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At LugRadio Live this past weekend, Novell developer Miguel de Icaza gave a presentation on Moonlight, an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight web framework. During the presentation, he described the current status of Moonlight and showed some of the ways that it can be used to create richer applications for the Linux desktop.

Red Hat has recently announced that they have "No plans for a traditional consumer desktop". Let me explain why I think Red Hat needs to change their business strategy. First, a short history lesson. Before the arrival of Windows NT Server, Novell Netware claimed 90% of the market for PC based servers. However, Netware made a near fatal mistake when they did not provide a GUI interface soon enough. So server administrators became familiar with Windows 95 on their desktop, and they naturally preferred Windows NT 4.0 which included the same interface.

It’s funny how some people react when I tell them I use Linux. Sometimes they express the sentiment that I must be very computer savvy. Other’s get caught up in all the brand loyalty hype and still some have never heard of Linux! I kid you not! The truth of the matter is that I switched partly because Windows no longer offered me any challenges and reliability became an issue. The most common question I get asked whenever I present a public speaking seminar is “Why did you switch to Linux?”Well… for all those who asked, here’s the long winded answer.

Novell carries on assisting Microsoft's fight against a member of the Linux Foundation (Adobe) by promoting an anti-Linux, anti-GPL Silverlight

Google has released Picasa version 2.7 for Linux, which promises many of the same improvements of the PC version, including (drum roll, please) uploading and downloading from Picasa Web Albums.

In many ways the Debian GNU/Linux project is unique among all the distributions that dot the Linux landscape. Apart from putting out a high-grade distribution, it has served as the base for a number of others - Ubuntu and Knoppix, to name just two - which have had a big impact on the growth of the Linux ecosystem. A few days back, the project concluded its elections for the year and Steve McIntyre emerged as the victor in a three-cornered contest. McIntyre may well be the most watched elected official of a non-profit group - the direction the project takes is of vital concern to a great many businesses. He was quick off the blocks when approached for an interview; his prose was clear and concise, his reactions swift.

There's patching work ahead for users of alternative browsers. Mozilla updated its Firefox web browser on Wednesday in response to the discovery of a vulnerability involving its Javascript Garbage Collector function. The security bug means that memory corruption might be caused through specially-crafted Javascript code. Successful exploitation creates a means to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable systems.

Despite their prominent position in the world as leaders of technology, we hear from oriental countries quite rarely in the free software world. To find out what happens to KDE in the East, we asked some questions to Daisuke Kameda (亀田 大輔) of the KDE Japan Users Group.

This one’s a two-fer! Dan Walsh covers the evolution of SELinux from Fedora 2 all the way to the upcoming Fedora 9 launch. Find out how it started and how user access controls will grow in the newest release. As a bonus, this is also a preview of Walsh’s scheduled talk at the upcoming Red Hat Summit. Want more? Check out the schedule of talks and register–and we’ll see you in Boston.

If Novell CEO Ronald Hovsepian was the the president of the Dairy Association would he say that he predicts people are going to drink less milk?

Building on the success of last year's Vancouver PHP Conference, the Vancouver PHP Users Association on April 14-15 drew more than 400 to the Vancouver Trade and Convention Center to learn about the trends in free and open source software on the Web. With speakers from major corporations such as Creative Commons, Facebook, Google, the Mozilla Foundation, and Sun Microsystems, and a healthy dose of the self-organization popularized by Bar Camp, the conference was in many ways a template for how a local conference can manage to offer informative and current information despite a relatively small size.

Microsoft Corp. has yet to convince Yahoo Inc. to agree to a friendly takeover, but the software company is already hiring lobbyists to help it convince regulators to let the deal _ hostile if it has to be _ go through. Software company Microsoft Corp., bracing for a regulatory squabble in its takeover bid, recently hired Bryan Cave Strategies LLC to lobby the federal government on the proposed multibillion-dollar deal.

"It's been long promised, but there it is now," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25 Linux kernel. He continued, "special thanks to Ingo who found and fixed a nasty-looking regression that turned out to not be a regression at all, but an old bug that just had not been triggering as reliably before. That said, that was just the last particular regression fix I was holding things up for, and it's not like there weren't a lot of other fixes too, they just didn't end up being the final things that triggered my particular worries."

In my next three articles I'll profile three native Linux software synthesizers (a.k.a. softsynths). I'll introduce their basic synthesis architectures and program operations, then I'll guide my readers briefly through the process of creating a new sound for each synth profiled. Our voyage begins with Nick Dowell's Analogue Modeling SYNTHesizer, better known as amSynth.

A few weeks ago, one person informed me that my game blew up on his older distro with an error "version `GLIBC_2.4' not found". Most of the dependency issues I’ve encountered involved changing flags used in my libraries, such as libSDL. Unfortunately, this issue was different. It was strange because I was not sure why my game was depending on GLIBC_2.4 since I was not explicitly linking to it. This article explains what the problem is and how I went about trying to solve it.

Version 0.46 of the open source vector graphics editor Inkscape is out, showcasing new tools, new effects, new filters, and a host of interface and speed improvements. Binary downloads are available for all three major operating system platforms on the Inkscape project site. The Linux build is provided in autopackage and ZeroInstall formats. The site links to unofficial Fedora packages, and Ubuntu users can install the update with APT using the Inkscape team's DEB repository; instructions are on the Inkscape home page. More distribution-specific packages are expected to follow soon for other distros.

Less than two months into Sun Microsystems' MySQL acquisition, Sun has succeeded in upsetting the grassroots types with plans to close off features to the community. It's emerged Sun may release extra data back-up features in the Enterprise Edition of the next version of MySQL, due in Q4, to paying enterprise subscribers only.

You can stream your music collection to the whole Internet from your favorite Linux distribution. Take some playlist files, add in the functionality of the Icecast server, and you have your own Web-based radio stream. Use it to listen to music remotely on your home machine, or tell your friends and become the next Internet radio phenomenon. Icecast is a collection of programs and libraries that creates a Web server for your stream. Icecast grabs your audio from a source program and allows it to be accessed by going to a URL. It seamlessly communicates with Shoutcast, announcing the presence of your stream all over the world if you wish. Others can listen to your stream through programs like VLC, MPlayer, and Xine.

Casey Coleman, the chief information officer of the General Services Administration, spoke at a Federal Open Source Alliance Web seminar held earlier today. Coleman noted that the GSA does indeed use a wide variety of open source programs. The agency started using open source for information systems, though is increasingly using the software for transactional mission-critical systems.

I completely realize I'm a geek. I've been using Linux far longer than it's been the "cool thing" to do. I've also been around the Windows world longer than Windows itself. And to nicely round off the playing field, for the better part of a decade, I've been supporting a network of Apple computers. All this experience means two things:..