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Recapping another busy couple of weeks in Ruby land as well as the first international Ruby conference.

For long-time watchers of Larry Ellison, the revelation that Oracle is looking at launching its own version of the Linux open source operating system has aroused a suspicion: is the software industry’s most acquisitive CEO stalking his next target? Mr Ellison made the comments in an interview with the Financial Times this week, laying out strong reasons why the database software company should embed a version of Linux into its existing software.

Tonight on The Linux Link Tech Show, episode 136:
We interview Jack Miller from the Centre/SIS student data systems project
What is Planet Techshow?
Dan takes a look at Qemu
Linc talks about SJphone
And much, much more

Be sure to check us out live every Wednesday night at 8:30 PM, EDT
Just point your favorite media player to any of the following streams:
http://www.binrev.com:8000/main
http://media.sysop.ca:8000/techshow
http://wdsmn.com:8000/techshow


You can also check out previous episodes from the download section of our home page

The Linux market in China continues to grow, according to a new research report from IDC. And it is apparently growing partially at the expense of Linux nemesis SCO.

ZDNet has an interesting article that brings readers up to speed on what's happening on the Linux graphic card compatibility and advanced GUI effects front. As usual there's a tug-of-war with people in the Linux developer community (including the free software advocates) and hardware makers regarding implementation of proprietary drivers with the Linux kernel, as opposed to offering full open-source drivers. The only trouble the hardware makers point out is that most of their closed-source drivers implement licensed third-party technologies that make it impossible to open them up for public development.

[It looks as if Intel plans to respond to the community. Great. We either have to use proprietary drivers or get FOSS drivers at the expense of being sucked into Intel's DRM. Vendors need to quit paying lipservice to the FOSS philosophy and GET REAL! - dcparris]

LINUX EXPERTS are dismissing as FUD a claim by Russian Anti-Virus outfit Kaspersky labs that it has invented a cross platform virus that can eat Windows and Linux systems.

[Yeah. Welcome to GNU/Linux Land, where we not only don't fear viruses, we patch our systems to be able to run them! - dcparris]

If you think setting up and using a printer in Linux is too much trouble, take heart -- you're not alone. To come to grips with a wide range of Linux printing-related issues, the OSDL-sponsored Portland Project has just held the first Desktop Linux Printing Summit in Atlanta.

Salt Lake City, Utah-based Linux Networx has named a new CFO, saying today that it has hired Robert Neumeister, Jr. as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for the firm.

Last week I installed Fedora Core 5 on two aging but serviceable systems: my eMachines desktop (2GHz Celeron, 768MB RAM) and a Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204 notebook (1GHz Celeron, 512MB PC100 RAM). The desktop had previously run Fedora Core 4 while the laptop had been running Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) for a few months and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 Update 1 prior to that.

Seeking to offset recent gains by Microsoft, a leading open source evangelist has launched a service designed to boost domain parking on open source software. Author and developer Bruce Perens created OpenSourceParking.com in response to a 5 percent market share gain by Microsoft in this month's Netcraft web server survey. The shift was due to domain registrar Go Daddy shifting 4.5 million parked domains from Linux to Windows Server 2003. "It's time for the Free Software/Open Source community to fight back," wrote Perens, urging open source supporters to park their undeveloped domains with the new service, which runs on the Linux operating system and Lighttpd web server.

Membership in the OpenDocument Format Alliance has almost quadrupled over the past month. The Alliance, a coalition of international organizations whose goal is to enable governments to have direct management and greater control over their documents, was launched March 3 with 36 initial members, but that has grown to 138.

Linux was one of the first cross-platform operating systems to use 64-bit processors, and now 64-bit systems are becoming commonplace in servers and desktops. Many developers are now facing the need to port applications from 32-bit to 64-bit environments. With the introduction of Intel Itanium and other 64-bit processors, making software 64-bit-ready has become increasingly important.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation is offing NTT's open source codes of the 128-bit block Cipher algorithm "Camellia", jointly developed with Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (Mitsubishi) in 2000, using the C and Java languages on the Camellia home page. This is based on the policy of expanding the international infrastructure technology to support a secure advanced information society as the first Japanese encryption algorithm.

Chinese domestic software company Redflag Linux has set up a joint venture company with Japan's Miracle Linux and South Korea's Haansoft to jointly promote the Linux operating system.

Drake Consulting launches Web service that stops viruses and blocks spam.

Opinion: Microsoft is Oracle's most threatening rival in its quest to get its own piece of the Linux pie.

Oracle's decision to pay $US220 million for telco billing software developer, Portal Software fits neatly into its reported ambitions to gain, through acquisition, its own Linux distribution: release of a Linux version of the Portal billing system appears imminent.

Open source software advocate Eric S. Raymond is reporting that his name and copyright information for a bit of MIT-licensed code called the GIFLIB library are included in the end user license agreement of a Microsoft application called Expression 3.3.