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No, IBM is not going to replace Windows with Linux on its 300 000-odd desktops. But it has ported its groupware suite, Workplace, to the Linux operating system, according to Joe Ruthvern, IBM SA's Linux and OSS business development manager. He also tells us that about 15 000 IBM employees currently use Red Hat Linux in the company, and that it is available on the IBM intranet.

[ED: Not as positively worded as many here would like, however, were MS to insist on some restrictive conditions IBM might put more effort into making its work force see the advantages of moving to the Linux desktop. Your move MS. - HC]

The great thing about open source software is that it is so malleable. In the Linux space, you can grab a kernel, and bunch of systems and applications software, and throw it all together and make your own personal distribution. But, ... then you have to support it yourself.

... best of both worlds. ... build your own Linux distribution, [add] systems and applications software stack, and punish someone else with ... testing it, and integrating it with your solution.

This is what the founders of rPath have imagined, and what its rPath Linux and rBuilder tool do.

[ED: Alas - I misread this, I thought it was mailable Linux - just think a positive use of SPAM. Aimed at Outlook, Windows Be Gone(r). Sorry got to go to the patent office - bbs - HC]

According to IT services provider, Unisys, open source software is set to have a similar impact on the marketplace as the internet did in the 1990s.

[ED: Nice, but will they being saying this next week when they remember their long lost love for all things MS? - HC]

Races SuSE to slice the penguin

I am posting this, despite its cynicism regarding even the existence of an Open Source community. This is an opinion piece where even here, despite the view presented imagines a situation where a company officer pays to develop code that is not critical to its business nor even with the code it shares with others using common business software. All parties gain by its release as (free?) open source code.

I have seen companies make decisions based not upon the quality of the product, but upon their estimate of the likelyhood of the vendor surviving to service its needs. Hence, those that are just takers where whatever community existed shrinks to nearly nothing, later they too may suffer lack of competent support.

Opinion: Dell is very unlikely to ever support a desktop Linux until there's either a clear winner, or there's enough in common among the major popular distributions that Dell can support all of them without undue effort. (DesktopLinux)

PRIMERGY BX630 Featuring AMD Opteron Processors Offers Lower Power Consumption, Scales From 2 to 8 Processors

SCO now has its own SCOServer twist on the LAMP stack. (Linux-Watch)

I recently had to upload some content to a Web site, and the only access available was via http://FTP. I needed an FTP client capable of uploading a directory structure recursively. I found what I needed in an application called NcFTP.

Races SuSE to slice the penguin

Dual-core is as good as it gets these days and even if you stretch a bit, a workstation with four physical cores typically is the limit even for enthusiasts. Tyan, however, demonstrates a solution that delivers an extra punch of performance: The "Personal Super Computer" (PSC) can hold up to eight Opteron or Pentium D CPUs for a total of 16 physical cores.

A market research firm, Radicati Group, is running an online survey, "2006 Messaging and Collaboration Survey", ostensibly designed to give paying customers preternatural insight into the mysteries of messaging. But the combination of its online nature and questions that ask if you intend to "stick with Domino as long as possible" suggest that the result will look more like a hit piece than a statistically valid survey.

The Linux vendor is expected to discuss building Xen virtualization capabilities into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 at a company event, and it may announce a Xen technology submission for inclusion in the Linux kernel.

Foreword: This whitepaper discusses the security challenges posed by voice over IP (VoIP) communications in wired and wireless devices such as VoIP servers, gateways, telephones, and mobile handhelds. The author describes a number of techniques that can be used by developers to help protect VoIP devices from security breeches.

Profiling is a technique for measuring where software programs consume resources, including CPU time and memory. This article provides a list of best-of-breed features you might look for in an ideal profiler and explains why aspect-oriented techniques are well suited to achieving some of those features. It also introduces you to the JDK 5.0 agent interface and walks you through the steps of using it to build your own aspect-oriented profiler.

Charles Schulz of the OpenOffice.org Native Lang confederation comments on the latest happenings on the Office scene, such as Microsoft's press release about MS Office 2007, and talks about the future of OpenOffice.org.

Software RAID provides an easy way to add redundancy or speed up a system without spending lots of money on a RAID adapter. OpenBSD includes support for software RAID using RAIDframe, which was ported from NetBSD, and supports RAID modes 0, 1, 4, 5.

Xandros has said that the retail giant, CompUSA®, is now selling the Xandros Desktop product in all of its stores, nationwide.

Gael Duval, CEO of Mandriva, creator of Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva Linux), has been let go (maybe fired) from the company. The information was leaked onto the Mandriva forums. Duval confirmed his departure from the company on his blog.

Infrastructure specialist LinuxIT Europe has teamed up with Red Hat Inc. to push Linux to small and medium-size businesses (SMB), a part of the market that has always been reluctant to embrace open source.