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Open source is a communist regime imposed upon us by the Free Software Foundation and its evil minions. Firefox is a load of rubbish that lied its way to its current market share. <b>Jason Norwood-Young</b> takes issue with the latest blogging fad – telling the world that open source is the root of all evil.

[Ed: I am more than familiar with the old "GPL = Communism" line. We know that Proprietary licenses come much closer to that description. It was the Firefox myths that blew me away. Did you know Firefox is supposed to be "bug free"? - dcparris]

Today is the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Most people know him as one of the world's greatest composers; few, though, are aware that Mozart was also a hacker.

Digg Story

Last week's newsletter pointing to Novell's "Bridging NetWare skills to Novell OES for Linux" training prompted reader Mike Ossing to drop me a note with his impressions of the course. Ossing had gone through it last fall when it was first announced. His impression was that Novell "...barely scratched the surface, and if I hadn't had the chance to previously play with the Novell [Linux] desktop and the SuSE 9.2 install, with my 'Dummies' book close at hand, I'd have been a little lost. Maybe a lot lost. I think I'd classify them more as an overview course. I got about 60% of the questions right the first time through."

An annual survey of 300 futurists, academics and business people from 28 countries by the Global Future Forum has found that future technology needs answers to ethical questions.

Platforms Feature Both Single and Dual Core Processors

LinuxAsia 2006, Asia s premier open source conference and exposition, will be held in New Delhi on February 8-10, 2006. The event is of particular interest to the India market as open source solutions are being built on all of India's major languages and are cost-effectively meeting a broad range of economic and social needs.

Xandros Inc. launched a special Education Edition of its flagship Xandros Desktop OS Linux distribution, this week, aimed at students ranging from elementary school through college.

Motion Picture Association of America admits to copying film without permission

[Ed: We knew the MPAA was a brood of vipers! Where's good 'ol John the Baptist when you need him? - dcparris]

ZFS is the filesystem Sun Microsystems began shipping in November with its operating systems to provide data management and protection from the loss of data due to file corruption.

Qlusters takes its server management automation platform to the open-source community to fill a void that executives saw in the market for an open-source server automation tool.

Spicing up a great utility for more IT fun

It may take some six to nine months before Linux is ported to its new multicore T1 chip, but Sun Microsystems Inc. clearly wants that to happen.

Sun has made T1 servers available to Linux developers and is working with Linux distributors, which the company declined to name, to develop the port (see ”Sun releases UltraSparc specs to open-source developers”).

And while a port may be completed this year, it will be a while before Linux on T1 appears in production environments; application certification and support will be needed as well.

LinClips.com has put together a new screencast of Gentoo RR4 Linux 2.65.1.

New Zealand and Australia are lagging behind Europe and North America in the adoption of open source software (OSS), according to a report from research firm Forrester. However, local OSS experts believe Forrester’s figures understate the true picture.

Earlier this month the state of Pennsylvania issued a Linux Server Standards bulletin describing which Linux distributions should be used, and why. It applies to agencies, boards, commissions and councils under the Governor's jurisdiction, and is recommended to other agencies not under the Governor's jurisdiction.

Excerpt from the bulletin:

In the recent past, the choice of Linux for large enterprise class environments for North American companies was limited to one company, Red Hat. Red Hat was the only vendor that had the software portfolio and support infrastructure in place to meet the business requirements of large private and government institutions. However, with the acquisition of SUSE Linux by Novell in Jan 2004, a new strong player was introduced into the enterprise Linux market along with a new variable into Linux procurement contracts.

Both Red Hat and Novell/SUSE enterprise server operating systems were chosen to be included in the Commonwealth's current standards list of Linux server operating systems. A dual standard was chosen for several reasons. First off, although each has different methods and configurations for installation and support of typical server functions, they both run on the same underlying kernel structure and thus both with the same standard set of Linux commands and shells that is common for any distribution of Linux. Because of this, a lot of the knowledge learned by using one distribution can be applied when using another. Secondly, they both are very interoperable with each other. If one software application is developed and works on one it will also work or can be ported to another. In addition, they both come with lots of standard open source applications, utilities, and functions many of which are the same.

A vendor of embedded Linux-based KVM servers (keyboard, video, mouse servers) has agreed to acquire a vendor of embedded Linux-based console servers. Avocent says its $90 million acquisition of Cyclades will allow it to diversify its product offerings, while taking advantage of Linux's rapid growth in the enterprise server market.

Typically, installing Linux means donwloading (or buying) one or more ISO images, and then clicking through the install screens. In an effort to make Linux installs easier, some smart folks at HP developed LinuxCOE, where a user could choose some basic options through a web interface, and a small (30MB or less) ISO image is generated that can be used for a "hands-free" installation using either Kickstart, AutoYAST, or the Debian Preseed autoinstallers.

Just five days after Novell's OpenSUSE project released SUSE 10.1 Beta 1, the company on Thursday unveiled Beta 2, a bugfix version. As in Beta 1, the latest release supports the Intel and AMD x86 and x86-64 platforms as well as the PowerPC platform.

Advisories were released this week for ClamAV, CUPS, ImageMagick, phpMyAdmin, and several other packages. Distributions covered this week are Debian, Fedora Core, Gentoo, Mandriva, SUSE, and Ubuntu.

The problems with networked PCs are a modern-day plague for both librarians and network administrators. PCs crash, they freeze, they require constant updating and patching. End users amuse themselves by finding ways to circumvent whatever safeguards the network administrator has put in place. Depending on the age of the machine and the operating system installed, PCs display different desktops, a constant source of confusion for patrons. End users often intentionally or unwittingly introduce viruses into the network through them. And every few years, the library has to find funding resources to buy newer machines, because invariably the PCs become outdated and can no longer run the programs the library wants to use.