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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.

Recently Ubuntu/Canonical contacted me for the use of buntu in our domain name. I had emailed them long before any announcement of the site but with no reply until the site began to attract visitors/users. I understand that Ubuntu/Canonical has a job to do when it comes to protecting their best interest. But Ourbuntu is doing nothing more than giving users the ability to setup a Ubuntu/Linux based system and sell it at no cost. Which helps promote the use of opensource software.

The European Commission has approved the EUPL on 9 January 2007. The licence has then been made available in English, French and German. By a second Decision of 9 January 2008, the European Commission has validated the EUPL in all the other official languages, in respect of the principle of linguistic diversity of the European Union. EUPL has been approved as a licence to be used for the distribution of software developed in the framework of the IDA and IDABC programmes. Nevertheles, the licence text is drafted in general terms and could therefore be used for other software applications, as the case may be. At a conference organised by the European Commission in Brussels last Friday, lawyers and license experts who helped sorting out terminology and linguistics differences for all of the translations began discussing which changes and extensions would be useful in an eventual next version.

[ Note: This news hits the LXer frontpage for the third time, except this is the original press release - hkwint ]

Linux feature phone will accelerate 3G mass market penetration - Eindhoven, The Netherlands, January 31st, 2008, NXP Semiconductors, the independent semiconductor company founded by Philips, and Purple Labs, a leading supplier of embedded Linux solutions for mobile phones, jointly announced today the release of a 3G Linux reference feature phone offering video telephony, music playback, high-speed Internet browsing and video streaming at a transfer price below US$100. The new Purple Magic phone serves as a reference design for phone manufacturers creating entry-level 3G handsets, including those targeting mobile markets such as Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

During the recent Greener Gadgets Conference in New York, former OLPC CTO (and XO challenger) Mary Lou Jepsen discussed the real-world difficulties with using the kid-friendly laptops, including the creation of an XO "hospital" used to repair broken computers. Apparently, in the crowded conditions of schools in places like Nigeria, the little green laptops have a tendency to be jostled around and even knocked on the floor from time to time. As there's typically no repair shops nearby, the kids have learned to fix the systems themselves, setting up a "laptop hospital" where they can repair what's broken using simple tools and cheap replacement parts.

Kurt Pfeifle and Simon Peter are the authors of Klik, a distro-neutral complement to the existing package managers where 1 app = 1 file which includes all dependencies in that file (!) and where you can install and run software with one 'Klik' from your browser using their online package-repository . Deleting an app is as simple as deleting its file, and (IIRC) root privileges are not needed to install new apps. At the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) 2008 - to be held in Bruxelles, BE the 23/24th of February, they will talk about the advantages of Klik, and the architecture of the upcoming Klik2. In this interview they talk Linux package management, Klik's future and their presence at FOSDEM.

[ Klik "version 1" already worked very well, it enabled me to use a CLI-program for which Gentoo didn't have a package and which I couldn't compile manually before some reason. It's by far the single best thing for Linux package management I saw since I use open source software, especially since it solves the dependency problem for one and all and my mother and grandmother could use it - hkwint ]

Summary taken from KDE.news:

As a longtime KDE user forced to use Windows, is the recent announcement and availability of a port of KDE for Windows a dream come true? "KDE 4.0.0 was released and there again was much joy. More importantly an actual honest to goodness Windows port is released." Blogger MrCopilot gives us a hands on review with 50+ screenshots of KDE in action on that other operating system and tries to answer that question. KDE on Windows is not yet ready for the masses but hopes to be declared stable for KDE 4.1.

[ Take a look at this article. It won't happen often you see such nice Windows screenshots being referred to from LXer! - hkwint ]

FlyBack is a tool similar to Apple's TimeMachine. It is intended to create snapshot-backups of selected directories or even your full hard drive. From the FlyBack project page: "FlyBack is a snapshot-based backup tool based on rsync. It creates successive backup directories mirroring the files you wish to backup, but hard-links unchanged files to the previous backup. This prevents wasting disk space while providing you with full access to all your files without any sort of recovery program. If your machine crashes, just move your external drive to your new machine and copy the latest backup using whatever file browser you normally use." This article shows how to install and use FlyBack on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon).