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You’ll all have seen and read by now about NetApp suing Sun for patent infringement. I’m not going to re-hash the arguments, but there are a couple of points of interest related to Sun’s patent strategy and open source. What occurs to me is that NetApp has gone out of its way to maintain that its patent claim is not an open source issue but an issue between two vendors about a technology that just happens to be open source. But ZFS is not an open source project.

So you have one of those sophisticated office printer models with adjustable guides that allow you to use any weird media size (with some sensible min/max value for width and height)? And you don't know how to tell CUPS to use that size when printing? (Ah... you don't have such a printer, and you are about to skip this article? Wait. The content may still be useful to you. See the last paragraph.)

A computer mouse is no longer a simple object as nowadays it may come in a variety of shapes and sizes, colors and tones, bigger and smaller and sporting exotic or more common features. Among the shapes that a computer mouse can take these days is the shape of a little happy penguin, looking especially for those Linux lovers out there. But, while this mouse is certainly cute and does not look half bad, I have to speak up my mind and say that it may be less than ergonomic or practical for that matter to the above average computer user.

IDF might have a tad more attention when it kicks off the week after next in San Francisco but Itanium loyalists will also get their moment in the sun soon when the Gelato ICE conference kicks off on 1 October in Singapore. This is a pretty specific show aimed at ISVs, SIs, developers and others that are working on big scale-up Linux-on-Itanium projects but two interesting things are likely to come out of the confab: a catch-up on the Itanium roadmap and developments in LinuxOnLinux, a project to support virtualisation on the chip.

[Huh? Is the "Itanic" still around? – Sander]

In a move which may raise eyebrows amongst the Linux developer community, Pieter Knook the CEO of the smartphone vendor, HTC has said that mobile Linux will face difficulties unless it gets support from a major long term partner - and named the company's own long term partnership with Microsoft as an example to follow.

[Here's some FUD to round off the week – Sander]

Wondering around my Linux filesystem I found a weird directory in /home… Ok, I thought, I didn’t create that. If it’s a virus, it’s the most stupid virus in existence, but, we never know. Anyway, The Oracle would know the answer… Searching for mrtstub, the first hit is directly from the enemy’s site. Not too far I found the origin: "mrtstub is part of the Malicious Software Removal Tool. It is responsible for copying mrt.exe to the correct location and launching it".

I’m working on setting up a new server to host windley.com (including this blog) and my other websites. Since the server will be running far from my watchful eye and largely unattended, I didn’t want to rely on a backup system that required changeable media. So, I decided to buy two 80Gb drives and configure them in RAID-1. Now, I haven’t configured a RAID system for a while (five years?) and I was surprised at how easy Linux makes it.

GCompris is a fantastic educational program aimed at children. I installed it for a family some time ago, and found myself getting caught up in it as I showed them how it worked. I caught up with the lead developer, Bruno Coudoin, to ask him a few questions about the widely-used GCompris project.

Trolltech recently released many smartphone developers' dream combination-the Linux-based Greenphone and its open-source Qtopia Phone SDK. The Trolltech Greenphone is a full-featured tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900MHz) mobile phone with a built-in 1.3 megapixel camera. Like many other modern smartphones, it features a QVGA touchscreen, Bluetooth, client USB, mini-SD Flash and stereo audio connectors.

Mindbridge didn't start out as an open source company -- far from it. "We had a predominantly Microsoft-oriented shop," says David Christian, Mindbridge CTO. But the company, which at the time offered an "intranet in a box" application, began hosting the software for its clients. "That required us to get a good handle on Linux, because Linux was the only inexpensive, cost-efficient way of handling that in a scaled environment," Christian says. "And I didn't want to add Microsoft to our customers' overhead." The more Christian worked with Linux, the more he liked it. And, as they say, the rest is history.

Students of Zürich's two big universities can finally obtain discount laptops without paying the "Windows Tax", thanks to the efforts of a student organization.

In light of the recent events relating to the standardization process of EOOXML, it seems appropriate to look into possible standardization of the process itself.

"Some people seem to be using'Acked-by' to mean,'seems good to me', without necessarily doing a full review of the patch, and instead of trying to change the meaning of'Acked-by', [the plan is] to have a new sign off which is a bit more explicitly about what it means," Theodore Tso explained in a recent thread on the Linux Kernel mailing list. He continued:"This was proposed by Andrew and discussed at the Kernel Summit; the basic idea is that it is a formal indication that the person has done a *full* review of the patch (a few random comments from the local whitespace police don't count), and is willing to vouch that the patch is correct, safe, extremely unlikely to cause regressions.

Microsoft's ISO standardization ambitions for its Office Open XML file format have hit a rough patch, as OOXML recently failed to garner enough votes for fast-track ratification. ODF (OpenDocument Format) advocates are pleased, but they're fooling themselves if they think that the lack of ISO standardization for OOXML is going to put any kind of a dent in the dominance that Microsoft holds over the office productivity market.

If you are having problems to upgrade your Ubuntu to Gutsy Gibbon because of this error: "current dist not found in meta-release" Read this "How-to" to solve it, maybe will not work for everybody.

This document describes how to install the Dovecot mail server from source as an imap / pop3 mail server for your domain and how to set up the sieve plugin so your clients can use the sieve mail filtering language for their mail accounts.

This week has been extremely exciting to say the least. We started by telling you about the AMD 8.41 Display Driver which is largely rewritten and offers Radeon HD 2000 product support, performance improvements, and soon will support AIGLX. Four articles looking at the R300/400, R500, and R600 performance under Linux followed that preview. Then yesterday we told you about AMD's new open-source strategy for supporting Linux and the open-source community. Well, what do we have for you today? With the 8.41 display driver we have completed some additional benchmarks using the Radeon HD 2400PRO 256MB and Radeon HD 2600PRO 256MB graphics cards. In this article, we see if these two mid-range ATI Radeon HD 2000 graphics cards are able to compete against NVIDIA's GeForce 8 series.

Discover the proof-of-technology visual demonstration of the graphics power of the Cell Broadband Engine for realistic real-time animation. Interactive Ray Tracer for Cell Broadband Engine runs on both the Playstation 3 or QS20 platforms, and a single Linux binary is supplied that renders the provided scene.

Some Bible study programs are gratis, but not libre. Others cost $30, right on up to hundreds of dollars - and that's just for the base modules. Worse, most of these programs can only run on one or two operating systems. Follow along as Blue GNU explores a few Free/libre Bible software projects that let anyone have access to hundreds of Bible resources, regardless of what operating system they use, or what language they speak.

Recent conversations with knowledgeable colleagues has recently reached a point where it is difficult to have a rational conversation about any aspect of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software without having to invoke an entire other discipline to speak about it. As well, the lines of demarcation between EMR software engineering, law, licensing, economics, politics and public policy has now become so intertwined that it is becoming nearly impossible to tell where one ends and another begins. A nexus may have formed in which these are inextricably linked.