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Portable applications can come in handy when you are on the move, but there are situations when using them is not an option. For instance, before you connect an external hard disk or a USB stick to a public computer, you have to ask permission. More importantly, even if you get permission, you can never be sure what kind of nasty viruses and malware you will be getting on your storage device. But why bother with portable applications at all when you can have your very own Web-based operating system bundled with a few essential applications? That's the promise of eyeOS -- an impressive and surprisingly useful open source Web-based OS.

Red Hat is growing and executing well. Financial analysts expect Red Hat to hit $517M this year (fiscal 2008, ending Feb. 2008), and $631M in fiscal 2009. At this pace, Red Hat should cross the $1 billion revenue mark in fiscal 2011. Red Hat may well be the gorilla in the Open Source marketplace. But after everything is said and done, that marketplace is tiny in comparison to the total software market. Just imagine a Microsoft that could offer customers a choice of Windows/.NET, Linux/JEE or, and here's the magic, BOTH. The fact is most customers have heterogeneous environments, and those that don't today, will likely in the future.

[It's hard not to laugh out loud when reading stuff like this – Sander]

This week on Open News Microsoft's Patent Covenant Woes, Mozilla Protects Itself From IE, and No Steam For You.

Xen and lguest technologies have both been merged directly into the Linux kernel, opening up more virtualization avenues.

Thomas Gleixner described an effort to create a unified x86 architecture tree, "the core idea behind our project is simple to describe: we introduce a new arch/x86/ and include/asm-x86/ file hierarchy that includes all the existing 32-bit and 64-bit x86 code and allows the building of either a 32-bit (i386) kernel or a 64-bit (x86_64) kernel." Andi Kleen expressed some concern, "I think it's a bad idea because it means we can never get rid of any old junk. IMNSHO arch/x86_64 is significantly cleaner and simpler in many ways than arch/i386 and I would like to preserve that. Also in general arch/x86_64 is much easier to hack than arch/i386 because it's easier to regression test and in general has to care about much less junk. And I don't know of any way to ever fix that for i386 besides splitting the old stuff off completely."

Skolelinux version 3.0 (codenamed Terra) is now available for free download, the project's Oslo, Norway-based team announced on July 22. The distribution supports educational institutions in over 50 countries and has become part of the Debian project, where it is known as "Debian Edu."

In this article, I provide a survey of a number of popular Linux data visualization tools and include some insight into their other capabilities. Finally, I identify the strengths of each tool to help you decide which is best for your application. The open source tools that I explore in this article are gnuplot, GNU Octave, Scilab, MayaVi, Maxima, and OpenDX.

The new PC-BSD 1.4 beta, released last week, offers 3-D desktop support via Beryl as well as late-model components such as KDE 3.5.7, FreeBSD 6.2, Xorg 7.2, a selection of fresh GUI tools and utilities, and a variety of optional components, as detailed in the full release notes. PC-BSD is a desktop-oriented distribution based on FreeBSD, similar to DesktopBSD, but outside the official FreeBSD project. It strives for user-friendliness primarily via a graphical installation program and a KDE graphical interface.

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, announced on July 22 at the Ubuntu Live conference in Portland, Ore., the availability of Landscape, its Web-based systems management program for Ubuntu servers and desktops. Landscape will be available to Canonical's support subscribers. Landscape provides a key tool for the growing number of businesses that want to take advantage of the ease of use of Ubuntu and have previously seen system administration or support as a hurdle. This is Canonical's first native Ubuntu system deployment and management tool.

LXer Feature: 24-Jul-2007

An interview with Dave Wreski CEO of Guardian Digital, makers of EnGarde Secure Linux. I ask him how EnGarde came about, what makes EnGarde different and the effect if any, of the GPLv3 on the software in EnGarde. He answers all these questions and more, in The LXer Interview of Dave Wreski.

Lars Ellenberg started an effort to getDRBD, the Distributed Replicated Block Service merged into the Linux kernel. When asked for clarification as to what it was, Lars explained,"think of it as RAID1 over TCP. Typically you have one Node in Primary, the other as Secondary, replication target only. But you can also have both Active, for use with a cluster file system." Earlier in the thread he described it as"a stacked block device driver".

A number of KDE related news stories are floating about the interweb today, so here's a quick round-up. Aaron Seigo writes his KDE e.V. Presidential Address on his blog. Over at Ars Technica, I have an article talking about the future of KHTML and Webkit. Daniel Molkentin has published a new book on coding for Qt 4.x and lastly, I've stumbled across a short visual tutorial for those Mac OS X users among us that are looking to help test the KDE/Mac snapshots.

Find out about the Eclipse Platform, including its origin and architecture. Starting with a brief discussion about the open source nature of Eclipse and its support for multiple programming languages, we demonstrate the Java development environment with a simple programming example. We also survey some of the software development tools available as plug-in extensions. This follow-up to David Gallardo's "Getting started with the Eclipse Platform" offers new information relevant for Eclipse V3.3.

Following the progress of founder and chief maintainer Barry Kauler's Puppy Linux is like watching a litter of scampering frisky pups. A fast gestating two months after the prior release, newborn Puppy Linux Version 2.17 -- aka "Dancer" -- was pushed out late last week. Version 2.17 of Puppy Linux -- so named to reflect its small, cuddly, yet very complete persona -- popped out at a mere 82.6MB, says the distro's website.

The FESCo election is over, and the members for the 2007/2008 FESCo are (in alphabetical order): Christopher Aillon, Josh Boyer, Tom Callaway, Kevin Fenzi, Dennis Gilmore, Christian Iseli, Jeremy Katz, Jesse Keating, Bill Nottingham, Brian Pepple, Jason Tibbitts, Warren Togami and David Woodhouse.

Hewlett-Packard announced on July 23 that it would be buying Neoware, a provider of Linux, Windows CE and Windows XPe OS thin client computing and virtualization solutions. HP will be paying $16.25 per share, or an enterprise value (net of existing cash) of approximately $214 million on a fully diluted basis for the company. In a statement, HP declared that this acquisition as part of HP's strategy to expand in growth markets and further its leadership in personal computing.

Akaza Research has been awarded a Phase II SBIR grant from the National Institutes of Health for the OpenClinica open Source clinical trials platform. Read on for the full announcement.

Microsoft's patent agreement with the Linux distributor shuts out GPLv3 and makes Linspire unsuitable for business, claims legal expert.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 97 for the week of July 15th through July 21st 2007. In this issue: fedorapeople.org is now available, Smolt, Open Invitation, Ohio Linux Fest Keynote Address, GNOME Cookbook, Repoview-0.6.0, Mascots and Fedora, Volunteers needed for GITEX, New in Fedora: Jack Aboutboul, Proposed Fedora 8 Features and much, much more.

Navicore is Nokia's GPS mapping and navigation program for the Linux-powered N800 Internet Tablet. The kit comes with a Bluetooth GPS receiver, car-mounting hardware, and a memory card containing the Navicore Personal software and map collection. If you have an N800, it's a great travel aid. Sadly, there is one strike against Navicore that I see no way around for desktop Linux users. The N800 Navigation Kit ships with a memory card containing one region's maps (say, North America). The Navicore Web site contains additional maps for other regions of the world -- but you cannot access or install any of that data without running Windows.