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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

Softletter announced that it will host "Marketing and Selling Open Source Software 2005", a two-day event for open source software vendor executives, sales and marketing managers. The event will take place October 6-7 in Burlington, Mass, and Nov. 10-11 in San Jose, Calif. Well-known guest speakers on the preliminary agenda include John Roberts, Kevin Carmony, Matt Asay, Andrew Aitken, John Weathersby, Maria Winslow, and James Curtin.

The Linux edition Cherry CyMotion Master keyboard is coming to the United States. According to the German company, the $65 Linux-centric keyboard will be available from major US technology distributors late this fall, following the port of its drivers to Red Hat Linux. I tested the keyboard this week, and I rank it "recommended".

TJ, the director of IT at a manufacturing company, explains what happened when he tried to move his company to open source...

lcamtuf (Michał Zalewski) has now written a book "Silence on the Wire". And o'reilly made an interview... Recently the eccentric security researcher Michal Zalewski published his first book, entitled Silence on the Wire: A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks. Because the book is everything except a security manual, Federico Biancuzzi chose to interview Michal and learn more about his curious approach to information security. Among other things, they discussed the need for randomness, how a hacker mind works, unconventional uses for search engines such as Google, and applying AI to security tools.

Gov. Ted Kulongoski pledged Tuesday to do his part to make Oregon an attractive place for open-source software development, promising to raise the state's profile within the open-source movement and to raise the movement's profile inside Oregon.

New users tend to make some common mistakes when trying out GNU/Linux for the first time. The reasons for these mistakes are varied: because GNU/Linux is a different kind of operating system; because Windows fosters bad habits; because users choose the wrong distribution; because Mercury is in retrograde; and myriad other possibilities. Here are some solutions to five commonly encountered GNU/Linux problems.

Linux and open source win the race against Microsoft for Kinetic, a start-up business that develops sports performance technology. Co-director of the company, Rob Shugg said he uses Linux wherever he can to save money, and attract the quality developers and community support required to create powerful tools and applications. "We started the company with our own savings and some money from Business ACT's Knowledge Fund, so there was no way we could afford anything else, but in truth, we never even considered buying any software, everything we needed was available on Linux," he said. "We use Linux where ever we can."

This year's aKademy saw a whole new innovation: The KDE Appreciation Awards, also known as the "aKademy Awards". Their purpose is to recognize outstanding contribution to the KDE community. The awards are for best application, best contribution to KDE and the Jury's Choice Award. The jury consisted of the well-known KDE hackers Aaron Seigo, Brad Hards, David Faure and Matthias Ettrich. If you want to know who the winners are, read on!

Not a dupe. We covered OSCON extensively on LXer but now the talks themselves are starting to show up on ITConversations.

Tim O'Reilly and Nathan Torkington speak about the O'Reilly radar, which tracks the latest happenings in the tech world. Tim describes O'Reilly media as a company that tries to identify the future and spread the future. Open Source Software (OSS) is changing the way the software industry works

Want to help a technical high school in Sicily develop open-source software? They're waiting for you.

Welcome to this year's 35th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Carla Schroder explained reasons to use Debian and gave an overview about several derived distributions. Sean Michael Kerner reported about Debian's debut in China with Sun Wah's enterprise Debian offering.

Expensive groupware is simply overkill when all you want is to decide whose turn it is to do the dishes. This month, Peter uses his old Linux™ box to build a miniscule Web-based household calendar. In these Linux on board column installments, Peter looks at Linux running on various kinds of hardware -- PDAs, embedded devices, or just ancient hardware no one thought was useful anymore. He alternates between looking at specific Linux devices and showing you in detail how to use Linux on decrepit hardware that's past its reputed prime.

The Open Source Lab at Oregon State University has received a large donation of Internet bandwidth from TDS Telecom that will allow it to more than double the number of visitors it can serve, in the future helping up to 50 million people a day review or download free software. For a five-year period the Open Source Lab will receive 600 megabits of bandwidth - a volume of Internet connectivity that is more than five times higher than the total used by the rest of the university. The bandwidth is worth several million dollars, officials say.

MadPenguin.org has published a lengthy interview with MEPIS Linux creator Warren Woodford. The article offers insight into the two-year-old distro's rapid and widespread proliferation. Woodford's secret? "Give desktop customers what they want: a simple, reliable set of applications that are easy to acquire, install, and use," according to the article.