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In the beginning of 2003, the Dutch government started a program called Open Standards and Open Source Software (OSSOS) to stimulate Dutch government agencies to use open standards in their software and to inform them about open source software. Last month, 10 big Dutch cities signed a Manifesto of the Open Cities, signaling that the OSOSS program is working.

Charles Wuischpard, an IBM veteran, has 'aggressive revenue goals' for the Linux computer maker.

Spanish software house Fluendo is selling codecs for Windows Media Player, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 to Linux and Solaris users. Although there are open source media players that can work with Windows Media Player, the software can either fail to run or work only in a limited fashion, particularly on websites hosting video.

Kaffe using GNU Classpath (without AWT) is now working fine on SkyOS, just like Wine. Although there is no Wine graphics driver yet, you can already start Windows console applications directly from within SkyOS (once a Wine/SkyGI backend is available Wine should run on SkyOS as good as it does on Linux, and will be available via Software Store). On the driver side there is now an ACPI driver including support for ACPI power/sleep buttons (a SkyOS service, the PowerMonitor, will react on power events with configurable actions like shutdown, reboot, etc.). And finally, the SkyOS LiveCD is shaping together and should soon be available.

SYDNEY -- It took more than 17 hours in planes and a trip through customs, but I've made the trek from Denver, Colorado, to Sydney, Australia, for Linux.conf.au (LCA) 2007. Already it looks like the trip was worthwhile.

Samba software, is a free, open source implementation of networking protocols to share files between UNIX/Linux and Windows computers. There are many ways to set permissions to your Samba shares and improve security. This article will cover some of the basic permissions and permission precedence with examples.

Feisty Fawn Herd 2 CD release brings with it many new and exciting applications. For this latest release of Kubuntu 7.04, usability looks to be the common theme. Besides usability there have been updates to many common applications as well as a changing in the default database application in Kubuntu. With every new pre-release, updates will be documented allowing you to thoroughly test your Kubuntu 7.04 installation. - Kubuntu.org. Screenshots of Kubuntu 7.04 Herd 2 are available at LinuxQuestions.org.

Text-editing operations are normally done interactively, inside a text editor application. Some tasks, however, can be accomplished quickly and easily, right from the UNIX command line. What's more, these one-liners can be used in scripts to automate various editing procedures.

Matt Asay has some good advice for folks asking him for career advice: "Work for an open source company." I'd wholeheartedly agree. I'd like to add "or within the open source group of a traditional software company".

Symbian Ltd will today announce the availability of libraries to support the Posix APIs, with a view to attracting developers of open source apps to port to its smart phone OS.

There is a growing recognition of Linux in the retail sector, as retailers are starting to see the advantages and cost savings of a Linux system, Columbitech said. "We are continuously expanding our product portfolio to stay ahead of market demands and meet customer requirements," said Asa Holmstrom, the company's president.

The Forum for Open Source Initiatives in India (FOSII) has been formed by a group of individuals from the Linux/Open Source to accelerate the adoption of Open Source by fostering innovation and development within the country. The FOSII is comprised of senior industry professionals, technology journalists, enthusiasts, mediapersons and others from the Open Source community. Sandeep Menon, convener of FOSII and director of Linux business for Novell West Asia, said, "FOSII members belong to various facets of the Linux/OSS (Open Source Software) ecosystem, which includes the industry, academia, government and the community.

Among other improvements, Libervis.com now has a link sharing section allowing FOSS and Free Culture people to share important "digital freedom" related links for each other.

This guide shows how to work with LVM (Logical Volume Management) on Linux. It also describes how to use LVM together with RAID1 in an extra chapter. As LVM is a rather abstract topic, this article comes with a Debian Etch VMware image that you can download and start, and on that Debian Etch system you can run all the commands I execute here and compare your results with mine. Through this practical approach you should get used to LVM very fast.

Austin Gatt is a lawyer, member of Malta's Nationalist Party and currently the country's Minister for Investments, Industry and IT. He hasn't got a clue about software. That doesn't stop him making clueless remarks about Free Software in order to diss a competing party. Not lxer material normally, but keep your friends close...

Server maker Unisys wants a bigger piece of the action in the open source software game and also wants to tap into the move by some companies away from mainframe and Unix servers and toward Linux platforms. Which is why the company will today expand its Open and Secure Integrated Solutions, or Oasis, product line.

I know I’m not the only person who doesn’t like to feel like a beginner whenever I use a computer. There are those of us who only like to use something that they can easily master within a few minutes, and then there are people who are always up for a challenge. If you tell them that they can’t do something, then you can count on them to do whatever it takes to accomplish it and prove you wrong.

Once considered to be way too complicated for the newer Linux user, HDTV on a 'Nix box often times felt just out of reach for many. Then we found that hardware designed for Linux specifically was in the works. The card is known simply as the HD-5500.

Desktop environments like KDE and GNOME make it possible for you to assign keyboard shortcuts to a number of global operations, but don't make it easy to create shortcuts to run any program you'd like. To set up shortcuts for programs, XBindKeys is the way to go.

LXer Feature: 16-Jan-2007

The European Commission's enterprise and industry department just released the final draft (warning: 1,8 MB) of what could be the biggest academic interdisciplinary study on the economic / innovative impacts of FLOSS*. The study was done by an international consortium, led by the United Nations University / University of Maastricht's (NL,EU) department of innovation; UNU-MERIT for short. The study was prepared by senior researcher Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, who did a tremendous amount of FLOSS studies the last few years, amongst them on FLOSSpols and FLOSSWorld.

The academic grade study has a very, very broad scope and has collected real world information that is valuable for both companies, government bodies who are thinking about migration, and decision-makers in the ICT business. The study is about the direct economic impact of FLOSS, but also about the more hidden indirect economical impact of FLOSS, and also compares scenarios of open and proprietary software futures of Europe. In addition to that, the study is also about competitiveness of FLOSS software compared to proprietary software, and also provides a few TCO comparison case-studies.

Probably most important, the study gives policy strategies to European government bodies, which can also be very useful for any company or organization. In this article, I'll discuss the key findings of this report, and try to link this with my own knowledge and experience.

A must-read for anyone who's willing to Get the real Facts!

* In contrary to US articles, European's don't mind using the term FLOSS, since English speaking people are only a small minority in today's Europe, and therefore almost nobody associates FLOSS with the dentist. If you do, please don't bother to complain; just change the associations you make.