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Unlike a typical Linux get-together, at the Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM), half of the attendees are developers and the other half are artists. The conference, which was held earlier this month at the Polytechnique Montréal, featured speakers from as far as Australia and Europe. In three rooms, speakers presented techniques for everything from generating photorealistic vector drawings to producing full movies to magazine production.

The OSHCA Conference 2007 is shaping up to be the best and biggest yet. Presenters and participants are attending from around the globe.

Recent Microsoft partner Novell today distanced itself from the Redmond giant's claim that free and open source software violated more than 200 of the company's patents.

Webcast to tap expertise of GPLv3’s chief legal counsel to evaluate effect of new license on enterprises

Linus Torvalds, lead developer of the Linux kernel, has a sharp retort to Microsoft executives' statements in a Fortune magazine article that Linux and other open-source code violate 235 Microsoft patents.

A Microsoft move to seek patent royalties from open-source distributors and users may be an attempt to use legal threats to deflect attention from company problems. Microsoft Corp.'s aim to seek patent royalties from open-source distributors and users may be an attempt to use legal threats to deflect attention from larger questions surrounding its business, including lack of interest in new versions of core products and lackluster profit from new wares.

XGI Technology is still in business, but what has happened to them? We once saw hope in them for providing discrete graphics processors to take on the NVIDIA and ATI duopoly, but they have since discontinued their Volari 8 series. While they're no longer producing these desktop chips, they remain an active player in the server and embedded graphics industry -- accompanied by their open-source driver

Despite its claim to own 42 patents used in the creation of the Linux kernel and hundreds more embedded in other free software programs, Microsoft does not plan to take a page from The SCO Group and sue users of the open source operating system, a senior company official said Monday. "We're not litigating. If we wanted to we would have done so years ago," said Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's VP for intellectual property and licensing, in an interview.

Open-source supporters are thumbing their noses at Microsoft's claim that it will seek royalties from users and distributors on 235 patents it holds for technologies in Linux and open-source software, saying they are not worried about being the target of litigation for patent infringement.

This article addresses reasons some in the community may have not to support the Tux500 project and explains why supporting it may be worth it.

I did go through the public database that exist over patents. Did a search for all IBM patents. I did find a wopping 98000 patents. Did slowly read a page and think if i could connect Microsoft windows vista and XP to any of them. About two hours later 50 is connected and thats just the start.

LXer Feature: 15-May-2007

A new database ("counterFUD") was released in 2005 at LXer showing patent numbers where parts of Microsoft might infringe upon.

[Note: This is an old LXer story, but I posted it again, since the topic is hot again, and included some new comments - hkwint ]

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today." - Bill Gates, Challenges and Strategy Memo. 16 May 1991, almost forecasting 'patent armageddon'

MOC is a console-based (build on ncurses library) audio player for Linux/BSD. It’s very easy to use, fast and functional so basically it has all the features of a decent player except for a fancy GUI. What is more — it takes a fraction of system resources consumed by most popular GUI players but still plays all popular formats „out-of-the-box”.

It truly is fascinating when you read about an accusation of anybody being a thief and a scam artist. An individual blogger who calls himself Penguin Pete believes that the TUX500 Project is a scam. This rhetoric unfortunately borders not only on the absurd, but crosses the line into libel territory.

How to Increase ext3 and ReiserFS filesystems Performance in Linux

Mike Connor has written a weblog post proposing raising the runtime requirements for Mozilla applications on Linux. Historically, Mozilla on Linux has had fairly conservative requirements, employing runtime checks and workarounds to support older libraries or work around known bugs. While this means that Mozilla applications will run on older Linux distributions, it has led to some compromises and ugly hacks in the Mozilla code, making it harder to maintain.

Nokia has released the first software update for its N800 Internet tablets. Officially dubbed Internet Tablet OS 2007 Edition version 3.2007.10-7, it corresponds to the maemo 3.1 platform. The update fixes several performance and stability problems in the 3.0 release that shipped with the tablet at launch, and offers a few improved features.

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your Debian Etch server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphics that let you recognize current or upcoming problems (like "We need a bigger server soon, our load average is increasing rapidly."), and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services.

Ubuntu 7.04(Feisty Fawn) Screenshot Tour

orway on May 11 became the latest European country to gravitate toward mandatory government use of the Open Document Format (ODF). According to a press release from Minister of Renewal Heidi Grande Roys, Norway joins Belgium, Finland, and France to move another step toward a final decision to require ODF.