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Eager to promote the"Linux point of view," IBM sponsored a research report praising the low TCO, and other advantages, of Linux.

IBM is kicking some total cost of ownership (TCO) dirt in Microsoft's face, releasing a numbers survey that claims Linux is cheaper to deploy and manage than Windows. An IBM-sponsored Robert Frances Group study found it is 40 per cent cheaper to buy, implement and run an application server on an x86 server running Linux than on a similar server running Windows. Robert Frances polled IT executives at 20 mid-sized and large companies with 250 or more employees. Click Here

Some 16,000 students in the mountainous South Tyrol province of Bolzano in northern Italy will find 2,460 classroom computers upgraded from Windows to Linux when they return to school this month. New multi-language educational applications resulting from this project are to be released to the open source community, the project's co-director told DesktopLinux.com.

At first, looking for free and open source software (FOSS) tools to generate Windows Help files seems an oxymoron. "Most open source projects are intended to help people break out of Microsoft's grip, rather than break in," one poster responded when I queried about the topic on the technical writers' mailing list. Yet, surprisingly, free Help Authoring Tools (HAT) do exist. The trouble is that some require expertise beyond that of those most likely to use them, and none can match the features or ease of use of major proprietary programs. As a result, none of the three applications I unearthed -- AurigaDoc, export from DocBook, and HelpMaker -- is completely satisfactory.

Many people are already convinced that the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) development model is superior to proprietary methods. Others see strong ethical and philosophical reasons to prefer it. But what's less clear is how to make money from it -- not to Bill Gates scope but by building a strong company or making a decent living. How can you make any money when you give away your work for free?

KDE's Kontact personal information manager acts as a centralized viewing and editing interface for email, contacts, to-do list, calendar, and notes. Kontact provides you with a Summary view of all the important information you have stored on computer. It also warns you when birthdays and anniversaries are fast approaching, and can even tell you the weather conditions in as many cities as you set it up to show. It's pretty good-looking to boot.

This is an excerpt from the ExtremeTech book, Hacking Firefox: More Than 150 Hacks, Mods, and Customizations. This chapter shows you how to speed up page rendering, tune Firefox to your CPU, optimize memory and caching, and more.

A recent report by analyst firm Gartner says that despite recent hype around open source desktop software, technologies such as Linux and OpenOffice.org are not posing challenges to Microsoft in enterprise desktop computing.

Taiwanese ODM/OEM DigitalMicron has used Linux as the embedded software platorm inside a wireless 802.11b security camera targeting commercial security and surveillance applications. The IP500 features JPEG/MPEG-4 compression, a microphone, remote pan-and-tilt, TV-out, and controls for up to four lights, alarm systems, and other security devices.

JBoss, Inc., has unveiled the JBoss Migration Program to meet growing demand from enterprises to move from costly proprietary application servers to the open source JBoss Application Server.

from the imitation-is-the-highest-form-of-flattery dept. An anonymous reader writes "There is a new plugin available for IE that can make Internet Explorer resemble Firefox by adding tabbed browsing capabilities and an integrated search box. Moreover, the plugin improves IE's privacy and security by integrating a firewall designed to block out Internet exploits, phishing sites, spammers, spyware and worms, with a special HTTP filter that removes private data, and an anti-spyware tool that can identify and remove all pests in less then 10 seconds"

Sun Microsystems is giving more of its code to the open source community under its new licensing scheme, this time with its JavaServer Faces (JSF) reference implementation.

First Reported on Lxer -ED

The State of Massachusetts -- home of The Boston Tea Party, The Battle of Dorchester Heights and other underdog victories -- today released the draft document (for review & comment up until September 9) which would be the basis of the State's policy on acceptable document file formats.

Among other information standards issues covered in the document, Massachusetts declares the following formats to be the targets of migration policies:

-OASIS OpenDocument for Text, Spreadsheet & Presentation files (.odt, .ods, .odp) Migration Target: January 1, 2005
-Plain Text Format for Text files (.txt)
-Hypertext Document Format for Web Pages (.html)
-Portable Document Format for Other Documents (.pdf)

Among the applications supporting OpenDocument are OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 and 2.0, StarOffice 8, KOffice 1.4, Workplace as well as, to some partial degree, AbiWord, eZ publish, Knomos, Scribus and TextMaker. Others will follow.

The State CIO requests our comments on the document by September 9, 2007.

The media buzz about Linux's alleged failure on the desktop probably means Linux is continuing to take a significant share of Microsoft's market - maybe even more than we think. Why else would the big Redmond company's minions write such claims? Disinformation provides an insight into someone's fears. The noise level has gone up and that probably means Linux is creating trouble for Windows.

A lawyer acting on behalf of Linus Torvalds has hailed as "favourable" the fact one in nine Australian vendors targeted by a letter campaign asking them to relinquish any legal claim to the 'Linux' name have agreed to do so.

Mepis has been known for some time now for creating a very solid usable Debian based distro which has been worked and reworked into a unique and very easy to like Live-CD based Distro. MepisLite takes this to a new level by working out the bloat from the base in order to allow it to run smoothly and reliably on older equipment. According to the website: MEPISLite offers the 2.4.29 and 2.6.10 kernels because they seem to work better with older hardware. There are no plans to upgrade to a newer 2.6 kernel at this time. MEPISLite is an entry level version of desktop MEPIS designed for home users. It has been used successfully with as little as a 2 GB hard drive and a Pentium 2 processor with 128MB of RAM. MEPISLite preinstalls a full complement of software including KOffice, Kontact, and Firefox.

The OpenOffice.org team earlier this week released beta two of the forthcoming version 2.0 of the office suite, more than five months after beta one.

Microsoft offers to co-sponsor a Linux vs. Windows study with the OSDL, but the OSDL says thanks, but no thanks.

Korea Post, Korea's postal service agency, Wednesday announced it will begin adopting the free, open-source operating system known as Linux to its desktop computers nationwide on Thursday, replacing the Windows operating system produced by U.S. software giant Microsoft Corp. In the first stage, Korea Post will install the Linux-based operating system on 4,748 desktop computers for customer use in 2,800 branches nationwide, the state-run mail service agency said in a statement. The move is aimed to join the South Korean government's efforts to promote the use of the Linux system in the public sector, Korea Post said. The replacement is expected to help Korea Post save 850 million won ($818,550) per year, the agency said. By the end of the year, Korea Post also said it plans to adopt the Linux software for its Internet banking and payment system to replace Microsoft Windows, which, users say, is more prone to viruses and hackers.

This article concludes "Companies find that their Linux server setups are less hardware-hungry than Windows-based systems, if the results of a recent survey are to be believed." The poll favors Linux and the author of this article misleads readers. Perhaps the title should be "Shilling for Microsoft". -ED