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FRAMINGHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 27, 2006--IDG World Expo today announced details of the conference program for LinuxWorld Conference & Expo(R), which will take place April 3-6, 2006 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. The world-class program will feature in-depth conference sessions focused on Linux as well as the broader range of open source technologies. Led by recognized experts in their respective fields, the conference sessions will offer attendees the opportunity to see the latest developments across the entire Linux and open source marketplace, and learn how to capitalize on the business value of these fast-growing technologies.

Linus Torvalds released the 2.6.15-rc5 release candidate kernel summarizing the changes since -rc4, "there's not much to say about this: people have been pretty good, and it's just a random collection of fixes in various random areas. The shortlog is actually pretty short, and it really describes the updates better than anything else." Read on for the shortlog.

Adrian Bunk followed up with a list of 6 known regressions in 2.6.16-rc5 as compared to 2.6.15:usb_submit_urb(ctrl) failed on 2.6.16-rc4-git10 kernel,Oops in Kernel 2.6.16-rc4 on Modprobe of saa7134.ko,saa7146: no devices created in /dev/dvb,S3 sleep hangs the second time - 600X,2.6.16-rc[34]: resume-from-RAM unreliable (SATA),total ps2 keyboard lockup from boot, andpsmouse starts losing sync in 2.6.16-rc2.

Want to keep an eye on what's going on in your home or office when you're not there? You can turn a Linux box into a motion detector by using an old webcam and Motion -- software for monitoring a Video4Linux device. User Level: Intermediate

We recently bought a Linux gaming console at work as a prize in a draw. Not thinking too much of it I packed it up and sent it off to the winner. A few days later I got an email claiming the device didn't work. So I emailed the parent company complaining that the instructions were less than clear and this is their reply.

There are various practices associated with software development that can be of great benefit to an IT department, but since few IT managers follow what goes on in the software engineering field, and even fewer come from a software engineering background, most managers are unaware of these ideas and technologies. This is unfortunate, as there are so many tools and techniques employed by programmers that could be put to good use in IT.

Google has become the de facto standard in the search arena. It's easy, quick and powerful. For those same reasons that the general user has gravitated to Google, so have the hackers. And as we all know, if the hackers use, the security professionals need to utilize it as well. And it doesn't hurt to have Johnny Long (with help from Ed Skoudis) showing you the ropes.

If you learned critical analysis in school, you may want to apply it to ferret out what the press has to say. In this close-up of the forms of articles we separate journalism from bigotry. For example, John Dvorak's writing has always come into question, especially when he pens Will Apple Adopt Windows? You don't have to call him names or say he's stopped taking his medications like the Mac sites do. Just get a handle on the content he provides and you can dismiss him quickly.

Do open source systems provide a better way of preventing bugs, or are their developers just cultural elitists?

[ED: Starts off a bit snide, but as it progesses the arguments become stronger for being open. - HC]

"In this article we aim to focus on the position which Free Software movement has in this more broad Free Culture movement, and to emphasize the reasons to why Free Software needs to be an integral part of Free Culture, that we wish to create and cultivate."

After years of open source projects like Linux and MySQL taking share from proprietary software companies, hardware makers like Cisco and Juniper get to experience the heart-stopping terror of open source hardware hitting the market. ... So far, the response from Cisco and Juniper has been a yawn.

They've got a new chief financial officr over at Sun Microsystems Inc. , and he's already acquiring a company known as a "knowledge driven" solution that significantly eases the management of open and mixed source server stacks.

Michael Lehman has been hired as CFO, replacing Steve McGowan, who will remain at Sun as executive vice president of Finance and will work closely with Lehman to ensure a seamless transition. McGowan announced his intentions to retire last October.

At 3GSM Congress E28 Limited and BridgePort Networks have showed a platform for dual-mode smartphones made by E28.

Welcome to this year's 9th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Written entirely by Robert Storey, this week's issue looks ahead at the upcoming 64-bit Mini-ITX processors, passes on a link to a freely downloadable copy of The Complete FreeBSD, and investigates "bcrypt" and "dm-crypt", the much-loved encryption utilities for the paranoid. In the first looks section, Robert investigates the newest OpenBSD-based live CDs - OliveBSD. Happy reading! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

IT managers planning for possible security threats in 2006 might be tempted to look back at some of the big security debacles of 2005 for inspiration.

The open and closed regions of the software world are poles apart, and not even the open source community can agree on the terminology. So, secure in the knowledge that fear, uncertainty and doubt are rife, how do you navigate the open source minefield?

Open source code generally evolves through the cooperation of a community of developers and is made available to the public, enabling anyone to make a copy, modify or redistribute it without paying royalties or licence fees. Traditionally, software vendors have distributed their products with no access to the source code, making modifications technically impossible.

Where do we begin when it comes to separating the open source words from the business reality? Where is open source in business and, in particular, in New Zealand business?

Like last year's PDA, donated by xtops.de, the Free Software Foundation Europe will be raffling off two HP notebooks to all active Fellows on 1 April this year. For two lucky Fellows, April Fool's Day will be anything but foolish.

Novell Inc. of Provo, Utah, has released the source code for its recently acquired open-source Linux security application, AppArmor, and has also set up a project site in hopes of attracting outside developers to further refine the program. The release of the software has sparked debate in the open-source community, however.

Rackspace Managed Hosting, a managed hosting provider, and JBoss, a professional open-source company, announced a partnership agreement to create Intensive Hosting for Linux/JBoss Edition, a managed Linux hosting solution specifically designed for complex Java Enterprise Edition applications running on JBoss Application Server.

Microsoft lately has been challenging Linux's suitability for older hardware, so it seems like a good time to look at Linux distributions that can run on older machines. I took six distributions for a test run on an old machine, and also tried software that turns old hardware into a thin client. The bottom line: Linux is still quite suitable for older hardware. It might not turn your aging PC into a powerhouse, but it will extend its lifespan considerably.

For these tests, I dug out Igor, an old PC that had been collecting dust in my closet. Igor is a Pentium II 233MHz machine with 64MB of RAM, an 8x CD-ROM drive, a 3GB hard drive, and an integrated ATI 3D Rage Pro video card with 4MB of video RAM. You can run Linux on older and slower machines, but this is the most under-powered machine I had available.