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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.

Europe’s agreement on patents predates the Turobolinux announcement Having watched how Microsoft included patents in its deal with then EU (more on this in the next post), it is worth pointing out that the US won’t extend antitrust sanctions, despite rising opposition and the recent decision in Europe.

Hasannudin Saidin, director of the government programmes from IBM Malaysia has written a very good article about open standards, and why they are important. I pointed to and thanked him for his article - and asked him for a job.

GeoGebra, a GPL-licensed teaching and learning tool that integrates geometry, algebra, and calculus, benefits both teachers and students alike. Developed by Markus Hohenwarter at Florida Atlantic University, GeoGebra constructs geometrical figures and demonstrates the relationship between geometry and algebra. GeoGebra can help you create interactive demonstrations and precise images of geometric figures for inclusion in teaching and testing materials.

Adoption of OSI-approved GPL v3 License Strengthens Open Source Community Participation In Leading Open Source Document Management Project

A recent bug report for Ubuntu Linux has confirmed that both the Feisty and Gutsy versions of Ubuntu cause some unnecessary wear and tear on a hard drive. The bug report reads: “I run feisty (beta) on a Dell Inspiron 9400 with a Hitachi HTS541616J9SA00 hard drive. After booting, the drive's power management settings are such that it spins down A LOT. At this rate the drive will be dead after 2.5 years, and I don't even use this computer for more than a couple of hours each day.” Definitely an interesting sounding find. But what exactly does it mean? That's what I thought when I read it, so I did a little research. Feel free to comment and correct me if I've gotten anything wrong.

We've been covering the development of GIMP 2.4.0 for a number of months, and GIMP 2.4.0 is finally available! GIMP 2.4.0 is so new that their website hasn't been updated yet, but if you check out the GIMP FTP it is available for download as of October 23. We have some screenshots from an earlier GIMP 2.4 testing build.

Open-source tools are finding their way into the stack, but few support mission-critical functions. Database administrators increasingly find open-source technologies in Oracle data centers.

-Levanta today announced that it has closed an $8 million funding round to help further accelerate its move into Linux data center automation. “Due to escalating management costs, enterprises are not able to truly reap the cost benefits of Linux on commodity hardware,” said Ed Ekstrom, ex-founder of LANDesk and current managing director at vSpring Capital. “Levanta, with its deep domain expertise and focus on Linux, is uniquely positioned to address this problem. We are pleased to see that Levanta’s products continue to deliver significant ROI to its customers.”

Nokia's recent announcement of the upcoming N810 Internet Tablet is very exciting news for mobile Linux enthusiasts. We have already covered the initial announcement, but this followup discusses some additional details about the N810 operating system and development platform that have been revealed by Nokia's Maemo team.

Red Hat today announced that three leading Italian organizations, including CSI-Piemonte, one of the top fifteen software and services companies in Italy, Iride Energia, a leading thermal and electric energy provider in Italy and the City of Marsala have found success with Red Hat solutions. Each has experienced heightened performance, cost-savings and increased reliability with solutions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Support.

Andrew Morton, sometimes referred to as the colonel of the kernel, is Linus Torvalds' right hand man when it comes to getting out new kernel releases. Morton screens patches that are candidates for being merged into the kernel. He distributes them to kernel maintainers, watches discussions and feedback from key kernel developers and in general applies a layer of organization to a sometimes chaotic process. In this interview with InformationWeek editor at large, Charles Babcock, he talks about recent kernel development including an assessment of recent patches and tools.

Linux users from around the world are filling out the Linux Foundation's desktop survey. But what John Cherry, the foundation's director of global Linux workgroups, wants to know is, "Where are the responses from the North America?" About midway through the survey, there have been what Cherry calls "extraordinary numbers. With over 10,000 respondents in so far, the survey has been taken by 6,206 English speakers; 3,684 Russian speakers; 1,198 French speakers; but only 118 Spanish and 51 Japanese speakers. The curious thing about the English language users is that 63 percent of the English responses have come from Europe, with only 22.9 percent from North America."

The company I work for is HUGE and has more business segments than I will ever know. Being a company this big means there is, more often than not, has its fare share of of bureaucracy and red tape. Sometimes the easiest things in life become major accomplishments. So, I figured I was in for a headache trying to use Ubuntu - especially when the official company Linux distribution is Redhat. So it was a big (and welcome) surprise to find not one but two groups within the company putting together distributions of the IBM desktop products for Ubuntu.

[The company in question is of course IBM - Sander]

ToorCon 9, a hacker's convention, kicked off with registration and a reception Friday evening in the San Diego Convention Center. Keynotes and the talks were held Saturday and Sunday. This was my first time at ToorCon, and I learned why it is so highly regarded among the hacker community. It's good. There were probably a few feds in the crowd, but for the most part attendees were hackers or hacker wannabes. ToorCon occupied only a small fraction of the enormous convention center; the whole thing was conducted in three meeting rooms on the upper level.

Tackling a Linux problem takes skill, but also a lot of flexibility. A. Lizard takes the lessons shown earlier in this three-part series and demonstrates how to solve a real-life problem with his methodology.

Today it's now time where the fglrx driver reaches yet another milestone. Not only does today's release address many of the outstanding bugs for the earlier GPU generations while also introducing a few new features, but it also delivers AIGLX support! Yes, you read that right. You can finally run your ATI graphics card with the fglrx driver and run Compiz, Beryl, or Compiz Fusion without using XGL! This is coming 13 months after NVIDIA had introduced its AIGLX support, but now just days after the release of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon it's here for ATI hardware. Granted, if you were using an older ATI GPU with the open-source Radeon driver, you could have been benefiting from AIGLX already.