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Exhausted, but happy about the work we've done I'm now back in Stuttgart. I have attended the 3 intensive days of discussions and work that were the Desktop Linux Printing Summit, jointly organized by OSDL (John Cherry) and Linuxprinting.org (Till Kamppeter). It was held in Atlanta, hosted by Lanier at their Education Center. The hosting was made possible by Uli Wehner. Uli is one of Lanier's senior support and testing engineers (responsible for Lanier's ever-growing business of non-Windows system printing); he is also quite active on the Linuxprinting.org user support forums.

Altogether we had nearly 40 people there. They represented a broad range of backgrounds. See yourself:

Red Hat, the world's largest Linux company is trying to grow into one of the world's largest software companies while at the same time keeping a grip on its Linux assets, says Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols in this edition of the Cyber Cynic podcast.

Linux afficionado Con Zymaris believes that the onset of dual boot Apple Macintoshes, running both Mac OSX and Windows, will be a boon for the cause of Linux and open source software. Zymaris, the CEO of Cybersource, an open source consultancy which has been in operation since 1991, says dual boot Macs will have minimal impact on the Macintosh space but may well convince many Mac users to jump ship to Linux.

Getting started with what appears to be a very powerful, very complex idea (in computing, at least) is often a daunting proposition, and Linux cluster computing is no exception. There is so much to learn! So many things can go wrong! It might require new, specialized, expensive hardware and software! But wait!

Most conversations about the cost of free software deal with its effects on the software industry. Microsoft people often talk about how much money the proprietary software industry can add to a developing country's economy. At the same time, proprietary software vendors tell us the total cost of ownership (TCO) for their products is often less than cost of running competing open source products, even though in developing countries the cost of labor is almost always low enough that license fees for proprietary software are huge by comparison. All these conflicting numbers get wearisome. Perhaps we need to look beyond the software industry -- and beyond software pricing -- to see what effects free and open source software have on a country's economy.

Creative Commons (CC) offers licenses that allow you to publish material with clear-cut licensing terms that reserve some of your rights while giving the public others. CC offers a number of tools to implement the licenses into the metadata of various media formats. Until recently, its ccPublisher program, which allows you to upload CC-licensed content to the Internet Archive, had official binary releases only for Apple Macintosh OS X and Microsoft Windows XP. This is about to change, with the upcoming release of ccPublisher 2.

Heads up to all authors, musicians, photographers, etc. It will be great having ccPublisher available for GNU/Linux. - dcparris

eCosCentric has added CAN (controller area network) bus capabilities to its commercially supported open source RTOS (real-time operating system) for deeply embedded systems. eCosPro-CAN initially supports ARM and PowerPC chips from Philips and Freescale, and targets automotive and industrial control systems.

[Check out the eCos license. Interesting... - dcparris]

This is the first part of a short series in which we illustrate the development of a web project from beginning to end. These illustrations are intended to show you a more complete picture of a web development effort, spanning multiple technologies to accomplish a single objective.

The search advertising company will support another Summer Of Code this year, where Google student developers stipends to create new open source programs or to help currently established projects.

Try KDE is a new resource listing ways that you can try out KDE without commiting to a full GNU/Linux or BSD install. It includes links to live cds, VMware player images and Klik bundles as well as links to KDE desktops available over NX, with explanations of these technologies. It is linked to from the KDE frontpage and will be updated regularly as more resources are discovered. You the community can help us out, by sending your comments and suggestions to the email address listed at the foot of the Try KDE page.

Mozilla Corp. late Thursday updated its Firefox browser to patch a mega-batch of 24 vulnerabilities, the bulk of them tagged "critical."

This article takes a "Windows/Linux" interoperability approach documenting the author's experiences with a hard drive install of Knoppix over 18 months ago. For example, the author describes how he configured Linux to use Thunderbird folders from his Windows install, and how he runs Windows apps in Linux using CrossOver Office. Unlike many Linux users, the author is not averse to using commercial LInux software if necessary - such as Nero for Linux.

Mozilla Latest News about Mozilla Foundation on Thursday made it easier for Mac users to browse the Web with Firefox. The open source software developer released a new version of its browser with more Mac support and several security Microsoft Free Security Tools & Updates fixes.

Multiple vulnerabilities have been identified in Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Suite, SeaMonkey, and Thunderbird, which may be exploited by remote attackers to take complete control of an affected system, bypass security restrictions, or disclose sensitive information.

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) exists to help its 1.2 million members "become more profitable and successful." The NAR provides buying power, education, government policy influence, and the latest technology. In fact, NAR has its own IT department, dedicated to making a real estate agent's job easier through the use of open source technology, called the Center for Realtor Technology (CRT).

Following the release of four alpha and nine beta versions, the OpenSUSE Linux project on April 13 unveiled the first release candidate of version its 10.1 distribution. OpenSUSE v10.1 RC1 is made up of five CD iso images for i386 and x86-64 architectures.

The Pacific Telehealth and Technology Hui released today an upgraded, open-source version of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ VistA health care information system software. Its new features include a streamlined installation process and updated patient registration, scheduling, pharmacy and laboratory modules.

This week, Debian, Gentoo, Mandriva, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu released updates to address security problems with the following packages: ClamAV, Xpdf, OpenVPN, libphp-adodb, Moodle, MPlayer, sash, Cacti, CMFPlone, Xscreensaver, and several others. Neither FreeBSD nor Fedora released security updates.

Paradox: as software increasingly becomes available for free, developers keep trying to foist more of it on us--along with lots of extras (call it, oh, say, spam) we don't need. In the days when we paid real dollars for software, all we got in the box was what we paid for. Now that the stuff is increasingly backed by advertising and by co-marketing deals (but not by technical support), we hapless users have to spend our time fending off vendors' constant offers to become our new best friends.

This guy should try FOSS. We don't do that to our users. - dpcarris

I enjoy x-windows as much as the next person, but I've found that text-based applications are the best way to work with information that is essentially text-based. Most direct communication, including E-Mail, Instant Messaging(IM) and Internet Relay Chat(IRC), fall into this category. I will touch upon these three communication methods in this article, and provide the text-based solution that I use.

But first, I will introduce screen.

From the introduction on the site:

"Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells ... Programs continue to run when their window is currently not visible and even when the whole screen session is detached from the users terminal."