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BOSTON, MA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 11/01/2005 -- At the Open Source Business Conference, the Free Standards Group, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing and promoting open source software standards, and the Linux Standard Base (LSB) workgroup announced that the LSB has achieved unanimous official approval as an ISO standard - an important milestone signifying the maturity and scope of both the LSB and the Linux operating system.

Every administrator has a set of software tools that he just can't live without. These are the utilities that you install as soon as you log into a new machine, to help make day-to-day tasks a little easier. Here are my top 10 tools.

Douglas Engelbart, pioneer of the GUI and of computer-supported cooperative work, has received a couple awards of late. About 35 years late, in fact. But he hasn't let neglect (and perhaps worse, empty lip service to his accomplishments) curb his spontaneous love of exploration. Spending a few minutes with him--at a ceremony celebrating an award given last Saturday by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility--convinced me that he remains an American original with a vast scope of interests, a bit like Edison or Feynman. I wonder what the modern net of sensors and cameras and GPS devices and wireless networks would be like if we had integrated his 1960s-era insights from the start.

After a couple of steps back over the summer, Mozilla's Firefox browser now holds 11.51% of the market in browsers used.

Red Hat will integrate the Xen virtualization hypervisor in its next commercial release of enterprise Linux due in late 2006. Built-in virtualization and built-in support for stateless Linux as well as improved automation and management tools will make Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 a more compelling platform for the data center and grid deployments [ED-Not a dupe, the earlier story was about Xen's inclusion in the 2.6 kernel. This is about RH's own distribution. Both issues are very important to Linux in the enterprise]]

According to c't Magazine this latest contribution by Microsoft to the initiative "Germany Safe on the Net," which a short while ago took stock of its progress so far, unfortunately fails to meet the high expectations aroused.

It's not flashy, but if you're re-using text often or need to streamline your template and macro lists, spend a little time with AutoText.

STMicroelectronics (STM) is sampling an SoC (system-on-chip) that it says supports all required HD-DVD and Blu-Ray codecs and security schemes. The STB7109 is based on an SH-4 core, and supports Linux and other embedded OSes, along with codecs and security schemes from both Microsoft and international standards bodies.

Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, brought to you by Tim Sutherland, with contributions from Christophe Grandsire.

Although modern desktop Linux distributions pride themselves in minimizing the need for users to resort to command-line activities, there are times when a visit to a shell prompt can come in handy. To this end, a concise guide to Linux shell scripts is now available from the LinuxHelp blog.

Apple on Monday released Mac OS X 10.4.3 Update, which delivers overall improved reliability and compatibility for Mac OS X v10.4 and is recommended for all users.

After previous efforts failed, Red Hat is stepping forward to get Xen virtualization technology included in the Linux kernel as quickly as possible.

Wal-Mart and Hewlett-Packard will likely celebrate this Thanksgiving season by attempting to crush their competitors with low-price desktops and notebooks, according to a Web site that tracks bargains.

If Scientigo can make its XML patent claims stick, all XML users, from office suite users to programmers, may be affected.

Just two months ago, Novell opened the development process behind SUSE Linux, creating the openSUSE project. Novell's move gave developers a chance to be involved in SUSE, which previously had been developed privately without community input. In the short time since openSUSE was unveiled, developers have begun work on several new and interesting SUSE derivatives.

Levanta, a Linux system management software company, unveiled code for a virtual file system that improves data sharing between Linux machines.

The policies from Open Source Risk Management offer protection in the event of an intellectual property lawsuit.

[ED-This was hotly debated in the early SCO days, but with SCO on its deathbed maybe we can look at this a bit more nuanced. ]

It took more than two and a half years, but the SCO Group finally has disclosed a list of areas it believes IBM violated its Unix contract, allegedly by moving proprietary Unix technology into open-source Linux.

In a five-page document filed Friday, SCO attorneys say they identify 217 areas in which it believes IBM or Sequent, a Unix server company IBM acquired, violated contracts under which SCO and its predecessors licensed the Unix operating system. However, the curious won't be able to see for themselves the details of SCO's claims: The full list of alleged abuses were filed in a separate document under court seal.

The secret agent quietly enters the generic-looking office complex. The agent's assault team has the building surrounded and is standing by in case the operation goes bad. The mission: to find a computer containing information that will save the country from an enemy attack.

The agent moves from the warehouse area to the offices in search of the target's computer. He finds it in the last office. The machine is on, and after gaining access to the computer, the agent starts scanning through files only to find them encrypted.

The agent calls the computer expert at base. The expert "remote controls" the machine and tries some generic passwords - they do not work. The expert runs a password-cracking program, and in seconds, the files are accessible.

The bad guys are caught, the country's security is maintained and the world is saved, all in the course of an hour - excluding commercials, of course!

Worldwide PDA shipments increased nearly 21 percent year-over-year in Q3, and are on track to reach record levels in 2005, said Gartner today in a report that seems to contradict pessimistic PDA market reports from competing research firms. Linux accounted for a paltry 0.7 percent of shipments, according to Gartner.