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The roots of the open content movement go back to 1971, before free software, before even the Internet existed, when Michael Hart was given an operator's account worth $100 million on a Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the University of Illinois.

This in an interesting move by LPI since they have long been established as providing "vendor-neutral" Linux certifications. I suppose with the success of the various vendor-affiliated certifications (Linux and otherwise) on the market, that they saw a way to attract more people to take their exams.

Recently I've been on a mission to raise awareness of KDE and Konqueror in the wider Internet community as well as prepare to make the KDE 4 web browser a top-tier secure application. As part of those ongoing efforts, I have been attending and participating in various workshops and conferences. Recently I had the opportunity to participate in the W3C Workshop on Transparency and Usability of Web Authentication in New York City. Read on for the report.

Linux World 2006 Boston is in full swing, and PCBurn is updating our coverage of the event to bring you some of the happenings from the showroom floor and what's being said at the keynotes.

The seasoned linux power user or admin won't need to read this article but for those of you who are Linux newbies, you'll want to have a look. The Linux file structure and file permissions are very different than those you'll find on a Windows computer.

At FUDCon Boston on Friday, the members will discuss the dismantling of their Foundation

OSNews reports - Normally only paid members get to beta test future Linspire releases, but the Italian branch of Linspire has opened the Italian beta program for Linspire 5.1 for everyone. Now, the catch obviously is that, well, everything's Italian, but with some guesswork and a dictionary you'll get there. Italian has a good one-to-one correspondence between vowels/consonants and sounds, so pronunciation shouldn't be too hard.

OSDir gives us an idea of what the next Linspire might look like in the Linspire 5.1.365 (Italian) Screenshot Tour.

nUbuntu.org reports - The main goal of nUbuntu is to create a distribution which is derived from the Ubuntu distribution, and add packages related to security testing, and remove unneeded packages, such as Gnome, Openoffice.org, and Evolution.

OSDir took this nUbuntu release through its paces in the nUbuntu FOTP Alpha Screenshot Tour.

More Than 10,000 LinuxWorld Attendees Will Register on Wyse Thin Clients for Second Consecutive Year

A bill has been introduced in Minnesota that would require all Executive branch agencies to "use open standards in situations where the other requirements of a project do not make it technically impossible to do this."

The text of the bill is focused specifically on "open data formats." While the amendment does not refer to open source software, the definition of "open standards" that it contains would be conducive to open source implementations of open standards. The fact that such a bill has been introduced is significant in a number of respects. First, the debate over open formats will now be ongoing in two U.S. states rather than one. Second, if the bill is successful, the Minnesota CIO will be required to enforce a law requiring the use of open formats, rather than be forced to justify his or her authority to do so. Third, the size of the market share that can be won (or lost) depending upon a vendor's compliance with open standards will increase. And finally, if two states successfully adopt and implement open data format policies, other states will be more inclined to follow.

"My impression is that the open source community is producing software defect patches at an extremely fast rate," Ben Chelf, the chief technology officer at Coverity, said in the statement.

  

Employee turnover in most organizations runs high. So unless you run a small shop with a stable user base, you need to learn how to clean up after an employee leaves. Too many so-called system administrators do not understand the stakes involved when they manage users.

Wind River Enhances Commercial Grade Quality Linux Consumer Device Software Platform with Support for Intel's New Monahans Processor Family

The news comes as Microsoft developers announced yesterday that to encourage consistency between browsers, IE7 will be using the Firefox RSS icon to represent RSS and RSS-related features.

Pep Boys, Harley-Davidson, Magna Steyr Illustrate Value of IBM-Based SOA Entry Points to Improve Customer Service, Boost Productivity and Help Reduce Supply Chain Cycles

UNDP-intitiative International Open Source Network has released a series of free and open source primer publications. Frederick Noronha takes a look at the first in the series.

Recapping two busy weeks' worth of news, events and releases in the Ruby world.

If you've always admired the Apple OS X desktop theme and layout but aren't ready to drop a load of cash on an Apple machine (or if you want to stick with free software), this article from Jem Matzan will show you how to make GNOME look and feel more like OS X, with some limitations.

Tired of the strangle-hold Microsoft has on the software world? There is a viable alternative that people are turning to: open source software. What do open source applications look like? Download this CD-ROM and install some of the applications on your Windows computer to see. The idea behind the CD-ROM is that all the applications are open source, and they also exist to run on Linux computers. Linux is a ubiquitous operating system that can be found in everything from home electronics to personal computers to some of the world's largest and most powerful computers.

If Windows is a family sedan and basic Linux is an armored car, then Red Hat Linux Desktop is a mainline battle tank.

Using the Security-Enhanced Linux subsystem, this version of Linux looks at security on a program-to-program basis and not a user-to-user one. This means that an admin can set the security levels and permissions of an individual program on the network regardless of who the user is. A word processor, for example, may be able to do basic functions and save and load files to a local disk, but be restricted from accessing network drives or running macros. And default settings can be configured so that if a virus should arrive, it will find itself restricted and unable to do anything outside the security protocols, such as replicating itself throughout the network.