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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?

LXer Feature: 13-Feb-2008

Here are some pictures I took while attending SCALE 6x this year in Los Angeles.

From his hot, dusty, locust-plagued property in the NSW outback, a software engineer who goes by the name Quozl is doing his bit to help educate 1.5 billion of the world's poorest children. James Cameron has spent the past two years testing prototypes of a low-cost robust laptop called XO designed especially for children in developing countries. He devotes up to five hours a day to his volunteer work for the US charity One Laptop Per Child, which began mass producing the "green machines" in November.

We've covered a lot of ground in the first three parts of this series. Today we stride down that last mile: setting up 802.1Q VLANs, and making configurations permanent...Client configuration is always the same, but switches and routers vary. I'll show you how it's done on the cheap, with a low-end smart switch and an inexpensive, but powerful router built with Voyage Linux on a PC Engines WRAP board.

don’t want to say its the best, but I’ve been using Debian, Ubuntu and other APT based Linuxes for years now. Ubuntu on desktop PC’s and Debian on Servers (only because I have a few servers already on Debian and keeping all identical is worth doing). I don’t run GUI’s on my servers. I pretty much use Debian in favour of other linuxes because it is free, and updates are also free. Why do I personally use Debian on my home servers - the main answer is APT.

The Zonbu PC, a $99 miniature desktop that debuted earlier this year, generated some excitement among those with shallow pockets—at least until they saw the fine print. You have to pay the two-year subscription plan (ranging anywhere from $12.95 to $19.95 per month) up front before you can call the desktop your own. In return, you get around-the-clock technical support, 25GB to 100GB worth of online storage, and the comfort of knowing that you'll never have to update your PC manually again. The plan worked well enough that Zonbu decided to take its subscription-based services on the road, in the form of a laptop. The Everex Zonbu Notebook, which launched earlier this year, loads Gentoo Linux and runs on green, or energy-efficient, parts furnished by VIA.

Two-million primary school children are to be provided with US$ 100-worth laptops under a farsighted initiative. Director OLPC Europe, Middle East and Asia Matt Keller, in an interview with The Sunday Times FT, said the World Bank has stepped into fund a pilot project to introduce laptops as an educational tool in nine provinces in the island. OLPC Lanka Foundation has been set up to implement this massive education project aimed at supplying this learning tool into rural children’s hands.

With XenServer 4.1, Citrix is working to integrate its Xen hypervisor and the tools that wrap around it with the sophisticated snapshotting and replication software that is already part of the popular disk arrays that are in use by businesses today. The XenServer 4.1 update will also include support for 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters, 64-bit Linux guest operating systems, and Ethernet network interface bonding.