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The merry month of March is just a few weeks away and foremost in the minds of those in the free and open source software community is the question of licences.

Concurrent Computer reports shipping its first VME/VXS system available with Linux. The "iHawk VME" system runs Concurrent's Red Hat-based RedHawk operating system for multi-processor x86 chips, and enables userspace software to respond to external events in under 30 microseconds, the company claims.

The KDE development team is working hard on the KDE 4 platform. KDE 4 will include many exciting new technologies which will greatly enhance the functionality of KDE. One of these new technologies is Decibel. We would like to give you an idea of what Decibel is all about.

You've heard of Web 2.0, right? Well, here's "utility computing 2.0," a combination of network booting, SSL, VNC, and other familiar concepts and technologies -- all on Linux -- that can yield dramatic returns on investment. See how the University of California set up a server farm environment to provide secure remote desktop application services for students.

Organizations running Linux in virtual machines on the mainframe will soon be able to throw more workloads onto the system thanks to an update to the z/VM operating system that now scales across 32 processor units, compared with the previous version that scaled to 24. The new release, z/VM Version 5.3, is expected to begin shipping on June 29, but IBM detailed updates to the operating system on Tuesday.

I just browsed back across some old bookmarks I had made on subjects to blog about. I've been playing catch up for the last few days as some of my projects I've been working on are slowing down. During this browsing session, I happened upon a blog entry titled "So Many Distros, So Little Time" which originally jumped across the RSS reader during January of this year. I gave it an honest read and was disgusted with the article quite a bit. Let me go point for point on this:

The move comes less than a week after Microsoft and its partners finished work on the Open XML Translator, an add-on to Microsoft Word that is available for download and use at no cost.

When it comes to troublesome Linux peripherals, WiFi takes the cake. Sparked by the Portland Project's efforts to bring standardization to the Linux desktop, the Linux wireless developer community tackled this problem at its second Linux Wireless Summit last month in London.

In an effort to bolster use of its open source middleware and license-free database software, IBM on Wednesday said it will provide free sales and marketing support to developers who create products for those offerings. Under the program, developers who create applications designed to run atop IBM's WebSphere Application Server Community Edition or its DB2 Express-C database can sign up to receive free telemarketing time and discounted advertising rates underwritten by IBM.

Several weeks ago, desktop Linux distributor Linspire Inc. announced that it was going to open up CNR (Click N Run), its Web-based software downloader/manager, to other distributions. Now, the company is revealing more about what this new Linux software distribution system will look like.

You know what I'd like to see? I'd like the various Free software groups (whether they use "open source" or "free software" doesn't matter) get together to produce the greatest educational tool the world has ever seen: A website dedicated to Free / Open Source code. Not programs. Code.

Following more than two years of development, the Xfce project team recently released version 4.4.0 of its popular open-source desktop environment. Xfce 4.4 includes new tools, such as the Thunar file manager, as well as several significant improvements to its core components, according to the release announcement.

Citing increased demand from Web developers and their clients, a Toronto-based Web hosting company today said it would begin letting customers build and host Web sites running both Microsoft Windows and Linux applications at the same time.

Well as I mentioned in my review of Ubuntu 6.10 Beta Edgy back in October 2006 where I was talking about switching to Ubuntu, well I did it... Yes I gave up Xandros which I had been using for 2 yrs and moved to Ubuntu.... I am happy that I did!

Get step-by-step instructions for things you should do during installation of the Hardware Management Console (HMC), measures you can take after installation, and maintenance guidelines to ensure that a secure system stays secure.

Good news today from the great state of Oklahoma. Debbie Foster, a single mom who was improperly sued by the RIAA back in 2004 for file sharing, has won back her attorneys' fees. The decision today is one of the first in the country to award attorneys fees to a defendant in an RIAA case over music sharing on the Internet.

With the Sonnet library for KDE 4, developer Jacob Rideout hopes to reinvigorate the field of desktop linguistics by adding automatic language detection and other innovative features. Sonnet is to be for KDE 4 what KSpell 2 is for the current version of the K Desktop Environment, providing spellchecking facilities to applications as diverse as the Konqueror Web browser, Kopete instant messenger, and KWord office software. Unlike KSpell, however, it will also provide grammar checking, multilingual tools, and perhaps even translation, dictionary, and thesaurus functionality across all of KDE.

In this role, McWhirter will be responsible for evolving the technical infrastructure and content of the JBoss.org site for a growing community of contributors and users as well as an increasing number of open source projects. Today, JBoss.org generates over 30 million page views and half a million user sessions per month.

One of your developers wants to extend an open-source application to solve a company problem, then contribute the code back to the community. That's fine. But making that process work in enterprise terms involves more than getting the legal department to recover from its fainting fit.

Toward the end of his linux.conf.au talk, Andrew Tannenbaum put up a few slides on the runtime cost of the microkernel approach. He had quite a few benchmarks, but the bottom line was that the microkernel architecture used in Minix imposed a roughly 5-10% performance penalty, depending on what one is trying to do. While operating systems hackers would normally cringe at the prospect of paying a 5% penalty, to many people this could seem like a good deal: give up 5-10% of a processor which is mostly idle anyway in exchange for a more reliable system.