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SYDNEY -- Linux.conf.au (LCA) 2007 continued Wednesday with a keynote by Dr. Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a full day of talks and tutorials, and a cameo appearance by Linus Torvalds.

Linux developer Linspire Inc. and SageTV LLC, one of the first digital video recording (DVR) and home media center software developers, have collaborated to make SageTV Media Center Version 6 easily available to users of the Linspire and Freespire desktop Linux operating systems. SageTV previously favored Gentoo users.

Is Linux going to take over the PC market from Microsoft with a cheaper solution like the one of the 130$ OLPC becoming mainstream? Is Linux going to win at the Ultra Portable PC market over Microsoft with the cheaper platform based on low power chips like the PepperPad 3? Is Linux going to dominate in the pocket-sized Tablet industry and phone section with products like the Nokia N800 against the iPhone from Apple and the Smart-phone and Pocket PC products of Microsoft?

A Spain-based software services provider is shipping commercial Gstreamer plug-ins that enable Linux and Solaris systems to decompress popular multimedia formats. Fluendo says its plug-ins allow applications like the Totem music player and Jokosher digital audio workstation to support a wide range of formats, including Windows Media and MPEG-2/4.

Get a demonstration on how to use resource indexing with the Apache Derby database to develop Eclipse plug-ins. The Derby database embedded in Eclipse allows you to create an SQL database on the client side with no security issues or network problems, such as an unstable connection or high latency.

Talk to anyone who follows hiring trends in IT and they’ll tell you the same thing: having Linux proficiency is growing increasingly important in getting and keeping a job in IT. From sysadmins to help desk workers to database miners, knowledge of open source has moved from being a cutting-edge “gee whiz” skill set to a must-have tool for IT staffers.

Alan Cox, one of the leading Linux kernel developers, has told a House of Lords hearing that neither open- nor closed-source developers should be liable for the security of the code they write.

Sterling PCU sells refrigerant systems to the automotive and appliance industry. It names among its customers Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, General Electric, and many others. Sterling had an extensive collection of customer information, but much of the data was stored in disparate locations: email, spreadsheets, and incompatible databases. When Sterling decided it was time to consolidate, its first choice was Salesforce's customer relationship management (CRM) product. However, high costs and restricted access to the company's own data forced a reassessment, and this time, Sterling chose an open source product.

It's been about a year since I wrote a program. I've written snippets of code since then but have mostly focused on managing other developers. This is partly because, as a business owner, my spare time is scarce; I have many tasks to juggle. It's also because programming stopped being fun for me. I have been fascinated with computers and telecom systems since I was a child, but in the past several years, coding has become more of a chore, in large part because the task of actually designing something useful is a small one compared with the much less interesting work that's now required.

There is a fascinating article on Groklaw calledSearching for Openness in Microsoft's OOXML and Finding Contradictions. One of the most relevant comments in the article is"So, they plan to be the only one in the Linux world that can actually interoperate with Microsoft. How do you think they will achieve that? By sharing? On the contrary, they already market themselves as uniquely interoperable, which means they get to interoperate and you don't, unless you are their paying customer." There is also the Novell comment,"Only Novell has Microsoft’s endorsement as its partner to drive Linux-Windows interoperability."

Last month, Toronto-based civic activists at The Citizen Lab released a new open source secure Web browsing tool designed to let people in repressive countries tunnel through government Internet filters. Known as Psiphon, the program allows users with unfiltered Internet access to provide a private, SSL-encrypted Web proxy for use by individuals in firewalled countries.

A new e-learning and collaborative training portal was announced by the President of India. What makes the portal unique is that one core phase of the development of India's educational e-learning will be explicitly based on Open Source tools...

Learn how PHP-based server programs can convert XML-formatted enterprise application data into JSON format before sending it to browser applications.

The new year has brought a new release of the Knoppix live CD. Along with the usual updates to application software, the most noticeable change in version 5.1.1 is the inclusion of the Beryl 3-D desktop with the Emerald theming engine.

Obviously, using XML from Java applications is nothing new as the first two editions of this book attest. However, numerous changes have occurred which required a third edition of this book. From the Preface: "Quite a bit has changed since the second edition appeared. Specifications that were drafts have been finalized, new APIs have been introduced, and new uses for XML have emerged. Perhaps most significantly, two APIs discussed in the second edition--JDOM and JAXB--saw important changes...". Having established the necessity for a third edition, let's see what it's got under the hood.

The initial version of OVIS -- a software tool developed by Sandia National Laboratories that provides intelligent, real-time monitoring of computational computer clusters -- is now available for free download from the Sandia Web site.

By its own developers' admissions, Linux supports more hardware devices out-of-the-box than any other operating system but that won't stop a slew of new drivers being added in upcoming releases. Two years after his 2005 Kernel Report, Colorado-based Linux developer Jonathan Corbet returned to Australia's linux.conf.au conference in Sydney this week to discuss recent enhancements to the open source operating system.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a venerable protocol which allows people to type messages at each other across the net. Your editor remembers a fascinating day in 1991, when observers in Moscow used an IRC channel to report on the Soviet coup attempt; it was an early example of the power the net would come to have. In subsequent years, however, your editor has had little time for IRC. Getting LWN together every week requires a strong focus on getting things done, and IRC can be a real productivity killer. Pretending that IRC does not exist has been most helpful in getting the Real Work done.

It's the time of the year for the annual fortune-telling ritual, where soothsayers get their say on the upcoming trends for the year. In my few years as a technology journalist, I've been asked--every now and then--when the Linux desktop will really take off among consumers.

Linus fans, get your diaries ready. The annual developers' conference of the Debian Project is to be held on 17-23 June in Edinburgh. Debian is one of the largest volunteer-supported Linux distributions, with over 15,000 software packages available for it, which can be used on a total of 14 different computer architectures, ranging from IBM's s390 mainframe and PowerPC through to the ARM processor at the other end. In the middle, of course, is the x86 architecture.