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Linus Torvalds recently held a Q&A, in which he attacked Microsoft, Patent Trolls, Sun Microsystems, Virtualization, and the Linux Market Share! Is this good for Linux that one of its top representatives is pessimistic about the rise of Linux in the desktop?

Google Rips Microsoft's Proposed Takeover of Yahoo, Saying It Would Stifle Internet Innovation

Cluster Resources, a leading provider of HPC resource management and scheduling software, today announced an agreement that will establish Cray Inc. as an official reseller of the Moab® cluster, grid, data center and adaptive computing products.

Photo mosaics are recreations of one large image composed of tiny tiles of other smaller images. They can be a fun project and make good use of the hundreds of less-than-extraordinary photos on your hard drive. We compared three easy-to-use Linux-based utilities for generating photo mosaics -- Pixelize, Metapixel, and Imosaic -- on speed, quality, and other factors.

Do you wish you had access to your home file server without leaving your firewall wide open to attacks? Well today's your lucky day! While you can implement this on any OS its easiest to do this on Linux. This article will show you how to lock down your firewall and implement a port knocker to let you in.

An amusing, goofy article listing various reasons why Linux is such a good choice as an operating system. It's a little early for Valentine's, but the article spreads some good cheer while poking a little fun at the competition.

In this installment of my series on the Top 10 Linux FUD patterns, I address two patterns that have more to do with software packages that run on the Linux platform than with the Linux OS itself. As I stated in a previous post, every believable piece of FUD has some element of truth behind it, and these two are no exception. Linux FUD Pattern #3: With Linux, you cannot access old files or share new files with others. Linux FUD Pattern #4: There are no good software titles for Linux.

Microsoft's aggressive defense of its intellectual property, which includes claims that Linux violates a number of its patents, is nothing more than "a marketing thing," according to Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel.

Newsflash people. There is no “Year of the Linux Desktop”. There will never be one. Before you start looking for sharp rocks to throw at me, let me start by saying I am a Linux user. I worked with all major distributions, roamed in Slackware land for about two years, tried to get accustomed to Red Hat’s RPM hell in a time when Linux was a wasteland and there were only a bunch of people that were using it.

ProFTPD is a ftp server written for use on Unix and Unix-a-like operating systems, there is no support for native use under Microsoft Windows. The TLS protocol allows applications to communicate across a network in a way designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, and message forgery. TLS provides endpoint authentication and communications privacy over the Internet using cryptography. Typically, only the server is authenticated (i.e., its identity is ensured) while the client remains unauthenticated.

If you cannot face the thought of hunting down and re-installing all of your Firefox extensions one by one on a second computer, you need, appropriately, an extension to simplify the task. CLEO, the Compact Library Extension Organizer, can package all your extensions and themes into one installable .xpi file. Extension seriesYou can install CLEO from its homepage or the official Mozilla Web site. You must also install FEBE (Firefox Environment Extension Backup), which CLEO uses to back up your extensions.

Welcome to this year's 5th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! It's tough to be a developer of a desktop operating system these days. Not only are we seeing increasing usability and user-friendliness from the major Linux distributions, the BSD world now also wants its share of the market, while there are those who believe that even Solaris can be a viable desktop alternative to the more established operating systems. But how far has Sun Microsystems' flagship product progressed since the opening up of the source code in the form of OpenSolaris? Our featured story looks at Nexenta, Indiana, BeleniX and other OpenSolaris-based distribution and asks whether they can compete on the desktop. In the news section, Debian edges closer to "Lenny", Slackware announces plans to move to KDE 4, François Bancilhon defends the code-sharing agreement with Turbolinux, and Ars Technica investigates the latest release of NetBSD. Finally, we are proud to announce that the recipient of the DistroWatch January 2008 donation is the VideoLAN VLC project. Enjoy the read and happy Chinese New Year to all our readers!

GLPI stands for “Gestionnaire libre de parc informatique”, GLPI is the Information Resource Manager with an additional Administration- Interface. You can use it to build up a database with an inventory for your company (computer, software, printers…). It has enhanced functions to make the daily life for the administrators easier, like a job tracking system with mail-notification and methods to build a database with basic information about your network-topology.

There are a number of ways to view the proposed Microsoft takeover of Yahoo. And, frankly, none of them is very encouraging. Yahoo is a company on a very slippery downhill slope, one that saw the company announce last week that it was to chop 1000 jobs in an effort to restore profitability. Microsoft is a company desperate to shore up the gaping hole in its business that is the Internet. And Google? Well Google just carries on being Google and growing stronger and stronger by the day. The concern, however, is that between the three the online advertising market is pretty much locked up and this deal will ensure it is even more so.

Linux certification body Linux Professional Institute has added another African country to its ranks with the inclusion of Egypt as an LPI affilliate. Egypt joins a growing number of African LPI affiliates including South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya.The LPI also announced this week new affiliates in Pakistan and the United Arab emirates. Egypt joins LPI ranks.

Novell has announced a pre-built "starter" system for Suse Linux Enterprise Server, which will eliminate the complicated procedure normally required to get Linux going on a mainframe, the company claims. Available from last Friday, Suse Linux Enterprise Server Starter System for System z provides a pre-configured disk image that installs like any other system z service, into a virtual machine, using standard mainframe tools, according to Novell.

The developer formerly known as Celunite claims industry first with Mobile Linux platform based on LiMo Foundation software.

The openness of the Internet is what made Google -- and Yahoo! -- possible. A good idea that users find useful spreads quickly. Businesses can be created around the idea. Users benefit from constant innovation. It's what makes the Internet such an exciting place. So Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.

[This is not directly FOSS related but I believe it to be of interest to our readers. - Scott]

Microsoft is constantly claiming that their products are more secure than the competition based on the same flawed argument over and over again. Filling in the data creates a very different picture.

LXer Feature: 3-Feb-2008

In the ramp up to SCALE next weekend we have a SCALE announcement, a concise history of Linux, Nokia acquires Trolltech. We have articles on VLAN's and Rootkit detectors on Linux, How to apply Unix philosophy to personal productivity, Eight interesting improvements in GNOME 2.22, Mythbusters- Vista gets BUSTED and the big news of the week, if not the month Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for $44.6 Billion dollars.