and good, but potential readers still need a method to access PG's collection. I recently sat down to test a handful of e-text readers that offer integration with the 24,000 PG titles. Searching on Freshmeat and SourceForge.net turns up five alternatives: GutenPy, Guten, JBook, PyGE, and GutenBrowser. Of those, GutenPy, Guten, and PyGE are all Python applications, JBook is a Java app, and GutenBrowser is written in C++.

Command line is known to be the most powerful way of doing things on Linux. Even though there are GUI tools for almost any task, doing them in the shell is most of the time faster and easier. Not to mention there are so many CLI tools out there, you only have to build a graphical interface in order to use them. It is also the most common way of spreading tutorials or helping new users, since it's less bandwidth consumptive (no screenshots, no explanations like 'go there, click on that, not that, the one below it'). This is a review on the most used terminal emulators in Linux.