Showing all newswire headlines

This has nothing to do with Linux or Open Source, but it does show the hazards of upsetting your network admins. Is it reality or is it humor, sadly I can see it happening, and its downright funny.

Catching my eye from this week's Distrowatch Weekly: MACH BOOT - a live CD that boots in 10 seconds. TEN seconds? I'm lucky to get anything to boot in less than three minutes. And I've never heard of Mach Boot. But I am intrigued. When an obscure distro gets mentioned in Distrowatch, it's a recipe for an overloaded server, but I will try to download, burn and boot Mach Boot to see how quickly it, in fact does boot. And whether it works at all.

Many other countries are turning to Linux and open-source for their school-house computer needs, and now there's a conference for those who want to bring it to schools in the U.S.

Offered only €30 from Acer for a refund on Microsoft products bundled with his notebook, a man took the company to court. According to this web site, not only did Antoine Gutzwiller get a full refund on a list of the software bundled his machine, but got €500 extra for what the court dubbed Abusive Resistance. Initially, Acer had offered only €30 if the man returned elements of the install at his own expense.

Are you planning on juicing anytime soon? How about JeOSing? Confused yet? Here’s a hint: Both those sentences sound exactly the same when you say them aloud. What’s different about them is a case of apples and oranges however, and I’m not talking about Tropicana. I’m not even talking about pro sports figures and questionable performance enhancing tactics that may or or may not lead to asterisks being placed next to stats and failed Hall of Fame bids.

There are a vast number of fantastic open source projects out there, though for every one that is widely adopted, there are many that remain cloaked in relative obscurity. How can the open source development model best be leveraged to take advantage of community feedback, ideas, and testing, and ultimately gather code contributions? If you are just thinking about open sourcing a new project, what steps can you take to ensure a vibrant community? If you already have an open source project, how can you make your community more active? The community can make any project stronger, but they are not built automatically.

Linux is hot again. In fact, there's never been a better time for Microsoft Windows users to give Linux a whirl.

The OS is more usable than ever, easier to install, and more compatible with PC hardware. It still helps to be somewhat tech-savvy to get the most out of Linux, but that's no longer a major requirement.

[Pretty nice unbiased review. - Abe]

This small city on Florida's Gulf Coast runs one of the most cost-effective municipal IT departments around. I last wrote about Largo's Linux-based client-server network in 2002. A lot has changed for Largo's computer-using city employees since then, and even more changes are in the works.

For all but three of the past17 years, Microsoft has been involved in antitrust litigation with government agencies. That's enough to wear anyone down. But as the Judge at Europe's Court of Appeals delivered his judgement on Monday, I did notice some ennui - not from dogged old hacks, but from a new generation of pundits.

Boy, this sure looks nice, eh? Simple, GUI goodness that you might think will work just fine. And for most of you, it might, so long as you can meet these requirements.

There are unlikely to be any new applications developed solely for Unix after 2009, George Weiss, a Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst, told attendees at Gartner's annual Open Source Summit here Sept. 20. "I expect that, around 2009, we will have seen the last application developed specifically for Unix, after which no applications will be developed just for that operating system, though updates to existing applications will continue for some time to come," Weiss said in an address titled "Planning a Third-Generation Linux Enterprise."

The Open Source Technology Center (OSTC) at Intel has launched a Web site, LessWatts.org, to help Linux users maximize power savings. The site hosts several open source projects, and shares tips and tricks to help optimize power consumption on hardware from portable devices running on batteries to large data centers.

"What is going on whenever someone changes a code is that they make a'derivative work'," began Theodore Ts'o."whether or not you can even make a derivative work, and under what terms the derivative work can be licensed, is strictly up to the license of the original. For example, the BSD license says:'redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met....' Note the'with or without modification'. This is what allows people to change BSD licensed code and redistribute said changes." He added,"it is not a relicencing, per se, since the original version of the file is still available under the original copyright; it is only the derived work which is under the more restrictive copyright."

Things have been going pretty well for open source and open standards recently. First, there was theimplosion of the SCO case, in the wake of which even SCOaccepts that it may not be around much longer. Then we had therejection of Microsoft's request for a fast-track approval of its OOXML rival to ODF. Finally, the European Court of First Instance hasrefused Microsoft's request for an annulment of the terms imposed by the European Commission. All are notable victories that many regarded as unlikely a few years ago. But elsewhere, other open movements are still in the early stages of the struggle against forces pushing closed, proprietary standards.

Open source is truly the best way to unlock the value of information technology, Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative, said at the annual Gartner Open Source Summit here Sept. 20. "Open source can give you a common operating platform for real, and if you use Linux as a leveler, the individual ships will all right themselves rather than colliding into one another," he said, pointing to the fact that even Microsoft submitted two of its licenses to the OSI for approval, although as a company it remains ambivalent toward open source.

Lobby4Linux has recently acquired the means to label and display the disks in an attractive way. Distro authors and communities are encouraged to send us any "official" cd labels they wish used. We have 4 distributions that have actively requested that their distribution be included in the list of those made available,

"We have just launched a fund drive to cover our expenses for one year - until September 2008. “Keep Us Going” is the motto - for we have been going on for one year by ourselves and we now need external help."

Lyons also used his FSJ blog to slam Linux. What most people don't realize is that as a Senior Editor for Forbes Magazine, he was able to parlay his business associations and friendships to launch semi-regular attacks against his favorite target. That target is Linux.

o3 magazine, the enterprise Open Source magazine, today announced a beta of its news portal, o3news. The portal is designed to track all Open Source enterprise-related news. The service guarantees 24/7 coverage across timezones thanks to a globally distributed staff. o3news.com monitors over 25 news sources to keep you updated with enterprise news as it happens. You can read the news online at o3news.com or subscribe to its RSS feed (http://o3news.com/o3news.rss).

I used to switch between KDE's Kontact and GNOME's Evolution. But it's been a long time since I've looked back at the latter. I finally settled on Kontact to keep me in touch with the reality of my hectic daily schedule. See how you can keep up...