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After years of watching the software industry twist itself in knots trying to differentiate “open” vs. “free” and having to re-invent code simply because it had the wrong comments at the top, I think it’s time to put an end to the madness. This promoted me to write the following letter to Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel.

Nortel CIO Steve Bandrowczak, who joined the Canadian telecoms and network equipment vendor last July, said "more and more CIOs are looking at Linux desktop for reasons of TCO" and argued that the technology "is receiving the same level of attention today as when Linux started on servers." Nortel is Microsoft's closest partner among enterprise networking vendors in what to both of them is a key strategic area, Unified Communications. That Nortel should be looking at Linux on its own desktop machines is therefore an intriguing development

The Linux community and indeed the Open Source community in general is comprised of many different types of people. Their way of life, philosophy, age and location all vary widely with as many variations as the human face. However like the human face it can be categorized in a broad manner and stuffed into rather large boxes. This is my attempt at categorizing the face of Linux into four general areas. So take a deep breath, a pinch of salt and delve into the twisted psych of Locutus's mind. Don't forget it is all a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, then it doesn't matter.

Via is sampling a single-board computer aimed at relatively high-end network appliances based on x86 Linux. Powered by a 1GHz, 1.5GHz, or 2GHz C7 processor, and supporting up to 3.5GB of DDR2 RAM, the Network Appliance Board (NAB) 7500 sports four gigabit Ethernet ports. Suggested uses for the NAB 7500 include firewalls, VPN routers, and more. The board is compatible with "many" Linux distributions, according to Via, with Gentoo being popular.

I had the fortune this year of being able to attend 24C3, the 24th annual Chaos Computer Congress. The conference was a lot of fun–probably the first time in a long time (at least since chumby started) that I got to sit down and just hack for a couple of days on fun projects…in between going to really interesting and stimulating talks, and enjoying Berlin’s nightclub scene.

[And in between all that he manages to hack together a wifi-and-camera-controlled franken-chumby-robot on wheels. Very impressive! - Sander]

The latest entry into the Linux-powered low-cost PC space is a Sears/Linspire box that features the Freespire version of the propretary-friendly operating system, with specs that seem to beat the $199 Everex PC featuring the gOS version of Linux and selling through Wal-Mart.

KDE4 Libraries have witnessed major changes in order to make coding KDE applications an easier task. Many shining points in this new edition which make of the future of KDE more promising.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS -- the distribution's first "long term support" release -- now has a new installer that incorporates some 600 bug and security fixes and makes installation easier, especially on servers. It's no secret that Canonical, the company that runs Ubuntu, is making a big play both for the desktop and more-lucrative server markets, and a big part of that play is the LTS release.

Asus's Eee PC, an ultra-light notebook that runs Linux, will be available with Windows XP before the end of the quarter. Pricing has not yet been announced. It will be interesting to see which OS consumers choose.

Whether by wind, vibration, or shaky hand, we have all taken blurry photos. But in the digital era, there is no need to despair -- you can remove shake and blur from your pictures after the fact. Several Linux-friendly utilities can help you. Deconvolution is the general process that helps remove the effects of camera shake and blur. If you want to understand the math behind the process, start with the articles referenced at Wikipedia and you can find as much detail as you want. In a nutshell, it involves taking the Fast Fourier Transform of the image (which makes it easier to see the tell-tale signs of blurring), smoothing out the artifacts, then transforming the image back into its original form. It is a CPU-intensive process, but for a shaky image there is no better use of your MHz.

We kickstart a major development into the next version of openSUSE: openSUSE 11.0. A very early alpha version, Alpha 1, is now available for download and testing. Despite many other products being developed in parallel to Factory, we have seen a heavy stream of development on it, so it is really worth a try if you have time for testing. Screenshots at The Coding Studio.

After the star studded talks of the main event day, the final day of the KDE 4.0 Release Event returned to the un-conference format of small group talks, demos and discussions. KDE Dot News listened in to some of the sessions, read on for brief summaries. Benjamin Reed (RangerRick) started the day with a Q&A session on the Mac port of KDE. The Mac builds of KDE are available and work reasonably but there are a number of issues to be sorted yet as well as some bugs that have appeared with Qt using the latest version of OS X so it is not recommended for everyday use. Some unresolved issues include the duplication of Strigi against Apple's Spotlight and lack of a Solid backend. Benjamin hopes to have stable builds available for KDE 4.1.

Brightside is a small utility for extending the functionality of Metacity, the default window manager for the GNOME desktop. Now at version 1.4.0, it currently offers two mutually exclusive functions: corner actions that are activated when the mouse cursor moves to one of the desktop's corners, and scrolling with the mouse between desktops. Although its home page has been down recently, Brightside is widely available in the repositories of major distributions. A wiki for the project has been registered with SourceForge.net -- although no content or contact information has been added yet -- so the project may be in the process of moving.

Arch Linux, which was inspired by the CRUX is an i686 optimized lightweight distribution with a great package management tool. Arch releases usually contain a core cd image (~160 MB) that has a core system without any graphical servers and an FTP install image (~30 MB) with which you can install the entire OS from an FTP server. I decided to try arch as it seems to be one of the fastest and highly customizable distribution around(The real reason was since arch seems to be more of a "geek's distro" , I thought I could check my "geek level" with it :) ).

A notification is an email, page or SNMP trap that is generated when a host changes its state or when a service check has exceeded the configured thresholds. Notifications are sent via three modes of communication: e-mail, SNMP trap, and pager. These can be acknowledged via e-mail. Only e-mail and pager notifications require acknowledgement, as SNMP traps do not participate in the escalation process.

I was eating breakfast in my favorite restaurant today and I noticed a sign up on the wall that said: "Free Range Eggs, $4.00 per dozen" Now at first I had the common knee-jerk reaction to the word "Free" that everyone does, thinking of the concept of "gratis". Then I realized that the word "Free" was related to "Range" and not the price of the eggs.

I have two of these posters for auction. They are both original Unix Magic posters, in mint condition, rolled up for 20 years and never touched or hung....Proceeds will go to the DevChix Scholarship Fund, now that DevChix is nonprofit!

A dissertation is composed of two elements: the content and the form. The author is certainly the person best qualified to speak about the content. We, however, will focus on the form. We are going to see how to get a fine composition with low time expenditure using LaTeX.

Innotek VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software. Some of the features of VirtualBox are: Modularity,  virtual machine descriptions in XML, guest additions for Windows and Linux and shared folders. The following workshop describes how to install VirtualBox (OSE) on OpenSuse 10.3 and to install  a WindowsXP guest addition.

Red Hat has launched a testing and certification facility in Beijing, as well as opened another research and development (R&D) center in the Chinese state. These moves come under an initiative to encourage deployment of open source software in the country, which Red Hat has termed Open Source Collaborative Innovation (OSCI).