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The SCO Group, which earlier this month filed for bankrupcy protection, says it has received an offer for its Unix business. A group of New York investors, backed by York Capital Management, are willing to pay $36m. This includes a $10m credit for lawyers' bills.

Virtual Bridges, a provider of desktop and enterprise virtualization solutions for business, announced today the release of a major upgrade to its Virtual Desktop Server product. Virtual Desktop Server, Virtual Bridges’ Educational/SMB and enterprise product, allows an organization to deploy multiple Windows desktop sessions to PCs, Workstations and thin clients from a non-Windows server such as Linux and Solaris.

What’s the lowest price you can find for a desktop PC? Next time you run out of baked beans, beer or …. big bunches of bananas (Alliteration too!) and nip to that shopping behemoth known as Tesco, you’ll be pleased to hear you can fill your basket with a PC for £139 as well! However this isn’t just a PC like any other … it’s running Ubuntu (V6.06).

Seems that ATI/AMD has made some serious progress on their drivers since the announcement of their new-found Linux enthusiasm. With driver version 8.42.3, you can find these awesome new additions..

Novell today appointed Tim Wolfe as president, Novell Americas, responsible for the execution of Novell's strategy across the Americas. Wolfe, who brings nearly three decades of software, technology and consulting leadership experience to the role, most recently held the position of vice president and general manager of Novell's East region in the United States. He will play a key role in Novell's transition to a greater focus on customers and partners in implementing the company's go-to-market strategy.

Today’s big news: Alice will bring Fiber to the building (see Wikipedia’s “Fiber to the premises” entry) to Hamburg, as does Netcologne in, well, Cologne, and M-Net in Munich. Now if they would only understand that it’s not all about triple play (read: TV over Ethernet) for end-customers, but a really distributed and symmetric internet. That would be innovation indeed then. Give us Gigabit to the homes, and we will give back Gigabytes of useful information for the rest of the world.

Interop The virtualization hypervisor belongs in server hardware - not in the operating system. So says Xensource, friend and partner of the operating system giants Microsoft, Red Hat and Novell. "Hypervisor will be delivered in hardware. In my view, it's a separate layer [from the operating system] because it's part of the box," Crosby told several hundred people gathered for his Interop keynote at the Jacob Javits Center in New York. "Platform virtualization is here to stay."

About a month ago, Network Appliance sued Sun to try to stop the competitive impact of ZFS on their business. Their objectives were clear - number one, they'd like us to unfree ZFS, to retract it from the free software community. Second, they want us to limit ZFS's allowable field of use to computers - and to forbid its use in storage devices. So later this week, we're going to use our defensive patent portfolio to respond to Network Appliance, filing a comprehensive reciprocal suit. As a part of this suit, we are requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of their filer products from the marketplace, and are examining the original NFS license - on which Network Appliance was started. By opting to litigate vs. innovate, they are disrupting their customers and employees across the world.

This article describes a compact little JSP tag library that uses some external JavaScript to bring easy-to-use Ajax support to your JSP pages, and how AjaxTags makes an excellent choice for quick, easy, and sophisticated Ajax applications.

Sabayon Linux is an up and coming Linux OS. The artwork of this Gentoo based Linux distribution is wonderful. Packed with software I think this distribution is one that everyone would enjoy.

R2integrated (R2i) is a Microsoft shop that has discovered how well open source software and communities can build a solid business. Principal Chris Chodnicki says it was a customer request that turned the technology consultancy toward DotNetNuke (DNN), an open source Web application framework. R2i began using and contributing to DNN about a year ago after Snyder's of Hanover asked the company to consider using DNN to build Snyder's corporate intranet. Since then, "We went from this little five-man company to 50 employees, all due to the alignment with this open source product."

"This may count as one of the biggest -rc releases ever. It's humongous. Usually the compressed -rc1 diffs are in the 3-5MB range, with occasional smaller ones, and the occasional ones that top 6M, but this one is *eleven* megs," Linus Torvalds announced the first release candidate of the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel. He summarized some of the changes, "in short, we just had an unusually large amount of not just x86 merges, but also tons of new drivers (wireless networking stands out, but is by no means the only thing - we've got dvb, regular wired network, mmc etc all joining in), and a fair amount or architecture stuff, filesystems, networking etc too."

Contributed by Alexander Todorov Splitting big files into pieces is a common task. Another common task is to create a tar archive, and split it into smaller chunks that can be burned onto CD/DVD. The straightforward approach is to create the archive and then use ’split.’ To do this, you will need more free space on your disk. In fact, you’ll need space twice the size of the created archive. To avoid this limitation, split the archive as it is being created.

The South African government yesterday announced the adoption of OpenDocument Format (ODF) as a standard for government communications.

Within the past couple of weeks two Linux distributions came out with new releases, featuring the K Desktop Environment. On October 9th, Mandriva Linux 2008 released their latest version to the masses. KDE 3.5.7 and Compiz Fusion 0.5.2 are just a couple of the updates with this latest release. Head on over and take a Mandriva Linux 2008 Tour. On October 18th, Kubuntu 7.10 was released, marking its 6th major release. Kubuntu includes the last KDE 3.5.8, making it the first distribution to release the 8th maintenance update to the KDE 3.5 branch. There were many other updates in this latest release as well. Mandriva is the first distribution to include QtJambi, while Kubuntu adds Qyoto C# bindings.

The nominees for the second annual South African E-Commerce Awards have been announced. All are now invited to vote for their favourite sites until November 23.

X/OS Linux is a distribution built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources. Its developers claim it was created "to provide a hassle-free enterprise-class Linux operating system without usage terms tied to commercial services." I downloaded it expecting I might find all the refinement of Red Hat along with some improvements and the community one expects to find growing around free software. It seems I set my expectations too high.

As part of our KDE and Distributions series (1, 2, 3, 4) KDE Dot News spoke to representatives from Alt Linux. Russia recently announced plans to include GNU/Linux in every school in the country, and ALT Linux hopes to be the chosen distribution. Below CEO Alexey Smirnov and Andrey Cherepanov answer our questions about their relationship with KDE.

Knowledgetree, the Cape Town-based open source document management software provider has released KnowledgeTree Open Source Edition 3.5, licensed under the new GNU General Public License version 3.

Are you geek enough for Linux? Though it first earned a reputation as a platform for hobbyists and hackers, Linux has come a long way since Linus Torvalds cobbled together the first kernel as a student project. A modern Linux desktop is a sophisticated, user-friendly GUI environment, with features and applications to rival any proprietary OS. In fact, when compared to the mainstream alternatives, there are lots of compelling reasons to give Linux a try.