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Shopping for a home computer involves more than just choosing hardware — buyers must also pick what kind of operating system they want to run that new machine. And for most people, that's long meant choosing between Microsoft's Windows, which runs on PCs, or OS, the system that operates Apple's Macintosh. Enter Linux, an operating system created by Finnish university student Linus Torvalds as a hobby. Once only a toy for geeks, Linux now is vying for a place in the consumer operating system market.

[Not "news" really, but these kinds of stories are appearing more and more on non-tech sites. – Sander]

Now that Oracle 11g has hit shelves, the question many IT shops ask themselves is which hardware and operating system does Oracle run best on? When it comes to Oracle server platforms, Donald Feinberg, a Gartner Inc. analyst, said it's really a toss-up between Unix and Linux. "In general, Oracle runs well on any Linux-capable hardware," he said.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Colour Picker and Welcome applets appear for Plasma. Many bugs fixed, especially through the merge of the Summer of Code project "KRDC Revamp". A KPart created, amongst other improvements in Marble. Support for XESAM UserLanguage queries in Strigi. More work, especially in playlist handling, for Amarok 2.0. Improved search interface in KSystemLog. A return to work on KRecipes. KVocTrain is renamed Parley. Restart of development on a successor to the Eigen math library, Eigen2. Start of a port of KMLDonkey, a file sharing frontend, to KDE 4. Parts of the Cokoon decorator infrastructure ported from Python to C++. Security fixes in KDM. Work on page effects in KPresenter. Kross bindings for the Falcon programming language. Import of PyKDE4, new Python bindings for KDE development. KDE SVN housekeeping sees the move of a variety of unmaintained applications to more relevant locations with regard to the KDE 4 release.

The IBM XL Alpha Edition UPC compilers are a technology showcase of the Unified Parallel C (UPC) language, Version 1.2, supporting IBM System p systems running AIX and Linux. This updated version of IBM XL UPC Compilers supports UPC 1.2 and contains bug fixes and performance improvements.

IBM joined OpenOffice.org on Sept.10, and the company is bringing its programming muscle with it to improve the popular open-source office suite. While IBM has long used OpenOffice.org code, licensed under the LGPL (Lesser GPL), in its own programs, such as the groupware program Lotus Notes 8, this has been IBM's own fork of the code. Starting now, IBM is directing its OpenOffice development efforts--involving about three dozen programmers--to the public, open-source OpenOffice suite.

A download manager can save you time if you download a lot of large files from the Internet, but it can be annoying to have to grab a link from your browser and pass it to the download manager manually. With the FlashGot extension for Firefox, you no longer have to. FlashGot sits between the two applications and fuses your favorite download manager with your Web browser. FlashGot supports more than 38 graphical and command-line download managers for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. The tools supported on Linux are Aria, cURL, Downloader 4 X, GNOME Gwget, KDE KGet, and wxDownload Fast. If you have any of these installed, FlashGot will automatically detect it and integrate it with Firefox.

One of the decisions which was made on the OSDL Printing Summit in Atlanta last year and widely accepted by all participants was to switch the standard print job transfer format from PostScript to PDF. This format has many important advantages, especially
* PDF is the common platform-independent web format for printable documents
* Portable * Easy post-processing (N-up, booklets, scaling, ...)
* Easy Color management support
* Easy High color depth support (> 8bit/channel)
* Easy Transparency support
* Smaller files * Linux workflow gets closer to Mac OS X

SmoothWall has released the latest version of its open source network firewall - SmoothWall Express 3.0. Code-name Polar, this version claims huge advances on Version 2.

Law suits sparked by patent infringement claims are risky ventures. They hardly ever make either party look good, and they are anything but sure bets as revenue producers - unless you're an attorney. Therefore, when they do happen, those involved usually go out of their way to keep all but the essential facts of the case from public view. Not so with the current sue-me-sue-you spat between Network Appliance and Sun. Here we have Dave Hitz of NetApp and Jonathan Schwartz of Sun arguing their cases blogospherically and in conflicting detail.

The Open Source Initiative's chairman, Michael Tiemann, announced Friday that the organization's licensing board have officially approve the version three of the General Public License and Lesser General Public License as OSI-approved.

I am always looking for other jobs, not because I am unhappy or really ready to get one, but because I always want to see what’s out there. When it comes to meteorology jobs or science jobs in general, any good ones want you to be comfortable with linux. Linux is the way of the future and we need to accept it.

The rumors about VMware putting ESX Server on dietary supplements have been confirmed. The virtualization darling today revealed ESX Server 3i - a super-thin hypervisor that will be built into the memory of servers from companies such as Dell, HP and IBM. We've been writing about the so-called ESX Lite for some time now, particularly in conjunction with Dell. The Round Rock-based server maker plans to ship an appliance-like machine later this year that will include a hypervisor in flash memory.

FOSS is nothing but a bunch of Birkenstock-wearing, aging hippies that are trying to make one last stand before retiring to a Senior Citizen Assisted Living Center. Yeah, we took their application... "Whadda'they gonna do about it...? Pout and hold a demonstration?"

SCO wanted a jury to hear its side of the story in its Novell lawsuit, but U.S. District Court Judge Dale Kimball has ruled that he, and he alone, will hear the case. In his ruling on this, Kimball wrote that SCO had no "just reason for delay of entry of final judgment in light of the strong policy against piecemeal appeals." After all, Kimball continued, "The court finds no compelling reason to separate these remaining claims for an immediate appeal given that the remaining claims in the case will be ready for appeal in two to three months. Regardless of the outcome of the upcoming trial, there will undoubtedly be an appeal at that time."

This morning at the X Developer Summit in the United Kingdom, Matthew Tippett and John Bridgman of AMD have announced that they will be releasing their ATI GPU specifications without any Non-Disclosure Agreements needed by the developers! In other words, their GPU specifications will be given to developers in the open. Therefore you shouldn't need to worry about another R200 incident taking place.

In an interview at Wired, Darl McBride, the CEO and President of SCO Group, remained defiant in the face of SCO's recent crushing setbacks in its lawsuit against Novell over the copyrights to UNIX SVRX. The article briefly reviews the history behind SCO's lawsuits against IBM, Novell and others, however it gets a few things wrong.

I finally had a chance to meet with our new librarian today. After being without an actual librarian for so long, it was incredibly cool to talk with someone who knew something more about academic research than how to Google. When I asked her how she felt about spending big chunks of her budget on commercial library software like Follett’s Destiny, vs. potentially more labor-intensive but free open-source solutions, she said, “I’m not afraid of learning new things. Why don’t you set up a server with one of the open source systems and I’ll give it a shot.” Rock on.

Discovering the perfect formula for profiting from an open source project is not easy. There are countless variables that must be considered, many of which determine early on whether or not a project will be successful with the community using it.

"My experiments show that when there is not much free physical memory, swapoff moves pages out of swap at a rate of approximately 5mb/sec," Daniel Drake noted in a recent discussion about swapoff performance. He added, "I've read into the swap code and I have some understanding that this is an expensive operation (and has to be)." Hugh Dickins acknowledged, "Yes, it can be shamefully slow. But we've done nothing about it for years, simply because very few actually suffer from its worst cases. You're the first I've heard complain about it in a long time: perhaps you'll be joined by a chorus, and we can have fun looking at it again."

Mark this Saturday, September 15th, in your diary. It’s Software Freedom Day and it’s coming to you. That's "free" as in "free lunch" but also "free" as in liberty. Software Freedom Day is described by its organising body as a global, grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of software freedom and the virtues and availability of free and open source software (“FOSS”). Previously, Software Freedom Day garnered 200 teams around the world and is sure to well exceed that figure this time around in 60 different nations.