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A year ago this week Sun finally bowed to pressure and agreed to make Java a free, open source project. It was an odd move given Sun's strong resistance to making Java open source for a more than a decade. Twelve months on, open source Java has made things a little easier for developers and attracted some expressions of support. It's notable, though, that no industry events have been arranged to celebrate the date while Sun's tools and runtimes continue to search for a role among Java developers.

The latest version of Fedora—codenamed Werewolf—was released last week. According to statistics released this morning by Red Hat, Fedora 8 has been already been installed over 54,000 times in only four days.

VMware Server has been VMware's response to rivals who opted to give away their base server virtualization software. VMware used to sell GSX Server - a lower-end package than its flagship ESX Server - until replacing it with Server last year. VMware uses Server to protect its low-end turf and to lure customers toward paying for ESX Server. More than 3m VMware Server downloads have gone out to date with the vast majority of those reaching SMBs, according to VMware.

Here’s a tour of the pre-alpha demo release of GNOME Online Desktop included in Fedora 8. Learn more about what it does and how you can get involved in the project.

Whispers of a potential economic recession ahead continue. That made The VAR Guy wonder: If the U.S. does head into an economic recession soon, are open source companies (like Red Hat, MySQL and SugarCRM) better positioned to weather the storm than their closed source counterparts (like Microsoft and Oracle)? Let’s take a look.

On October 4, 2007 we announced a contest regarding the KDE 4.0 Release Event at Mountain View, California on January 17-19, 2008. Participants were asked to answer the question: "Why should you be at the KDE 4.0 Release Event?" with the winner being flown out to the Release Event itself.

These three short videos -- all less than 8 minutes long -- give you an idea of Fedora 8's "look and feel" during the installation and setup process, and show you what software is installed by default. The third video shows you how to install and -- just as important -- uninstall software in Fedora 8. Fedora is often described as a GNU/Linux distribution "for enthusiasts and developers." It is sponsored by Red Hat, and some people see Fedora as the "beta" version of Red Hat's official releases.

New Ideas Corp. announced the immediate availability of their custom-built C3 workstations and laptops preloaded with Ubuntu on C3PC.com today. New Ideas Corp. began selling their custom built PCs regionally in 1997, as a way to provide high quality hardware to business at a lower cost than other builders and resellers.

In the United States, SCO's Linux/Unix litigation has been stalled out while the company's bankruptcy trial is being dealt with. In Germany, however, several court cases have found SCO Group GmbH, SCO's Germany branch, guilty of lying about Linux containing stolen Unix code.

How to view CHM (Microsoft Compiled HTML Help) files in Ubuntu

Can you be a computer consultant and generally a computer guy without ever installing windows? I managed for over 12 years... until this week.

Xubuntu 7.10 (gutsy gibbon) Screenshots Tour

When a desktop Linux distribution suddenly becomes popular before even DistroWatch starts tracking it, you know you've got something special. One new Ubuntu-based distribution, gOS, has managed to capture users' attention purely by word of mouth over the Internet. gOS was introduced by Everex, a midtier PC vendor, in its inexpensive Green gPC TC2502 computer in late October. This cheap computer is sold for $198 at Wal-Mart stores and online at walmart.com.

Turns out that people are finally getting it. You can buy a “green” low-power-hungry machine built on a VIA C7 chip from Wal-Mart and ZaReason these days, and both stores report that they already sold all of their first stock.

Damn Small Linux is tiny Linux distribution that John Andrews originally created in 2002 to see just how many applications could fit into a 50MB system. The project has grown over the years to include many other contributors working on hundreds of packages and applications. Last month's release of DSL 4.0 brought many updates and changes, yet it remains a special-purpose distribution for older hardware because it lacks support for many modern features. Damn Small Linux offers an amazing array of options for running the distribution. You can boot it as a live CD, from a USB stick, or on a hard drive. You can install it traditionally or run it within a Windows OS. It can run on CPUs as old as a 486DX with 16MB RAM. If you install it on your hard drive, you can upgrade it to a full-blown Debian system.

Late last month the First International ODF Users Workshop was held in Berlin. The event was attended by officials representing 20 governments from around the world. South Africa was represented by Aslam Rafee (left), the chief information officer at the department of science and technology.

This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Ubuntu 7.10 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as standalone server, not as a domain controller. For this setup, I will use the Ubuntu Server installation CD but the same installation procedure will work on an Ubuntu desktop as well.

Over the last week since my short review on gOS and the introduction of the ASUS EEE PC with it's stream line version of Xandros I have been thinking about what value this has for the Linux OS and it's familiarity to the masses.

On October 27th, KDE Italia attended the Italian Linux Day 2007 in Rome at the Tor Vergata University. Other cities had their Linux Day throughout Italy at the same time. For the people that have never attended to these kind of events, it is important to remember that the Italian Linux Day is a day dedicated to spreading Free and Open Source Software and specially the GNU/Linux Operating System and its software components such as KDE. The talks for the day were at different levels of difficulty and you could find widely accessible talks or talks for an expert audience with more technical and specific topics.

The GNOME project has a new tool coming into its own that enables developers to produce GObject libraries using the high-level Vala, as if they had used C. Blue GNU got Jürg Billeter to discuss the up and coming Vala platform.