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'Painless' migration saves Johannesburg BRS call centre as much as R2000 per machine and cuts downtime and virus risk.

Michael Robertson has given up day-to-day control of Linspire and is leaving the company in the hands of new CEO Kevin Carmony. Robertson said, on his blog, that he wants to spend more time with his two other companies, Mp3tunes.com and Sipphone.com, which allows customers to make free long distance phone calls. However, Robertson says he will continue to advise Linspire on strategic matters.

You don't have to run Microsoft's omnipresent OS, but why should you try an alternative? For many years there have been several operating systems to choose from, but the newest ones – those based on a Linux kernel – have usually been hard to use, at least for the average user. Times have definitely changed. Get your hands on a recent version of, say, Xandros Desktop and you’d almost swear you'd been working with it forever.

If patent law had been applied to novels in the 1880s, great books would not have been written. If the EU applies it to software, every computer user will be restricted, says Richard Stallman

As information technology becomes more pervasive, the issues of communication between information-processing machines and people becomes increasingly important. Up to now such communication has been almost entirely by means of video screens. Speech, which is by far the most widely used and natural means of communication between people, is an obvious possible substitute. However, this deceptively simple means of exchanging information is, in fact, extremely complicated. Festival Speech Synthesis System aims to make things a little easier on interface developers.

The use of Linux and virtualization makes more sense everyday.

Unisys has introduced its "Real Time Capacity" (RTC) series of ES7000 servers -- for customers running Intel-based servers on Windows or Linux, the servers provide the ability to scale their computing power as their business needs evolve, officials said. Each ES7000 RTC series server is shipped with surplus capacity that can be activated -- and paid for -- when and if needed.

With Version 3.9 of the Live CD Linux Knoppix only recently completed, the next one is already in the offing. In time for the event LinuxTag 2005, which will commence this Wednesday in Karlsruhe, the developer Klaus Knopper will be releasing the Version 4.0 of his Linux system, which can be booted and operated directly from CD. It is based on the recently released Debian 3.1 (Sarge). Knoppix was expanded compared with the state of release of Sarge by the Version 3.4.1 of the Unix/Linux desktop KDE. As a further desktop the Version 2.8 of GNOME is included, with the open-source Office Suite OpenOffice available in the beta version of the 2.0 edition.

The more Linux succeeds, the more rhetoric I see from people opposed to Linux's success. If the people making that noise had much credibility, maybe you should worry. Given the source of noise, however, Linux users should consider they got on the right train.

I just finished Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, and like pretty much everyone else who has read that book, I was awestruck and inspired. Like a couple of other authors before me (see end of blog for list), I’m seeking to apply Diamond’s analysis to the question of which type of software will prevail: open source or commercial software.

This is a special podcast dedicated to the review of the newly released Linux distro Fedora Core 4 by Redhat. This is part one of the review and focuses on the initial installation and configuration of the OS. [The story links directly to the mp3 file]

The art of hiding information from anyone except from the intended receiver has been used for many centuries. Hiding information by embedding it in other, seemingly innocuous information is known as steganography, a word that means "covered writing" in Greek. Today, steganography applications can hide one file within another on a computer. Steganography applications are available on many different platforms, including Windows, Linux, and *BSD.

NetApp CEO talks open source, virtualization and IBM

A Linux board the size of a packet of chewing gum has been used to spur a wave of low-cost robotics applications, including a wireless helicopter, at England's University of Essex. Computer science researcher Owen Holland at the University of Essex has created an airborne robotics application.

Most of us have been conditioned for so long that the Microsoft "platform" is essential that we scarcely pause to think about alternatives. But as long as we can perform our essential tasks - print that report, send that e-mail - does the operating system really matter?

For every network service you run, you've opened one more window on your server to the world. Firewalls are great for defending servers against attacks from the outside, but attacks don't always come from the outside. If you have a server inside your firewall hacked, the attacker can continue hacking away at other servers without worrying about the firewall stopping his progress. For this reason it is important to schedule network audits of all of your servers.

This primer provides a broad perspective on the localization of Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) for the benefit of policy- and decision-makers in developing countries. It highlights the benefits and strategies of FOSS localization, along with case studies from various countries that are on the road to software freedom.

The Linux Kernel Archives provides an assortment of methods for obtaining the Linux Kernel source code. In an earlier article we spoke with H. Peter Anvin who has been maintaining kernel.org since its inception in 1997. In the beginning it operated on a generic PC connected to the Internet through a shared T1 housed by Transmeta Corporation. Since those early days, it has been upgraded several times to finally reach the current configuration which includes multiple ProLiant DL585 4-way dual-core Opterons donated by HP, each with 24 gigabytes of RAM and 10 terabytes of disk space. Both of the servers have a full gigabit connection to the Internet donated by Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.

VA Linux Systems Japan K.K. (VA Linux), Japan's leading Linux and Open Source solutions provider, has announced the release of 'FlexPOP', a fast and secure POP server which supports large-scale systems, and an Open Source Software solution. FlexPOP is a part of the company's VA FMS (FlexMessaging Solution), a total messaging solution for use in small-to-middle scale organizations to large scale network service providers with over one million accounts.

Welcome to this year's 25th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! This issue focuses on some of the interesting events of the past week, including the war of words between the Linux and BSD communities, the failure of Lycoris as a business model, and the surprising revelation that the founder of Gentoo and one of the leading Linux personalities has accepted a job offer from Microsoft. We also wonder why SUSE does not participate in this year's LinuxTag, introduce a Debian sarge variant "with a human face", and tell you how to get the latest release of Linspire for free. The featured distribution of the week is INSERT, a tiny security and rescue live CD. Happy reading!