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Linus Torvalds is often described as an open source champion, interested in licensing only insofar as it affects his ability to share code and improve software more quickly. However, his real position is more complicated -- and to some, perhaps surprising. Asked point-blank which is more important, sharing code or empowering users -- the declared goal of the free software champions whom Torvalds is routinely depicted as being in opposition with -- and his first response in what he calls "the usual Linus polite words" is "That's a really stupid question. Why do you put it as an 'either or' kind of concept?" He then goes on to explain that, because open source operates in the same manner as scientific query, and is a matter of enlightened self-interest, sharing code and empowering users "are not at odds at all" -- a view that, in the end, places him closer to the free software position than either free software or open source followers might care to admit.

Warren Woodford of MEPIS announced on Aug. 10 that his company has built KDE 4 Beta 1 Live DVDs to verify the compatibility of KDE 4 with SimplyMEPIS 7.x. SimplyMEPIS 7.x marks the return of this popular desktop Linux distribution to using Debian Linux as its base. Warren said, "I decided to share my KDE 4 Beta 1 ISOs, so others could take a first look at KDE 4 and also to demonstrate that I'm serious about the commitment that MEPIS 7.x will be incrementally upgradable."

This will be an unusual review, due to the fact that the distribution under review doesn’t have an X server, and you don’t really need to login on it to work… This review is about the just released EnGarde Secure Server 3.0.16 developed by Guardian Digital company with the help of the community.

The first question a company asks when presented with a Microsoft Office alternative is how well the software supports Microsoft's de facto standard file formats. Based on eWEEK Labs' testing experience with productivity applications based on the Open Document Format standard (the most prominent of which are Sun's StarOffice and its open-source sibling, OpenOffice), document fidelity consistently falls short of 100 percent, and that's not good enough for most companies and organizations.

To really take advantage of the best tools in computing requires that you become quite comfortable with using the command line interface (CLI). In general, nearly every task -- aside from graphical work itself -- can be accomplished from the CLI. Once the user becomes more adept at CLI work, these non-graphical tasks can be done more quickly, with more fine-grained control, and with less demand on computer resources.

The BASH shell has a feature called job control that allows you to run and manage multiple processes from a single interactive prompt. In the age of serial connected dumb terminals, this was a killer feature. In the age of multi-homed multi-core Macs, not so killer, but there are certain situations where it can still be useful.

If you’ve ever had to install a large number of Linux systems, you are probably aware how tedious the install process can be. While tools like kickstart can help automate an installation, there are other pieces to the puzzle. There really hasn’t been a tool to unify all the ways you can install Linux–until now.

Blue GNU interviewed Gustavo Narea and Olivier Cleynen of GNU/Linux Matters, the organization behind GetGNU/Linux.org.

Articles about Linux and mainstream Linux news tends to be dominated by the big Linux distributions, those with large corporate backing and/or large development teams. I’m primarily talking about Red Hat Enterprise Linux and it’s free clone CentOS, Novell/SuSe, and Ubuntu on enterprise servers and Ubuntu, Fedora, Linspire, and Mandriva on the desktop. Throw in two venerable and widely respected distributions, Debian and Slackware, and you’ve got about 90% of the industry chatter covered, maybe more.

It was with sorrow that we learned of the death of David S. Rushby, aged 27, in a drowning accident in the Black Sea at Anapa, Russia. David has been the sole developer and maintainer of KInterbasDB (firebird) Python interface for some years

Trolltech's Qtopia is a commonly used mobile Linux. It's used in a large number of different devices– from Sony's mylo communicator, to Motorola and Panasonic's Linux phones. While you might not have come across it in the Carphone Warehouse, it's a common platform in one of the biggest mobile markets going – China.

Attempt to use compiled binaries might fail sooner or later due to hardware issues. Fortunately, 2.6.18-xen kernel does understand the hardware assembled on ASUS P5B Deluxe and Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet in particular. Actually, it means that any board based on (I965+ICH8R) or (I975+ICH7R) would be in general OK for Xen 3.1 Binary installation , but may have trouble with Ethernet Adapter.

According to its Web site, LyX is"the first WYSIWYM document processor," coupling a familiar word processing front end to the powerful LaTeX typesetting engine. Last month's new version 1.5 release includes a revamped interface, big improvements in multilanguage support, and enhanced tools for incorporating math, tables, and outlines.

I’m actually beginning to picture a day when users start to ask their IT departments why they can’t run Ubuntu Linux at work, the way they do at home. Now that Dell and Lenovo are running the distribution on some of its machines, and Novell is promoting a desktop version of Suse, the stage is set for a serious change in expectations. It was one thing when companies were using Linux quietly, on back-end systems like Web servers to cut costs or improve scaleability. This week’s LinuxWorld Expo show in San Francisco has demonstrated that open source is moving much closer to the front end than ever before, and with that begins another quiet shift, which will probably happen among departmental lines.

This article describes how to implement SSL-enabled name-based vhosts - that is secure virtual hosts which share the same IP address and port - with the SNI-capable mod_gnutls module for Apache's httpd web server.

Groklaw is reporting that Judge Kimball in the SCO v. Novell case has decided some of the Summary Judgements. Novell Still owns the copyrights to Unix.

You may be forgiven for thinking that a tumblelog is just a blog for lazybones. While there are a lot of similarities between these two kinds of content management systems, a tumblelog is more like an online basket, which you can use to collect your thoughts and discoveries and share them with others. Unlike with blogs, tumblelog readers don't expect you to provide any commentary in the published items, so you don't actually have to"blog about" the stuff that you publish. The idea is that the post item itself implicitly expresses your opinion on it, or, to put it in a slightly different way, you let the item speak for itself.

Editors' Blog If computer game development is your thing, save your pennies and get yourself over to the Los Angeles Convention Centre.

The arch directory in the kernel source tree contains all of the architecture-specific code. There is a lot of code there, despite years of work by the development community to make things generic whenever possible. There are currently 26 different top-level architectures supported by Linux, many of which contain a number of sub-architectures. Two of those top-level architectures are i386 (the original Linux architecture) and x86_64, which is the 64-bit big brother to i386. There is quite a bit of commonality between those two architectures, and some efforts have been made to share code between them whenever possible. Even so, the source trees for the two architectures remain distinct from each other.

LXer Feature: 10-Aug-2007
I've been trying to catch on and to understand what this thread's all about (It started with R. Hovespian from Novell explaining why they needed a deal with MS). I thought, maybe I could try to summarize it all to understand - and maybe explain to others - what's happening here, so I made up a tale of the whole situation: