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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.

"Was this really where Microsoft thought it would be ten years ago? Is this really Microsoft's idea of making the rules and leading the industry? Being forced to *deal with GNU/Linux* by making fuzzy deals with vague patent implications?"

The collaboration deal also included plans to develop a support program for the developer community.

Yahoo Finance reporter Jim Finkle has a story on Red Hat and IBM signing a deal for Red Hat Linux software on Z series mainframes. Up until now SuSE Linux, a Novell company, has been the main supplier of Linux on mainframes.

Use a componentized build system to automatically port Java projects with native extensions on heterogeneous UNIX platforms. To guarantee porting for many heterogeneous UNIX platforms, a build system should be pluggable.

The recent announcement of a new standard for "slipperiness" reminded me not only of the seemingly infinite, and at times surprising, types of standards we find we cannot live without, but also of the linkage between language and standards.

A chapter of a new how-to book, Hacking Ubuntu: Serious Hacks, Mods and Customizations, has been published online at ExtremeTech.com. The chapter, entitled "Making Ubuntu Usable," explains how to tune Ubuntu to your personal tastes by changing startup music, background, fonts, icons, colors, and more.

The Mozilla Quality weblog has announced that an initial version of the quality.mozilla.org site has launched. Described as "pre-alpha", the quality.mozilla.org site (QMO for short) is intended to become a central portal for the Mozilla quality assurance community.

Silly name, but a good idea, VMware is joining the rush down the road of paravirtualisation already beingtrodden by the likes of Novell and Microsoft.

Andrew Morton sent out the latest lguest patches for review, noting that he intends to merge the code into the mainline kernel, "some concern was expressed over the lguest review status, so I shall send the patches out again for people to review, to test, to make observations about the author's personal appearance, etc. I'll plan on sending these patches off to Linus in a week's time, assuming all goes well." The project's FAQ notes, "lguest is designed to be simple to use and modify, with the aim of keeping the codebase small. Currently it's around 5000 lines including userspace utility, whereas kvm is over 10 times that size, and Xen is around 10 times bigger again (of course, both have far more features)."

One of the less well-known features of OpenOffice.org is its ability to run as a service. You can put that ability to some clever use. For example, you can turn OpenOffice.og into a conversion engine and use it to convert documents from one format to another via a Web-based interface or a command-line tool. JODConverter can help you to unleash OpenOffice.org's file conversion capabilities.

This document describes how to install a vsftpd server that uses virtual users from a PostgreSQL database instead of real system users. I could not find any tutorial like that on the internet, so when that configuration finally worked for me, I decided to publish it. The documentation is based on FreeBSD 6.2 which I was recently forced to use (I usually use Debian). Nevertheless the document should be suitable for almost any Linux distribution as well (may require very small amendments).

Ubuntu 7.04, aka "Feisty Fawn," has been out for several weeks now and it's already very popular. Heck, Michael Dell was running it even before he chose it to become Dell's Linux of choice. But, how good is it?

The End User License Agreement is, as its name shows it, a contract between the software developer and a potential user. Whenever you install software on a computer, you will have to face the inevitable: agreeing to the EULA. The question is, how important is it and what is the impact of it?