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Prepare for LPI certification with developerWorks tutorials! The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) certifies Linux system administrators at two levels. Each certification level has two exams: the 101 and 102 exams for junior-level certification (cerification level 1), and the 201 and 202 exams for intermediate-level certification (cerification level 2).

With globalization considered one of the key factors in IBM's restructuring, Big Blue is scouting for new IT talent with numerous openings in Russia, China, Brazil and India--as well as the U.S.

Goodbye checkboxes, hello preview pane. No more client refreshes, no more "Move…" button. Now you can just hit the delete key on your keyboard and watch the message immediately disappear - instead of clicking a checkbox, hitting a delete button, and waiting for the page to refresh

Quick -- name a Canadian-made computer-programming language. Time's up. If you answered "Java," that's true enough -- its originator, University of Calgary graduate James Gosling, created the language for Sun Microsystems Inc. But the top prize goes to those who answered "PHP." Ten years ago this summer, Rasmus Lerdorf created the wildly popular Web-development language while working at the University of Toronto. Mr. Lerdorf, who returned to the city last week as keynote speaker at the PHP Works conference, is also a University of Waterloo graduate and worked for a number of years at Bell Canada, but is currently employed by search engine giant Yahoo Inc. in California.

Micro/sys is offering a free Linux development kit along with first orders of its new XScale-based PC/104 SBC (single-board computer). Aimed at point-of-sale terminals and industrial control panels, the SBC1670 includes a color flat-panel display controller, audio, debounced keypad inputs, and several PC-style interfaces.

I wanted to do my part and set the record straight about something Oracle is unfairly labeled as: the idea that unlike its competitors, Oracle is not a supporter of industry standards and produces proprietary software to lock customers in and trap them forever.

Over a million and a half copies of the Opera browser have been downloaded since the application was offered up free to any taker on Tuesday, the company claimed on its Web site.

Powerscale4ppc (Power and Frequency Scaling for the IBM PowerPC 970) is an IBM free-trial emerging technology power management solution that demonstrates a power management implementation for the PPC970FX and CPC925 bridge chips on the Maple-D PPC970FX evaluation platform running on Linux.

Massachusetts has finalized a proposal to move away from proprietary document formats to open standards based on XML, which would eliminate Microsoft Office as an option for creating new documents. Microsoft responded harshly to the plan, calling it "inconsistent and discriminatory." The final Enterprise Technical Reference Model version 3.5 was completed Wednesday following a period of public comment and a "lengthy discussion" at the September meeting of the Massachusetts IT Advisory Board. A draft of the proposal was published in late August detailing the changes.

Typically, people use Red Hat Network to download patches using the errata updates. I use it often, and I can tell you that it can do a lot more than that. I've used Red Hat Network successfully in the past, so I was happy to get my hands on a demo of Red Hat Network 4, which is in the process of being released. Before I drill down into RHN4, I have to say RHN4's new features are cool, particularly the ones that enable you to manage Unix-based Solaris servers and monitor systems more effectively. In this tip, I review the overall features of Red Hat Network 4, describing its different types of configuration and architecture and the improvements in the new release. To illustrate some points, I use sample screenshots, courtesy of Red Hat, from an older version, Satellite, but these features work the same as in the new release.

Sample Chapter is provided courtesy of Sams.

Look for Microsoft's lobbying againsts MassGov's OpenDocument file format decision to reach an absurd, even Kafka-esque, pitch throughout the rest of this year.

For the past two years, the industry has inundated you with messages that you've reached a new plateau in high-speed connectivity. Around 25 percent of the world's computer users now have at least a cable modem or DSL connection; of course, this implies that speed is no longer an issue. And, as such, throwing huge images or Flash movies on to a Web site is now fine! I mean, if everyone has all this bandwidth, why not use it?

Oracle's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco is winding down, and the fifth richest American took some questions from the 35,000 assembled for the gathering. InformationWeek reported that future applications developed for Project Fusion could be certified with IBM's DB2. Microsoft's SQL Server would be a candidate as well, but not open-source favorites like MySQL or PostGreSQL. "It's a nontrivial process to supply certification…. IBM is much better equipped to go through it. I'm not sure I can say that for these other databases," he said to InformationWeek.

This week, advisories were released for turqstat, centericq, lm-sensors, kdebase, python, XFree86, Mailutils, Shorewall, mozilla, mod_ssl, clam, mod_ssl, Zebedee, umount, squid, and mod_ssl. The distributors include Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, and Red Hat.

The recent court decision on Blizzard Entertainment's Battle.net (also reported by Slashdot) does not deal a death blow to reverse engineering by any means. But it resembles the June ruling on Grokster in that it weakens an important right of technologists. Just as the Grokster case made it harder to develop technologies that carry audio, video, etc., without directly outlawing those technologies, so the Blizzard case insidiously eats away at the right to do reverse engineering, without directly attacking the legal foundation that protects reverse engineering. So this case marks not, perhaps, a major precendent, but another inch-long drift of the continental shelf in American law toward making established companies harder to challenge, and making both competition and innovation less likely.

After seeing the same mistakes repeated by different IT managers over the years, I've noticed a pattern of common errors. Here are the five common mistakes, along with tips for avoiding them.

Code has been published that exploits one of the flaws patched in the latest Firefox and Mozilla suite releases

The Linux Mark Institute, set up by Linus Torvalds in 2002 to protect the Linux trademark, has denied reports that it has "failed" to register the Linux trademark in Australia and clarified its position on Linux trademark licensing.

The generally accepted path for introducing new code into the 2.6 Linux kernel is to first have it merged into Andrew Morton [interview]'s -mm kernel, and then after sufficient testing to have it merged into Linus Torvald's mainline kernel. In a recent thread on thelkml, this process was briefly discussed. Linus noted, "one issue is that I actually worry that Andrew will at some point be where I was a couple of years ago - overworked and stressed out by just tons and tons of patches." He went on to acknowledge that Andrew has written and enhanced numerous patch tracking tools, and that git merging helps, "but it still worries me," Linus said. "If Andrew burns out, we'll all suffer hugely."

Andrew replied, "I'm doin OK." He went on to explain, "patch volume isn't a problem [with regards to] the simple mechanics of handling them. The problem we have at present is lack of patch reviewing bandwidth. I'll be tightening things up in that area. Relatively few developers seem to have the stomach to do a line-by-line through large patches, and it would be nice to refocus people a bit on that. Christoph's work is hugely appreciated, thanks." He also suggested that the number of major features lined up for the kernel have been slowing down, hinting that some day the kernel will be a completed project, "as I said, famous last words. But we have to finish this thing one day ;)"