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In November, Real Networks opened its Rhapsody.com online music service to non-Windows clients, a venture widely touted as the first "legal" online music service available to Linux users. How does it measure up?

The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (POV-Ray) graphics software has existed for 15 years under a license designed to keep it free and open. But with continued confusion as to what that license allows, the POV-Ray developers are looking for something new.

Gentium is something new in fonts. Its design is a mixture of the practical and aesthetically pleasing. It support the diacritical marks needed to render a wide range of Latin characters, yet it is also designed for readability, compactness, and visual appeal. What is really unusual is that its designer, Victor Gaultney, has released it under a free licence and is developing it as a free and open source project.

There is a utility called service that can be used to shortcut the path of init (or rc) scripts on several platforms. The service utility is written in Perl. As an exercise service is being rewritten in C. The command needs to be able to do very few operations. The version presented in this text will have room for improvement requiring some additional functions and operational changes.

Email Battles reports that their unpublished Squid server was up for just 17 hours and 35 minutes before an attacker tried to use it as an open proxy. The story examines how the company used a program called ProxyJudge to find the perpetrator registered in Korea but located in Austin, Texas. The story also says: " if the Korean door-knocker had succeeded, our server would have been added to a list of open proxies."

Desktop Linux specialist Xandros Inc is targeting the education sector with Education Edition of its Xandros Desktop OS Linux operating system with prices starting at $10 per seat for student use.

Although Microsoft is becoming an increasingly formidable rival in the same space, IBM, Sun, Oracle, and many other vendors are now responding to renewed opportunities for Linux in department store environments, as retail chains like Circuit City, Pep Boys, and Urban Outfitters start to step to 100-percent Linux deployments on their store-level IT systems. Jacqueline Emigh reports from this year's National Retail Federation show.

Alcatel, Ericsson, Motorola, NEC, Nokia and Siemens launch industry alliance to boost the use of free software in the telecommunications arena. Better interoperability between providers is high on the new alliance's agenda.

A guide to why the Debian distro is a good choice

The rollout of ODF in Massachusetts is going well - but there are still hurdles ahead. Here's the current status and expected action date on each of them.

The company has been integrating large amounts of PC real estate into the processor, or the associated chipset, for some time. The graphics controller is one obvious example. But now it is looking at what constitutes a 'server' and starting to identify that functionality as targets it can integrate into its own architectures.

Many times before a hard drive goes completely bad there are signs foreshadowing its demise. If these signs are observed and recognized there is a good chance that the data on the drive can be saved. The window of time in which action any will be useful is quite small but if the proper precautions are taken there is a chance than a real problem can be avoided.

Linus Torvalds has weighed in on the debate over the draft of version 3 of the GPL in a post on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) this afternoon. Torvalds says that the Linux kernel "in general" has always been covered under version 2 of the GPL, and that that isn't going to change.

At the ceremony for the 2005 Free Software Awards, Richard Stallman presented Andrew Tridgell with the award for the advancement of free software. Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell was recognized for his work as originator and developer of the Samba project. Samba reverse-engineered Microsoft's version of the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, which is used for file-sharing and print services.

David Madie is on an unusual mission: He is filming a documentary about the African free and open source software movement and the inspiration for the film is well-know African free sofware advocate James Wire from Uganda.

Being 2006 and all, you would think it should be difficult to get excited about markup validation extensions for FireFox. Nevertheless, I have to say Joe Hewitt’s new offering Firebug has to be the most impressive new developer extension I’ve seen for a while (ok,ok,.. since IETab).

Helios had no illusions that this would be an easy sell. Oh, selling to the mainstream? That's a piece of cake. It's the elbows and thumbs to the eye from the Community that is amusing. Again, some argue that the Linux Community does not exist...only zealots and freeloaders...

Who controls your computer? If it's a Windows computer, not you. I swear I'll puke if I read one more cheery press release touting "Trustworthy Computing." Richard Stallman strips away the Newspeak and calls it "Treacherous Computing."...us old Linux geeks and other Free/Open Source Software users see the whole security issue as ridiculous, akin to devoting massive resources to developing bigger and better waders, instead of simply climbing out of the sewer. Call me cranky, but it sure seems stupid to continue to entrust one's data and business to a proven leaky, malware-friendly, anti-customer platform like Microsoft Windows.

Clearly, March of the Penguins is coming to a living room near you; and I'm not talking about the DVD release of the acclaimed penguin documentary. Last week's news of Motorola purchasing Swedish set-top box maker Kreatel Communications is another step towards the "Linux-ification" of the digital home.

SOCORRO, N.M., Jan. 25 /PRNewswire/ -- FSMLabs, (http://www.fsmlabs.com) today announced ARINC 653 scheduling is now available in RTLinuxPro(R). Designed for avionics control and advanced hardware-in-loop simulation, ARINC 653 provides a fully protected and partitioned scheduling environment configured using a standard XML format. The ARINC scheduler has been added to FSMLabs' industry leading Process Space Development Domain (PSDD) product which executes real-time threads in the address space of Linux or BSD processes. Richard Bond, in his work as Principal Real-Time Specialist for Lockheed-Martin developed an RTLinuxPro based simulator, contributes: