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Alek Komarnitsky's controllable Christmas lights started out as a hoax, but now Komarnitsky is using Linux to power the controllable Christmas lights for real in order to bring attention to celiac disease.

Just as the year in open source was cruising to a finish in 2006 -- all gussied up in a neat bow for the year, November arrived with a splash to re-draw the whole map.

The legendary Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame) has resigned from Novell in protest over the Microsoft-Novell patent agreement, which he calls "a mistake" which will be "damaging to Novell's success in the future."

The first 10 years of XML were only the beginning. This article Takes a good look at the future of XML. XQuery and native XML databases will be very, very hot. Also pay attention to anything called Web 2.0. Yes, it's hype; and yes, if you asked four speakers at this conference how they defined Web 2.0, you got six different answers; but there's a lot of reality behind the hype. XSL-FO and XForms will be more important next year and developers will start to build impressive systems with them.

A year ago, many words were written (including by me) on why Microsoft may have chosen Ecma to package Microsoft's Office Open XML formats as a standard. Now that Ecma has finished that project and adopted the result, there's additional data to examine that sheds some light on that question. That will be my topic today, and for the next several entries.

After four successful years of revolutionizing how content is shared in the real world, Lawrence Lessig, founding chairman of Creative Commons, announced his retirement as chairman of the board last week. Lessig passed the CC torch to Joi Ito, a venture capitalist from Japan.

David Nielsen has started a pledge drive to fund nouveau development. (nouveau is a project to produce complete and free open source drivers for NVidia video cards.) This pledge drive does not have the official support of the nouveau developers, but what a wonderful idea to be able to present them with $10,000 to support their work! If you would like to use the hardware you’ve already paid for under terms that respect your freedom and choice, consider pledging $10 to this effort. (I’ll discuss the pragmatics and politics of free drivers more in a subsequent weblog soon.)

Small businesses with small budgets can save a lot of money by deploying open-source software — at least in theory. The Linux operating system and office productivity software such as OpenOffice can be downloaded free. That sounds a lot better than paying $200 (£101.49) for each system's OS and $300-500 more for an Office suite.

Each distribution has some specific tools to build a custom kernel from the sources. This article is about compiling a kernel on Debian Sarge systems. It describes how to build a custom kernel using the latest unmodified kernel sources from http://www.kernel.org (vanilla kernel) so that you are independent from the kernels supplied by your distribution. It also shows how to patch the kernel sources if you need features that are not in there.

Two banks and an insurance company have accepted Microsoft Corp.'s offer of technical support for Novell Inc.'s SUSE Enterprise Linux. One of the three, Credit Suisse Group, has yet to use SUSE Linux, said spokeswomen at the two software vendors.

Eyeon has released the Linux version of Fusion. Based on the recent December release of version 5.1 of the visual effects software, Fusion on Linux is the company’s next universal platform initiative.

Adam Turner looks at how to keep your old computer from joining the mountain of tech waste that's clogging our landfill.

New Meta data based Linux desktop search system, which overcame the limitation of current Linux desktop search capabilities, was developed. Thus likely to fuel more active developments in open source based semantic desktop search technology too.

Analysis As PR stunts go, Sun Microsystems' Blackbox trailer park computing launch this autumn wasn't bad. Sun pumped up some rather dull AMD Sun servers by unveiling a black, spray-painted, branded shipping container that could be crammed with Sun storage and server devices.

Kubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) Step By Step Installation with Screenshots

One of the aims in the drafting of the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPL) is to internationalize the language to make it easier to translate. Those who doubt the need for this effort only need to look at the efforts to write an alternative free license in the Brazilian state of Paraná to change their minds. Despite the good intentions of its creators, the alternative license has been labeled as non-free by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and its Latin American counterpart, the FSFLA, and is currently being re-written under some protest -- all of which might have been avoided or minimized had an internationalized version of the GPL been available.

Mozilla Corp. today released a version 2.0.0.1 update for its Firefox browser and version 1.5.0.9 for its Thunderbird email client, for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows machines. For those still using Firefox 1.5.x, version 1.5.0.9 includes the same security fixes.

This is list of Network Bandwidth Monitoring Tools for Ubuntu Users includes bmon bwbar,bwm,bwm-ng,iftop,iperf,ipfm speedometer,cbm,ibmonitor,pktstat,mactrack,MRTG,Cacti.This tutorial also contains how to install and configure each tool with examples and screenshots.

I want to share the experience I gained from the switch over to Ubuntu Linux a few months ago. It might be of some help to other people looking for a superb alternative to Windows. Even though the new Windows Vista OS is being released, some people might not want to use this upgrade. There are numerous unbiased reasons not to upgrade, including the fact that Vista is extremely demanding on resources and will cost an arm and leg to upgrade. On the other hand, Ubuntu is completely free and so are most other Linux programs.

Six months after Sun Microsystems Inc. said it was not a matter of if but when it would open source its flagship programming language, the company announced that it would release the Java platform as free software under the GNU General Public Licence V2.