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Linux has always made one hell of a server operating system. Anyone who's ever administered a server (or many of them) can tell you why. It really needs no explanation here, as most of our readers already know this for law. The more interesting news, in my opinion anyway, has been that over the past several years Linux has made some serious inroads on the desktop platform. As Linux becomes a more viable contender for the consumer desktop market (and it is... slowly), the need to make it stand out from the competition just gets greater and greater. Some might see this as functionality, others look and feel, still others might see it as a bit of both.

TimeSys this week launched a new subscription-based service allowing embedded developers to "roll their own Linux." The LinuxLink subscription service targets processor architectures from Intel, Freescale, ARM and MIPS. TimeSys said it offers on-demand access to components relevant to embedded developers' design requirements and target processor. This is different, the company said, from traditional Linux distros that determine feature sets of applications and components.

When you're on the road and need to connect to the Internet, sometimes the only way to do it is through a cellular GPRS or GSM connection. Wi-Fi wireless access points are not always readily available, and sometimes are not secure enough for private communications. Why not hook up your GSM/GPRS-capable cell phone to your GNU/Linux-based computer and connect that way? The free GPRS Easy Connect utility makes it easier for you to do just that.

Yesterday, Sam Hiser called to let me know he placed an article in the pending queue at Lxer. "It's a scoop," he said. Turns out he was right. The article made the major media wires shortly after hitting Google News at 3 PM on Wednesdy.

Neoware is shipping a ruggedized thin client designed to support industrial applications such as retail distribution centers, transportation hubs, and manufacturing shop floors. The e900 comes stock with a Neoware's custom embedded Linux OS, but can be modified to run other OSes, the company says.

The announcement of a new Forensic File System led into another discussion of kernel tainting and the legality of binary-only kernel modules.

INSTEAD of clearing the air about open source with its Get the Facts campaign, Microsoft is clouding the open source debate by taking advantage of people’s limited knowledge of Linux. This is according to members of the open source community in response to comments made by Martin Taylor, head of Redmond’s competitive strategy and architect of the Get the Facts campaign, in a recent interview with Reseller News. In the article Taylor said competing against Linux has become easier since providers such as Red Hat and SuSE Linux, which is now part of Novell, have become more commercialised. However, Con Zymaris, director of Open Source Industry Australia and CEO of Cybersource, a Melbourne-based Linux and open source solution provider, says this argument is a fallacy as these vendors have always been commercially focused.

Over the past few years SATA has become a standard interface on hard drives and is starting to show up in many peripheral devices. Today we're taking a look at two similar hard drives to see how well SATA is supported in Linux.

The third stable major Linux Kernel update of the year, v. 2.6.13 was released this week. The new kernel includes a long list of updates, a few enhancements and even an odd regression. Among the new enhancements to the Linux kernel is "Kexec," which allows for a fast reboot without the need to go through a bootloader.

Ease of Installation, better Compatibility and integrated Performance enhancements featured

Plans for an Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF) will open up new opportunities for open source developers and systems integrators, executives said at EclipseWorld. At the New York conference this week, Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich said the evolution of the Eclipse Java IDE into a full-fledged application lifecycle management (ALM) platform will spur more commercial activity on the open source development environment over the next 12 months.

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.