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See how Linux can be used to prototype a sophisticated Internet appliance.

An R&D affiliate of the world's largest telephone company has achieved a stable release of a new Linux filesystem said to improve reliability over conventional Linux filesystems, and offer performance advantages over Solaris's UFS filesystem. NILFS 1.0 (new implementation of a log-structured filesystem) is available now from NTT Labs (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone's Cyber Space Laboratories).

Knowing a little bit about how the Linux 2.6 scheduler treats CPU affinity can help you design better userspace applications. Soft affinity means that processes do not frequently migrate between processors, whereas hard affinity means that processes run on processors you specify.

Wikibooks, sister project to Wikipedia - the online encyclopedia that can be accessed and edited by anyone, has been introduced. Previously called Wikimedia Free Textbook Project and Wikimedia-Textbooks, Wikibooks is a collection of free textbooks, manuals, and other texts, with supporting book-based texts, that is written collaboratively on the website. It works on the same principal as Wikipedia, meaning that anyone can edit any book module by clicking on an "edit this page" link, which appears in every Wikibooks module.

Sun Microsystems must have figured digital rights management (DRM) never sounded so good when it recently announced a call for partners in its quest to use open source DRM to "compensate rights holders and stimulate innovation," but Sun's open DReaM (DRM everywhere available) Project is as scary as any other content control nightmare to open source and digital freedom proponents.

An agency of the French Ministry of Defence is planning to install a high-performance Linux cluster for technical and scientific work. The Technical Establishment of Bourges (ETBS), which tests and manufactures armaments, has issued a tender for the supply of a 64-bit Linux cluster, according to a document on an EU website. The deadline of the tender was reached on Thursday but it was unclear from the tender document when the ETBS plans to start implementing the cluster.

Linux, Apache Web server, MySQL and PHP - the widely used LAMP platform - are key parts in a recently-built voicemail system that is helping displaced residents of the Gulf Coast keep in touch with family and friends around the country. LAMP technology is the engine running contactdlovedones.org, a project that provides freely accessible voicemail services to people who had to evacuate their homes due to Hurricane Katrina.

SearchEnterpriseLinux.com caught up with Featherly to talk about his new book and to get his thoughts on where Linux and the open source applications market is heading. The author also offered tips for SUSE administrators and developers, those comparing KDE and GNOME, and those mulling the deployment of JBoss with SUSE. Featherly, who in addition to being a writer is currently a consultant with HP Services and Consulting Integration Group, is a 20-year veteran of the IT industry.

Only two years into its development, a new version of Linux is generating considerable excitement.

Just found this (of all places, on Novell's website - you'd think someone would have shared this with me...?). As the IDC analysis goes,

IDC expects Linux to continue biting at the heels of Windows market share and increase from 24 percent to 33 percent within two years forcing Microsoft to swallow even smaller profit margins just to hold on to their share

Many businesses are turning to Voice over IP (VoIP) to save money on infrastructure and communications costs, but just ripping out your existing phone system and replacing it with VoIP will not work. VoIP systems require IP phones or analog telephone adapters to allow your existing phones to work. If equipment costs are stopping you from experimenting with VoIP, softphones can provide an inexpensive way for businesses to get up and running with VoIP, as I recently discovered by putting Kiax, Linphone, Twinkle, and CounterPath's X-Lite to the test.

Kontron is sampling a mini-ITX board that supports Linux and targets cost-constrained, high-volume applications such as gaming, POS (point-of-sales/service), data communications, and medical equipment. The 786LCD/mITX is based on a mature Intel chipset and low-voltage processor, yet supports USB 2.0, SATA, FireWire, and LVDS, Kontron says.

IBM has supported Linux for some time, and Dell's recent announcement that it is now shipping servers with the open source Web platform LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) is yet another indication that open source is entering the corporate mainstream. Even so, some IT managers are still reluctant to use open source products. This book is the perfect antidote. You won't find any rants here — just a reasoned and prudent assessment of open source products, how to evaluate them and determine if they suit your organization's needs.

But I strongly believe that Linux users badly need the kind of automated anti-viral patch management service that Windows users now take for granted.

Use the ChipBench System Level Design tool to create and simulate a design constructed from SystemC models of IBM PowerPC 4xx processor cores. The PEK tutorial provides an introduction to embedded software-driven performance analysis for consumer applications based on Power Architecture technology. Before beginning, Download and extract the Power Evaluation Kit V1.0 tarball (PEK). You will also want to read the accompanying developerWorks article with installation instructions.

Anti-patent advocates could lodge a revocation application against Microsoft's patenting of XML word-processing in South Africa within the next few weeks.

This week, advisories were released for python, XFree86, kdeedu, courier, zsync, gtkdiskfree, util-linux, mantis, Webmin, Qt, PHP, firefox, mozilla, cups, HelixPlayer, RealPlayer, wget, ghostscript, slocate, net-snmp, openssh, and binutils. The distributors include Debian, Gentoo, and Red Hat.

Speaking Thursday at MIT's ongoing Emerging Technologies Conference, Negroponte confirmed that five countries -- Brazil, China, Egypt, South Africa, and Thailand -- are already putting plans in place to distribute as many as 15 million of the devices. The effort has taken the form of a nonprofit group launched by the Media Lab that is known as One Laptop per Child, which Negroponte first detailed at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, in January.

Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 is now available for download. Amongst other changes, this minor release includes fixes for a return receipt regression introduced in version 1.0.2 (bug 289091) and the Linux command line URL parsing security flaw.

It's extremely difficult to turn in a better financial performance than Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT) did in its fiscal second quarter earnings report, which it released after the close of trading on Wednesday.