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Summit Red Hat, it seems, is all about open source and closed answers.

In keeping with its frantic pace of development and improvement, today the Puppy Linux team has released the beta of Puppy 2.16. The good news, for me anyway, is the "minimalist look" (see above), and the "Save" icon on the desktop for USB users. Also welcome are an improved Pmount drive-mounter -- an alternative to the MUT (Mounting Utility Tool).

This just in from Cape Town: Python fans can look forward to a Saturday afternoon of Python fun at the Bandwidth Barn.

There are many reasons at Fon for dropping Microsoft. The first one and by far the most important is to save time. I have tested Ubuntu and Mac for about a month now and while I like Mac to play I found myself using Ubuntu more and more for work. Ubuntu has the look and feel of Microsoft, but it´s like a Microsoft software that works fast, that turns on and off very quickly, that installs programs very easily, that lacks that atmosphere of paranoia that surrounds Microsoft and that is extremely easy to learn and use. With Ubuntu I forgot about the computer and got to focus on the work at hand.

Linux continues to make inroads into China according to the latest market research. A new report from Beijing-based CCID Consulting pegs Linux operating sales revenues up by nearly 31 percent in the first quarter of 2007 to 31 million Yuan (just over US$4 million), as compared to the same period a year prior. CCID's numbers are close to those of IDC, which, in its "China Linux 2006-2010 Forecast and Analysis" report last year, pegged the compound annual growth rate for 2006 to 2010 of Linux in China to be 34 percent, bringing revenues to $51.1 million.

Gentoo has long been a distribution aimed towards the power Linux user. It allows users to foray into the inner workings of their computers, and is not for those who need an operating system immediately. With this year's first Gentoo release, 2007.0, comes an updated LiveCD featuring a completely rewritten GTK+ based installer, but isn't a graphical installer defeating some of the purposes of Gentoo?

It is possible to mount your remote filesystem as a local filesystem on your Red hat/CentOS Linux system using sshfs.

Jitterbit, the developer of an open source integration suite announced new customers to coincide with the latest release of its software. Jitterbit claims that open source integration is gaining significant traction with businesses as they look to integrate both open source and proprietary CRM, ERP, and other on-demand applications.

About one month ago, Snort 3.0 Alpha was released for testing in the community. If you want to be on the cutting edge of intrusion detection, packet sniffing, and keeping your system safe, check out this introduction to preparing for the future of i...

Blogging from the command line without a GUI -- and no e-mail gateway -- can be done ... almost. Using the command-line, text-only Elinks browser to post blog entries -- or to complete Web forms in general -- is a lesson in trial, error and frustration. But disciplined use of keystrokes -- and a little dumb luck -- allows these browsers to post to Movable Type blogs such as this one.

It's Global in a non-global sense. Summit Between 9 a.m. and noon, Red Hat developed a new desktop operating system strategy.

The third annual Red Hat Summit is underway in San Diego. This year's show already has a different feel to it than the first two. The crowd is larger, for one thing. The event is a complete sell-out -- so much so that Red Hat had to stop taking registrations. Attendees have booked all the available rooms at the Sheraton and are spilling over into two additional hotels, and Red Hat is running shuttles between the hotels. Unofficially, the crowd is between 1,200 and 1,400, up from less than a thousand last year.

Anyone who has tried downloading a popular software or Linux distribution on or just after release day, knows of the pain of the phrase ″connection timed out″. Getting the software can be quite a struggle, despite all the mirrors and BitTorrent Samaritans. Anthony Bryan's Metalink is an open standard that makes downloading easier, faster, and more reliable by helping users extract the last drop of juice out of their connection.

Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. today announced that 12 new customers have signed up to take advantage of the companies’ collaboration. These customers, from around the globe, are 1blu, Arsys, Fujitsu Services Oy, Gordon Food Service, Gulfstream Aerospace Corp., hi5 Networks Inc., Host Europe, Nationwide, PRISACOM SA, Reed Elsevier, Save Mart Supermarkets, and state of California, Department of Fish and Game.

Back in early March, a company called the Olliance Group held a gathering of about 100 corporate manager types at a resort in California's wine country. This "Open Source think tank" has now produced a 16-page report. It is, indeed, an interesting look at how a certain part of the corporate world views free software - though, perhaps, not entirely in the ways its authors intended. When a self-appointed "think tank" gets together to talk about free software, one is right to be cautious. When one of that event's top-level sponsors is Microsoft, an extra degree of nervousness seems appropriate. The other top-level sponsor, naturally, is Novell; the remainder of the list is NEC, Unisys, Jasper Soft, OpenLogic, and SugarCRM. Not the most community-oriented bunch one could have come up with.

IT professionals spend a lot of time thinking about security, and ways to make sure their systems are patched as quickly as possible. However, what goes on before they hear about a vulnerability is mostly a mystery. To get a clearer picture, we talked to Mark Cox, director of Red Hat's security response team, about trends in Linux security, who discovers vulnerabilities, how they're rated, and what's being done to minimize security problems.

Jens Axboe posted a series of ten patches that add support for large IO commands. He began by defining the problem..

Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) recently conducted a successful open source introductory course. With 40 people certified so far, there are plans underway to scale this up to as many as 1000 students in June.

This is a cool little video of a librarian installing Ubuntu on donated computers.

Develop a Java application on AIX and learn how to extend it by using a PHP interface to look at the underlying Java code.