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Commentary: Well, they've done it again. In prime-time. With malice and aforethought. The duplicitous droogs, the denizens of deep-doodoo, I'm talking about Bill Gates' Microsoft: caught in a bald-faced lie about HD DVD-ROM discs. This is news? Not any more than the fact it's hot in Texas this summer or that Katrina caused a lot of damage. It is, after all, the Microsoft way: dishonesty in all things.

There is a real danger that millions of them will end up either unused or, worse, being dumped. We’re increasingly being prompted to pass our unwanted PCs but as far as I can see there aren’t any console recycling schemes. Yet both the Xbox and the Playstation 2 are just computers, and although they are shipped as dedicated games systems they can do other things. Sony provides an official Linux for the PlayStation 2, based on the Red Hat kernel, and it comes with a collection of libraries to let games developers use the specialised graphics hardware that makes it such a good gaming platform

For 10 years, Danny Rimer was in the thick of the startup action in Silicon Valley as an investment banker and venture investor. In 2002 he gave it all up to move to London to open the European office for VC firm Index Ventures. At the time it may have seemed an odd career move. Silicon Valley-style venture investing was on the downswing in Europe, in favor of more old-fashioned and safer buyout deals.

Don Rosenberg's review in LWM (Vol. 3, issue 4) of Larry Rosen's book, Open Source Licensing, did double-duty as a platform for FUD about the GNU GPL.

In an e-mail exchange with BusinessWeek Online editors, Torvalds discusses his thoughts on where open source is heading and the challenges the Linux community faces. Edited excerpts of the exchange follow:

Novell Inc. Latest News about Novell has announced what it is dubbing the first cross-platform systems-management suite that allows businesses to manage their Windows workstations from aLinux Latest News about Linux platform.

Novell Zenworks 7 Suite automates lifecycle management across desktops, laptops, servers and handheld devices, reducing management costs and improving security Latest News about Security across the organization, according to the Waltham, Mass.-based organization.

This is a step by step guide for setting up a custom Debian firewall for your home or office network.

Sun is taking a new approach to rolling out its trusted version of Solaris. Rather than a completely separate version of Solaris, it's now in "early access" for something called Trusted Extensions, which overlay Solaris 10.

f you are located in or near the Birmingham area in the United Kingdom and are interested in the use of Linux on the desktop in schools, there is a free workshop on Oct. 11 you might want to attend. In this workshop, run by OpenAdvantage, leading figures from open source in education will present real-life examples of open source use in schools. They will show how open source has enabled greater access to software, lower costs, and easier maintenance across school IT departments.

Updates to the open-source mail client correct a serious URL parsing vulnerability affecting Linux users.

mperorLinux has announced the Raven Tablet, the ThinkPad X41 by Lenovo, to the Linux world with a 1.5 GHz Pentium-M, 1.5 GB RAM and a 60 GB hard drive, built-in ethernet and WiFi.

If you're running a Linux desktop in some dark sub-basement somewhere, preferrably with the Gnome desktop environment, checkout GnoTime 2.2. A particulary propeller-headed buddy is using this, and it looked pretty good--for something that is very obviously designed with a programmer's concept of attractive UI. Still, so many product management features, it can actually do some good if you feel like worming your way up the learning curve. I'm wondering why nobody has put an RSS publishing feature in so the whole thing could be pumped out to a Web server: Insta-ProjectBlog. TinyERP and Open for Business are two more worthwhile pings.

The Fink project, which began in December 2000, has two goals. It aims to port all this software to Mac OS X ("porting") and makes it available for install ("packaging"). As a full package management system, based on Debian's apt system, it installs and uninstalls packages, tracks dependencies, installs the packages that are needed, updates the packages, etc. Bottom line: installing Unix software on Mac OS X with Fink is a piece of cake (most of the time). There can be challenges, however, and I'll cover those in a minute.

Browsers always bring out the passion in readers, perhaps because they've become such a personal extension of our computing experience. Did you ever borrow someone else's computer to check out something online? It feels awkward, right, like going through their clothes drawers. Even if it has the same browser that you use, everyone configures their browser to their own taste, so it's different.

In a conversation that began as a request to include theSAS Transport Layer in the mainline Linux kernel, there was an interesting thread regarding specifications. Linux creator Linus Torvalds began the discussion saying, "a 'spec' is close to useless. I have _never_ seen a spec that was both big enough to be useful _and_ accurate. And I have seen _lots_ of total crap work that was based on specs. It's _the_ single worst way to write software, because it by definition means that the software was written to match theory, not reality."

ShrinkTo5 announced version 1.52 of its open source product. Designed as a cross-platform DVD copy engine, the software enables you to shrink and copy an entire DVD or the main movie only. You will also discover the ability to manually select the DVD content to copy, which lets you get more space for the main movie and achieve better quality.

Eolas and the University of California sued Microsoft in 1999, and many were stunned when a jury agreed with the claim in 2003 and awarded damages of $520.6 million plus interest. That verdict was upheld in January 2004 and a Chicago District Court imposed an injunction on Microsoft, banning it from distributing the infringing software. But the ban was stayed pending an appeal, and in March this year an Appeals Court granted Microsoft a reprieve.

If Dell is to continue to grow, making inroads into the enterprise market is essential. Chavis wants the world to know that her group is doing just that, with the help of an unlikely ally: Linux.
It may seem ironic that a free OS could become such an important profit driver for a company the size of Dell, but Chavis takes it in stride. Asked where Linux will take Dell next, her answer is simple: "All the way up the food chain."

Chip and boardmaker Via has partnered with an online retailer to create a car PC targeting in-car navigation and infotainment applications. The $300 "Voom PC" is supported by a media-oriented embedded Linux operating system, and is based on one of Via's newest, most powerful mini-ITX motherboards.

I sat down for a Q&A with Pat Gibney, IBM Director, Software Group Componentization to dig into IBM's Community Source development strategy. IBM has been touting the benefits of open source for years . Taking that to the next level, IBM developers are now applying a methodology borrowed from the open source community to create its own commercial software.