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Commentary: Every speech I give in a country where poverty (by US standards) is the rule, not the exception, contains a statement that programming talent is everywhere; that it is not limited to white males in prosperous parts of the world. And, I say, open source software is the best way to find and develop your population's hidden programming talent. This tectonic article shows that South Africa has recognized the truth of my thesis -- and is doing something about it.

DistroWatch reports - Flight 6, the latest alpha of Dapper Drake, is available. Significant changes affecting the installer and live CD include: Espresso has been further improved and should now work on PowerPC, it now correctly estimates time needed for installation; Espresso still has bugs, but we encourage everybody to test it and file bugs about any bugs you find; the default theme has been tweaked slightly; new versions of GNOME and KDE are included.

OSDir had a look at Ubuntu's latest flight in their Ubuntu 6.06 Flight 6 Screenshot Tour.

Secure your Debian System

Robert X. Cringely reveals the true reason why Paul Allen of Microsoft fame left the Redmond company, even though it was on track to become an extremely valuable stock. Considering Microsoft's track record and behavior over the years, this should not be surprising, but if true it is beyond pall!

Thanks to GnuGuy who pointed out something Cringley states at the end of this incredible story: Cringely writes:

My reason for bringing up this topic at this time is because it will all shortly be back in the news as Microsoft goes to court later this year in what might well be its last-ever anti-trust trial. Remember those 19 states and the District of Columbia that settled over time for software vouchers and promises from Microsoft to no longer do evil? Well only Iowa remains, represented by a lady lawyer from Des Moines named Roxanne Conlin whom I have met. Roxanne is not in any way impressed with Microsoft vouchers, no matter how many there are. Looking for real money for the people of Iowa, Ms. Conlin is about to dredge-up all this old news and put a new spin on it.

Based purely on character (or lack of it), I confidently predict that Microsoft is going down. It should be interesting.

The Linux operating system is expanding from company data centers onto employees’ desktops, one of several trends that a local technology trade show producer will highlight at this year’s LinuxWorld exposition.

The East Coast LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, sponsored by IDG World Expo Corp. of Framingham, will attract somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 software developers, consultants, academics, end users, venture capitalists, legal constituents and geeks to Boston’s Convention and Exhibition Center tomorrow through Thursday.

At the center of the new migration initiative under Move2Lotus is "Migrate to the Penguin." IBM is introducing a limited time only rebate program for eligible IBM Software Resellers who move customers from Microsoft Exchange to Lotus Notes and Domino on Linux collaboration offerings.

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen 3.0.1 on a Debian Sarge system. Xen lets you create guest operating systems, so called "virtual machines" or domUs, under a host operating system (dom0).

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen (version 3.0.1) on a Debian Sarge (3.1) system.

Xen lets you create guest operating systems, so called "virtual machines" or domUs, under a host operating system (dom0). Using Xen you can separate your applications into different virtual machines that are totally independent from each other (e.g. a virtual machine for a mail server, a virtual machine for a high-traffic web site, another virtual machine that serves your customers' web sites, a virtual machine for DNS, etc.), but still use the same hardware.

Microsoft was also the only company cited as having a negative brand potential.

Out of 22 companies, Microsoft ranked 20th in brand trust showing that consumers are wary about the company. HP and Apple (of course) broke the top 5 as being trustworthy. Accordig to the study Microsoft has "negative brand potential."

Last year, I had the opportunity to participate in Running Linux 5th Edition. Mae West once said, "Flattery will get you everywhere". So, I felt flattered when asked to re-write the first chapter and add a major section in Chapter 28. For aspiring writers and interested parties, you might benefit from my experience with what we called RL5.

Faced with former Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn's harsh appraisal of the real reason behind the "inertia" of Linux in the business world, Linus Torvalds and OSDL have come up with an action plan for rebranding the Linux image and the image of its core developers. They have jointly agreed on the formation of OSDSU, the world's first Open Source Dress for Success University.

[Will this be enough to save Linux and Linus et. al. from themselves. I truly doubt it.]

A few weeks ago, Jonathan Riddell had asked me on IRC in passing why kprinter and KDEPrint 3.5.1 didn't work with CUPS-1.2. My reply had been like "CUPS-1.2 hasn't even released an alpha or beta tarball -- w.t.h. does Ubuntu Dapper plan to include an SVN version of a piece of core software which has a yet unknown release date??" Of course, this is not Jonathan's personal field of work -- Kubuntu just inherits the CUPS version and setup which the Ubuntu main developers decided for.

Regarding an impending CUPS-1.2 release, prospects have become much brighter in the meanwhile. During March, Mike Sweet released 2 Betas and the first Release Candidate. So a final 1.2.0 release seems pretty close now.

After reading this morning that "Dapper Flight 6" was available, I decided to download the Live CD version of Kubuntu. Download took 6 hours, but luckily was completed after I woke up.

Yours truly and other Linux aficionados will be in Boston next week for the love fest known as Linux World Conference and Expo. This year's show is gearing up to represent the year of the ecosystem, as there won't be any major distribution announcements from the Linux heavies.

Milan Babuskov one of original creators of fbManager which became Flamerobin, just made it publicly known that he now works for MySQL AB.

As we all know, NVIDIA does support the Linux community with their very best. At least the drivers for their graphics cards work flawlessly. But it seems, that this is not enough for them. Quite a few minutes ago two NVIDIA employees appeared in wine's IRC channel.

In the CyberCynic podcast, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols asks: Will the now more open-source friendly Sun finally open the doors to the popular programming language? (Podcast #57)

"A versatile, old school Unix program -- Wget is a highly hackable, handy little tool that can take care of all your downloading needs. Whether you want to mirror entire web site, automatically download music/movies from a set of favorite weblogs, or transfer huge files painlessly on a slow or intermittent network connection, Wget’s for you." ...

Just in time to give you something to do this weekend, Alexandre released Wine 0.9.11.

Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) chairman Dan Glickman and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) president Cary Sherman today announced the historic merger of the two organizations. The newly-created entity is being called the Music And Film Industry Association of America, Inc.

Here is a cool article which pursues how one can enable or disable services during start up in GNU/Linux. You get to know how you do the same task in different distributions like redhat, gentoo and ubuntu as well as the old fashioned way.

There has been a great deal of buzz lately about KDE4 and especially Plasma. People are talking excitedly on Osnews and Slashdot about what KDE4 will bring. Many other people are asking where they can see what new features are being developed at the moment, and other signs of progress. Some real screenshots of KDE 4 in development.