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A Scottish police force is extending its commitment to open-source software by developing a Linux-based system for ensuring it complies with the impending Freedom of Information Act legislation. The Act comes into force on 1 January 2005 and is intended to facilitate 'open government' by allowing the public to request access to government data. Central Scotland police, based in Stirling, will pilot a Linux-based system developed by IBM that was one of the projects referred to in the recent pro-Linux Office of Government Commerce report.

A Linux Resource Center has been set up at the KR School of Information Technology, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. The center, which will work on Linux-based solutions for the educational institutes, is a result of collaboration between the IIT and Intel.

This presentation (registration required, flash preferable) shows Sun's plans for their Opteron support as well as how Linux represents a transitional technology (for customers that have not realized Solaris is better) as they move to support enterprises with hardware capable of running Solaris and Windows. Anyone with doubts on where Sun stands should watch this presentation.

As described in parts one and two of this series, open source licensing principles are generally, if not exclusively, associated with software. These principles may be less readily applicable to non-software works, such as documents.

There is a growing belief that the wide-ranging benefits of ICT can be delivered to Africa's tertiary education sector only through the strategic adoption of open standards, free and open source software, and open content.

Silicon Graphics is claiming the title of world's fastest supercomputer with a Linux system it built for NASA.

Reflecting the growing popularity of Linux clusters for high-performance technical computing, two specialists have garnered new investments.

Linux has always been about choice: the freedom to change code if you wish to modify its behavior, the freedom to see what one is running on one's hardware. This concept of choice has been extended to Linux distributions as well. A staggering array of Linux distributions cater to the whims of the minutest factions, each directed at its own specific ends and goals. There appears to be one for everybody; in fact, from a brief glance at Distrowatch, it almost appears that there is one by everybody. Nothing's wrong with that, but the profusion of available choices may be hurting adoption of Linux by users who are used to Windows as a standard in operating systems.

Mark Rais offers DesktopLinux.com readers a tutorial on setting up broadband connectivity using DSL on Linux-based systems. Rais, author of the just-released Linux For the Rest of Us, gives KDE and Gnome users tips to get their systems up-and-running step by step.

Zupera Technology has used a 2.6-series embedded Linux kernel to build a handheld audio/visual player set for volume production in January. The 30GB "Zupera" will be available with a 5.7- or 7-inch LCD touchscreen display, along with software for playback of a variety of multimedia files.

In Hands-Off Fedora Installs with Kickstart, I provided an overview of the Kickstart process. This article is a collection of techniques that may interest people who want to do more with Kickstart.

Ziff Davis - Novell's Vice Chairman Chris Stone, responsible for engineering, product management and alliances, leaves the company to"pursue other interests."

With the introduction of Oracle Database 10g, Oracle now provides Automatic Storage Management (ASM) that is optimized for Oracle files. You may decide to migrate to ASM with a piecemeal approach by allocating new Oracle data files into ASM as the database grows, however to receive the full benefits of ASM such as the ability to add or remove storage from the database configuration with automated balancing of the distribution of the data files without downtime, the entire database should be migrated to ASM.

The question was recently raised on the lkml why such a wide range of GCC versions were being actively supported by the Linux kernel. One reason offered was, "because the new compilers are a lot slower", an argument that left some perplexed. "Why is this an issue when compiling a kernel? How often do you compile your kernel?"

Mark Shuttleworth, the man who sold a software business he had built on the back of the open source software (OSS) movement for billions, has taken the wraps off his own Linux distribution. Ubuntu (“be humane”) is based on the Debian distribution. Like Debian, it is freely downloadable and customisable. Canonical, Shuttleworth's OSS development outfit, undertook to distribute the software to early adopters via 340 000 CDs, free of charge, at a personal cost of $10 million. Ubuntu can also be downloaded via global mirror sites.

Alternative shines with a clean interface, sophisticated functions, and many options

Countering the latest salvo of Microsoft's Get the Facts campaign against open-source software, Novell this week launched a Web site devoted to "unbending the truth" about Linux in the enterprise.

Microsoft has criticised the IP indemnification offered by Novell, Red Hat, HP and IBM -- the main vendors of the Linux operating system. It claims that Microsoft offers better indemnification than any Linux vendor and has highlighted specific problems with the indemnification policy of each vendor, although it has not yet divulged the specific details of its own policy.

An IT consulting company has published a case study about installing a Linux-based VoIP (voice-over-IP) system at a bank with two satellite offices. The setup saves $2,600 of recurring monthly charges over a system based on leased lines, the company says.

Do trademarks require a special license for software to be free? That is the question that Debian developers are currently debating. The specific concern is whether AbiWord's recent assertion of trademarks conflict with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), the set of principles under which the Debian distribution operates. However, the implications could affect not only Debian's use of other trademarked packages, such as Mozilla, Evolution, and OpenOffice.org, but other GNU/Linux distributions' use of them as well.