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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.

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.