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Last week, The VAR Guy raised questions about Novell's overall business strategy. This week, Novell Chief Marketing Officer John Dragoon responds with key points about Novell's strategy and momentum. Among the highlights: Even without license revenue from the Microsoft-Novell agreement, Novell's Linux growth rates would equal or slightly exceed the overall Linux market growth rate. Here's a recap of Dragoon's conversation with The VAR Guy.

UNetbootin is a simple open source tool that allows you to install a variety of distributions over the Internet, without burning a CD. The Wubi tool for installing Ubuntu this way has been around for a while, but unlike UNetbootin, Wubi installs Ubuntu on a file stored in a Windows environment and creates no actual partitions. UNetbootin will create a partitioned dual-boot system as though you installed with a CD. It's useful if you're working on a machine with a slow or no CD/DVD drive or don't have any spare discs to burn.

In 1994, National Semiconductor promised the IEEE that it would license two of its patents to anyone implementing the Fast Ethernet standard for a flat $1000. Later, it transferred those patents, and they eventually came to be owned by Negotiated Data Solutions (N-Data) - a troll. That's the same Ethernet standard that's implemented in millions of computers all over the world. You can guess what happened next.

Debian Developer Benjamin “Mako” Hill, who also runs Planet Debian, announced that the planet now has a search function - thanks to another Debian Developer, Steve Kemp.

There is a lot of activity going on in the CinelerraCV mailing list these days about the next version of Cinelerra.

The simplest application of NAT is address translation from a more trusted segment to a less trusted segment. The simplest use of NAT with iptables is MASQUERADE.

When you hear the phrase “official support,” what comes to mind? Informative user manuals? A well-staffed call center? But what makes it “official”? This is the second item on my Top 10 List of Linux FUD patterns: the lack of “official” Linux support. The goal of FUD based on this notion is a mixture of fear and uncertainty, to make you believe that using Linux means having no place to turn when a problem occurs.

Inspired by the command wheel in the Neverwinter Nights online game, Kommando is a floating command panel for KDE. Although Kommando's development is almost as slow as an official Debian release, and is only at version 0.5.2, it is already a configurable and convenient addition to the array of panels available in KDE.

This year will see Linux gain a stronger foothold as an enterprise platform in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as steady growth in mobile-commerce, a market report revealed. In its study released Wednesday, Canadian-based research house XMG gave its top eight predictions and trends that will impact the region in 2008.

That crazy penguin is making some huge strides toward the mainstream, because Dell has announced that they will be preloading the Linux-based Ubuntu 7.10 OS in their new XPS 1330n notebook computer. From what I can gather, this unit is similar in many ways to the Windows-based XPS m1330, with the obvious difference of the operating system.

For years, the poster child of the anti-open source movement was Microsoft, with its proprietary software model. In recent years, however, the company has changed its views, opening an open source software lab to work on interoperability issues. It's even become a purveyor of its own open source-approved licenses.

KDE isn't just for Linux anymore. With the recent release of KDE 4, the K Desktop team has set their focus on porting the core libraries that power KDE applications over to both Windows and OS X. Although still in the early stages, there are already builds available for both platforms that will enable you to compile and run popular KDE application like the Amarok Jukebox or KOffice suite on either Windows or Mac, and KDE's goal is to have production-ready versions out later this year.

Flash filesystem (FFS) specialist Datalight Inc. will soon release a commercial Linux FFS claimed to provide 400 percent faster write performance and 500 percent faster mount speed compared to JFFS2. The new FFS will target Linux-based mobile phones, set-top boxes, and other embedded devices.

Canonical Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu version of Linux, called Tuesday's interest-rate cut the "most extraordinary failure of economic leadership in recent years."

The open-source KDE desktop environment is making the jump across platforms with broad support for Windows and Mac OS X. The core KDE desktop programs, the KOffice suite, and the Amarok music player are actively being ported. Related Stories * First look: Qt 4.4.0 with Phonon and WebKit These efforts are largely made possible by the inherent portability of Trolltech's Qt development toolkit, the underlying framework used by KDE software. Qt is designed for cross-platform portability and even uses native widgets on both Windows and Mac OS X.

Look beyond tools like SpamAssassin and Amavis to see how you can extend them and provide additional filtering facilities to lower the amount of spam hitting the e-mail boxes of your users. Most companies use spam and virus filtering services on their UNIX platforms, but there are some methods that you can use that help improve your filtering scores and might even eliminate spam reaching inboxes.

A while ago Roy Russo had made a comment to the effect: "OSS needs to stop competing on price". Regardless what you read about him on the Interweb, I say, he's a smart guy! ;-) I've never really looked at the price of Windows vs. RHEL or Ubuntu. The simple answer is that CentOS/Fedora (near RHEL replacements) and Ubuntu are free without commercial support, so end of discussion. But, if you want commercial support and consider a typical Windows replacement cycle (~5 years), it seems that Windows is actually cheaper than purchasing RHEL+support or support for Ubuntu.

It has been said that the most important missing killer app for Linux is a free Adobe Photoshop clone. In this series we'll correct that assertion, and then move on to bringing high-quality digital images to life in Linux itself, without having to use icky old Windows, or spending a pot of money.

djbdns is a very secure suite of DNS tools that consists out of multiple parts: dnscache, a DNS cache that can be used in /etc/resolv.conf instead of your ISP's name servers and that tries to sort out wrong (malicious) DNS answers; axfrdns, a service that runs on the master DNS server and to which the slaves connect for zone transfers; and tinydns, the actual DNS server, a very secure replacement for BIND.

Automattic, the parent company of popular open source blogging platform WordPress, announced this week it received $29 million in funding from four investors who will take a minority stake in the company. Though this isn't the first round of financing for the not quite three-year-old company, it has drawn a lot of notice because one of the investors is the New York Times. It's an unusual pairing of two industries -- blogging and conventional media -- typically thought to be at odds with each other.