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Dutch network computing specialist Athena has updated its OEM-licensable Linux-based thin client operating system. The company claims NLX (New LinuX) 5 to be the first thin client OS based on a 2.6-series Debian kernel.

While we spend a lot of time talking about Linux vs. Windows and Windows vs. the MacOS, the real battle for the Windows desktop alternative may be the preliminary round between the MacOS and Linux. That battle really kicks off this year with Apple stepping up their effort sharply with the Leopard, and Dell becoming aggressive (with others likely to follow) with SUSE Linux (though this choice may change). These two platforms have distinct advantages and disadvantages against each other and the winner will likely be the solution that walks away with the greatest number of advantages and the least number of disadvantages.

The big news of the day is that a legislator in California has decided that it is time to convince his colleagues that California should become the latest U.S. State to get on the open formats bandwagon. If the bill advances, it will the third such pieces of legislation to have been filed in recent weeks (the others are in Texas and Minnesota). The full text appears at the end of this blog entry.

Sun Microsystems has urged users to update and secure their Solaris 10 installations after a recently discovered zero-day vulnerability was found in the wild.

The Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship (FAIR USE) Act, introduced Tuesday would allow customers to circumvent digital copy restrictions under some circumstances. In a telling response, RIAA stated that: "The difference between hacking done for non-infringing purposes and hacking done to steal is impossible to determine and enforce."

For the next interview in the fortnightly People Behind KDE series we switch continents, travelling to Brazil to meet a cool-headed draftee with a 'cooler' pet, someone who keeps it in the family and who loves to both play and create games - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Mauricio Piacentini.

Opinion -- Slowly, ever so slowly, the Linux desktop has been picking up momentum. It keeps getting better and better, but Microsoft's monopoly has kept many PC users from realizing that there really is a viable alternative to Windows. However, that's about to change.
Just like a few more snowflakes can turn a quiet snowy mountainside into an avalanche, Linux is teetering on the edge of becoming a real force in the desktop computing world.

In this cursory overview, Mark Rais, provides some of the common reasons why people brand new to Linux have installation failures. The brief article covers issues with Fedora, Gentoo, Mepis, PCLinuxOS, and Ubuntu.

Nokia quietly began delivering an upgrade to its Linux-based 770 Internet Tablet in January. The N800 retains the same small web tablet form factor, while adding a webcam and significantly increasing computing horsepower, memory, and storage expansion.

Gmail offers a few clever features that make it more than just an email service. You can use your Gmail account as a document viewer, a file storage, and even as a full-blown Getting Things Done solution. You can also turn Gmail into a nifty backup solution for your OpenOffice.org documents using a simple OOoBasic macro and Gmail's own tools.

The first software-defined cellular base station to be certified by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is on display at a communications conference in San Diego this week. The physical layer software of Vanu Inc.'s "Anywave" Base Station runs on Linux and commodity Intel hardware, for low cost and convenient upgrades, according to the company.

SpikeSource is a three-year-old company with an open source business model that packages popular applications together with its own SpikeIgnite platform. SpikeIgnite does the work of integrating disparate applications and tools into a single solution so customers don't have to fiddle with dependencies and integration coding. The company calls it "support automation." As you might expect, SpikeSource itself depends on open source software to run its business from the inside. What might surprise you is that, instead of relying mostly on email and a fancy content management system for internal and vendor communications, it makes extensive use of wiki software.

Get easier management of blank form templates and central storage of completed form instances with IBM Content Manager Integrator. This tool enables integration of open XML-based eForms components between Workplace Forms and DB2 Content Manager.

OpenSAF Aims to Accelerate Broad Adoption Through Common Software Platform

Athena Thin Clients, a leading developer of embedded hardware and software in server based computer networks of the European Thin Client market, again claims its leadership in Thin Client development at Cebit 2007 in Hannover, Germany. Athena development engineers are the first to build a Linux Thin Client based on Debian kernel 2.6. This new Linux version carries the name NLX 5 where NLX stands for New LinuX. Athena® will be the first Thin Client manufacturer to have not only an extremely powerful but also the most flexible Linux embedded operating system in the market today.

The last week or so has seen new releases of two of my favorite additions to testing (or speccing if you're of the BDD persuasion) in the Ruby world.zenspider andKevin Clark have released a new version ofHeckle on the 20th, andMauricio Fernandez released a new version ofrcov this morning (the 21st).

QLogic Corp., a leading provider of iSCSI HBAs, today announced the availability of the industry's first iSCSI HBA functionality to be accepted into the "upstream" Linux kernel. Developed by the Linux community, the upstream Linux kernel is the central core of popular Linux packages including Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, Slackware and Yellowdog.

Sun Microsystems is the latest company to become a patron of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The FSF's corporate patron program allows companies to provide financial sponsorship for the FSF in return for free license consulting services. High-profile FSF patron affiliates include prominent technology companies like Google, Nokia, IBM, Cisco, and Intel. FSF involvement represents Sun's latest attempt to take a more active role in the open-source software community.

The global Red Hat Challenge gives Asian graduate students a chance to develop creative solutions to business problems posed by the No. 1 Linux vendor.

Announcing 2.6.21-rc2, Linus Torvalds noted,"I'm not very proud of this, because quite frankly, -rc2 has way more changes than I really like." The current Linux kernel development model is that the bulk of changes in a new kernel should happen during the -rc1 phase, with the rest of the -rc kernels being primarily bug fixes. Linus explains,"it's largely my fault, because I simply missed a V4L/DVB merge that came in before the merge window closed, but since I didn't notice it didn't make -rc1, and as such it got merged late and is in -rc2 instead." With typical humor he added,"but because I'll flail around wildly and rather blame anything else than my own incompetence, I'll just claim that all the other kernel developers have been irresponsible, and caused -rc2 to be bigger than needed.