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After a number of years in development Linux Test Drive is becoming a reality, from the page:

The Free and Open Source Developers conference, one of Europe's finest free technical conferences, opens its doors Saturday the 23th in Brussels, Belgium. In anticipation of the main track talks, a batch of interviews with FLOSS project leaders have been published at the FOSDEM website. You can read up on Linux in Hollywood, Perl6, klik2 and much more at fosdem.org/2008/interviews. The event features a busy line-up of project development rooms, a Lightning Talk track and a social beer tasting event the night before.

Sangoma produces telephony cards and writes drivers that work with open source applications such as Asterisk, Yate, FreeSwitch, and CallWeaver. Sangoma CEO and founder David Mandelstam says that before Sangoma started producing cards to work with Asterisk, the open source project was "kind of a toy for hobbyists."

Today’s the first day of the largest-ever JBoss World! To celebrate, we’re giving you a few links to bloggers who are talking about it. What’s below are just clips from what they’ve posted so far. Watch JBoss bloggers and check back here to find out more as the event goes on.

Yesterday I went on about the man page for fvwm, the default X window manager in OpenBSD. It clearly says that, in the absence of a .fvwmrc file in the user's home directory, fvwm will look in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm/ for a file called system.fvwmrc ... There's a file called system.fvwm2rc in that directory, but it doesn't control fvwm. I know this because I added a line to it, stopped X and restarted it. No change.

I hate accounting. The one accounting class I took in college proved that to me. The fact that I could get an A in the class by doing one homework problem and copying all the others during class was only part of the reason. But, it's related. I hate doing the same thing over and over and, to me, that is exactly what accounting is.

Having a great defense involves proper detection and recognition of an attack. In our security world we have great IDS tools to properly recognize when we are being attacked as well as firewalls to prevent such attacks from happening. However, certain attacks are not blindly thrown at you - a good attacker knows that a certain amount of reconnaissance and knowledge about your defenses greatly increases the chances of a successful attack. How would you know if someone is scanning your defenses? Is there any way to properly respond to such scans? You bet there is...

Some of us use Linux, some of us tell others about Linux, and a smaller percentage of people Advocate Linux. Let me introduce you to a true Open Source Advocate. Freedomeware indeed. Let the bell toll, let the news be heard. Now if we can all do about 1/10th of what this guy does, we can say we've truly helped spread the word. Let's take a look at some of the work this Author has done.

South African Linux and open source specialists, Obsidian, will from March be offering official training for the Ubuntu Certified Professional programme. In terms of the deal with Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, Obsidian will start offering the training from March 2008. Obsidian will be provide both Ubuntu Professional Courses 1 and 2 for system administrators wanting to pass the required Linux Professional Institute 101 and 102 and Ubuntu 199 exams to achieve the Ubuntu Certified Professional certification.

AMD has today launched their new open GPU documentation website for register-level documents covering their ATI Radeon products. In addition, they are now providing an email address for any open-source developers who may have questions concerning these documents.

With the number of CPU cores in desktop machines moving from two to four and soon eight, the ability to execute computationally expensive tasks in parallel is becoming more important. The mgzip tools that can take advantage of multiple CPU cores during file compression, while pbzip2 uses multiple cores for both compression and decompression.

This article reports that Sun Microsystem has acquired Innotek the makers of Virtualbox. Sun asserts that Virtualbox will remain open source and will compliment Sun's xVM Server products which addresses both desktop and server virtualization. It was only a few weeks back that Sun had acquired MySQL for a cool billion dollars.

When users say the documentation is excellent in the BSD operating systems, they're not lying. Besides the excellent handbook/FAQs available for download or online browsing for NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, the man pages are way more valuable than I ever though. In OpenBSD, they're up to date -- and they have plenty of plain language throughout.

The Slackware team has released some kernel patches to fix the local root exploit you have probably read about recently. It seems that the updated kernel was available yesterday, but a lot of people, including us, did not receive the security advisory email due to some recent work on the mail server.

Presens Technologies is the newest "Advanced Business Partner" to Red Hat, and will provide software, hardware and application services using Red Hat's open-source platforms to clients, according to an announcement. he Winston-Salem-based Presens serves more than 1,500 clients and will continue to support other software platforms besides Red Hat, the company said.

The Ministry of Justice has added an extra policy covering total cost of ownership to its Open Source Adoption Paper, a paper described by New Zealand Open Source society President Don Christie as “groundbreaking”. The new policy says the ministry should make systems adoption and replacement decisions based on full lifecycle costs. The paper suggests TCOtool (www.tcotool.org), an open-source toolset, as a useful way to compare real costs.

Retired Air Force pilot John Wojnaroski can’t seem to get away from flying and he’s been constructing the “ultimate” flight simulator with authentic screens, switches and even throttle controls. Using scavenged passenger jet parts and the “FlightGear” open source simulator platform, Wojnaroski’s simulator can emulate most jumbo jets and can even perform instrument approaches along with around the world flights.

Taiwan's BenQ is showing off a new user interface on an ultramobile PC that it plans to start marketing in the second quarter of this year, a spokeswoman for the company said Tuesday. The device is being displayed at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as part of BenQ's new mobile offerings. It was first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year. BenQ's MID sports a Linux operating system, but the company tweaked the user interface to work more closely with its functions.

In today's IT environment, new applications and platforms are transitioning to Linux, and there is an underlying concern that this means new people have to go with the platform. According to David Christian, CTO of Mindbridge Software, when a client's operating system platform is to change from Windows to Linux, one of the main issues that concern them is whether their staffs have the ability to support Linux. However, surprisingly, he finds that many are already familiar with Linux.

Bruce Perens' 10 year look back at the "Open Source" marketing campaign reminded me of another anniversary coming up. On September 27th, it'll be the 25-year anniversary of the GNU project's announcement, and thus, of the free software movement. That's a biggie. What to do?