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Many IT managers would like to switch to enterprise Linux, but balk at having to port existing applications to a new platform. Fear not, for porting existing apps to Linux doesn't have to be a head-banging activity, says application development expert Gopi Kumar Bulusu. So stop balking, and make the pitch to switch your company to Linux. In this interview, he offers tips that can simplify application porting. Bulusu is chief architect and managing director at Sankhya Technologies Private Limited, a distributed system software company based in India.

2004 was a portent of things to come for Linux in 2005, both because of what didn't happen (SCO Group's victory) and what did (the rise of open source software), according to Marten Mickos, CEO of Sweden-based MySQL AB. In this interview, he predicts how those events, which included the success of MySQL's database, will play out in 2005.

If there's a real bottom line here, the one thing I'm clear on is that I haven't found it yet, but the questions raised have been more interesting that the answers -- so more help would be welcomed.

Bob is the VP of IBM Standards. He says: "To be clear, this is not a "donation," but rather a pledge of the patents to seed and then maintain a patent commons for open source projects." Go here to see his other comments and his extensive list of links to articles on the subject from all the major developer and business publications. There is also a link to the Patent Description Document, which provides the nitty-gritty of the patent release.

I recently got a chance to interview George Staikos, the Official Representative for the KDE Project in North America. He addresses some questions on the current status of the KDE project, and about the problems they have faced.

A lot of development has happened since KDE 3.4 Alpha, so we are now happy to publish KDE 3.4 Beta 1 code named Krokodile.

Nearly 10,000 computers in Chilean schools will be turned into thin clients running Linux and applications such as OpenOffice.org and Mozilla.

Following up on the success of the Firefox open-source Web browser, released by the Mozilla Foundation last autumn, open-source software developers are preparing some new products aimed at a consumer market still dominated by proprietary software.

A hard drive crash over the holidays left me scrambling to get back to a productive desktop as quickly as possible. Luckily, I had my /home partition on a separate drive, so I didn't lose precious email, stories, research, and pictures. But it did get me thinking about my lack of preparedness. Where was the back-up system I've talked about for years, but never acquired? This is the tale of how I rectified that glaring omission, and built myself a personal back-up system using inexpensive parts and free software.

The European Computer Driving License wants to become the world standard certification for computer end-users. What it promises in exchange is more productivity at home and work, an official, international acknowledgment of one's skills and, consequently, more chances to find a qualified job. While ECDL certification tends to be award to those with Windows skills and experience, it could represent an opportunity for free software supporters.

Two years after its first attempt fell short, Red Hat is trying again to reach beyond its own employees for help developing its Linux line.

A great way to debug glibc functions is to override the function of interest with your own version. This can be done without having root permissions and without recompiling the libc source. Imagine the pure thrill of writing your own version of open()!

Free Software Magazine is a new magazine entirely dedicated to free software. It contains quality articles relating to both technical and non-technical issues. The magazine's goal is to publish good articles which are then released under a free license after publication. The magazine obviously needs subscribers - the more, the better! Also, the magazine's editor (myself) is looking for articles on Gnome. Please contact him if you have any proposals!

In this month's column, the author explains how to determine code complexity with complexity metrics and introduces his own metric, PyMetric.

"KMail has long been my Linux email client of choice for a number of reasons: nice clean interface, easily customizable and configurable, stable, and more features than you can shake a stick at. Today we'll dig into migrating from other email clients, encrypting messages and key signing, and configuring multiple accounts and identities..."

A recent AMI-Partners Inc. report which stated "user challenges and a dearth of applications continue to hinder the growth of Linux servers and on the desktop" prompted one Novell executive to counter that point-of-view.

Although IBM's open-source support is no money-maker, it does serve as a deft weapon to undermine Microsoft's markets. Big Blue collects about $1 billion a year in licensing fees from its hoard of 40,000 patents. So it came as quite a surprise to some on Jan. 11 when IBM pledged to make 500 of its software patents, valued at about $10 million, freely available to open-source software projects such as the Linux operating system and the Apache Web page server software. Why would IBM allow others to use its intellectual property free of charge?

Miklos Szeredi provided patches against the 2.6.10 Linux kernel for FUSE, "Filesystem In Userspace". Aptly named, "FUSE exports the filesystem functionality to userspace. The communication interface is designed to be simple, efficient, secure and able to support most of the usual filesystem semantics."

As 64-bit PowerPC processors become more widely available, it becomes desirable to make applications run in the 64-bit computation mode, providing access to larger address space and faster 64-bit arithmetic. This excerpt from a longer Technical Library article covers some of the issues faced when porting existing 32-bit code to the new computing model -- or when embarking on new 64-bit development.

For the second year, NOSSTIA and Syria LUG are organizing "The Free and Open Source Software Workshop" in 2-4 March 2005. Richard Stallman, Glenn McNight Vice President of Linux Professional Institute, Jonas Oberg Vice President of FSF Europe , Khaled Al Ghoniem President Saudi Computer Society, and AbdulRahman AlJadahi President of Saudi LUG are some of the speakers expected.