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Another penguin vendor is turning bullish on the Indian market. Hyderabad-based ELX Linux Pvt. Ltd. has aggressive plans for selling its Linux desktop OS -- BizDesk 4.0 -- in the country, doubling its previous target of 50,000 copies to a new highpoint of 100,000.

On previous travels, I've discovered over and over just how bad a place a car is to operate a laptop. (Naturally, I'm talking about when safely parked.) In the driver's seat particularly, I've found no way to sit with a laptop that's even halfway comfortable, never mind OSHA-approved. To gain clearance from the steering wheel, I lean back, and slide the seat as far back as possible. It's not a back-friendly way to compute. The car-friendly laptop platform I ordered before this trip, though, makes a huge difference. Car computing is still a pain, no question, but it's considerably less of one with your laptop resting somewhere other than your actual lap.

The machine is aimed at education, but could be attractive to businesses as well. With new PCs offering more computing power than a single user needs for basic work such as exploring the Internet or creating documents, Hewlett-Packard Co. is now pushing a desktop machine that includes four monitors, keyboards and mice. The Mandrakelinux-equipped machine can be used by four users at one time.

The man who turned around Microsoft Corp's internet strategy and helped forge its success in Windows, believes his former employer is struggling on open source. Brad Silverberg said Linux is challenging Windows on price, and that Microsoft must demonstrate it offers better Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to justify the higher price.

please find here after a press-release about the new Mandrakeonline, an online profesionnal service which manages software updates on a number of Mandrakelinux systems, warns about new updates and can upgrade the system automatically.

Former Red Hat Inc. and Cygnus Solutions Inc. technology executives Kim Knuttila and Erik Troan have founded a new open-source company, Specifix Inc., that produces tailored Linux solutions targeting enterprises, hardware OEMs and other Linux users.

A couple of months ago I asked if Novell's new Open Enterprise Server (or any other Linux distribution) would be enabled to run NetWare Loadable Modules, the applications that run within a NetWare server. We were briefly led to believe that this might be possible with an "NLM to ELF" tool, ELF (Executable and Linking Format) being the format for Linux code that can be ported among different distributions. If an NLM could be turned into an ELF format, then it could be directly ported to Linux. Sadly, it was a simple case of misunderstanding - there's an "ELF to NLM" tool, but not the reverse.

Free Software Feature Enhances IM with VoIP.

In my last article here on ITMJ, I challenged traditional notions of the importance of source code access in open source. Most point to source code availability as the premier benefit open source delivers, without offering any substantive reasons to support the claim. As I noted, while open access to source code may matter for some, its benefits pale in comparison to the benefits associated with open source distribution. In summary, open source business models yield dramatically lower sales, marketing, and product distribution costs, enabling upstart competitors to undercut established vendors on price while providing their customers Porsche technology at Pinto pricing.

Xandros has announced that Canada's Acadia University has selected the Xandros Desktop Operating System (OS) as the Linux offering for its undergraduate program. The Nova Scotia-based facility, credited as the first university in Canada to integrate notebook computers into the curriculum, is offering a customized version of Xandros on Dell D600 laptops through a three year program that is expected to outfit 9,000 laptops to students and faculty.

The Freedom Technology Center (FTC) has announced that it is adding four additional Samba training workshops across the US through the end of the year. The organization has added 4-Day hands-on workshops with top Samba instructor John Terpstra. The new courses will be held in San Jose (Calif.) on August 16-19, in Los Angeles on September 20-23, in Boston on October 25-28, and in Atlanta on November 15-18.

Are there non-evil reasons why customers continue to like Microsoft products?

On Tuesday, Red Hat issued a press release and held a conference call to announce it would be delaying Red Hat's first fiscal quarter 2005 10Q filing. The reason for the delay is that management is restating Red Hat's results for the three fiscal years 2002, 2003 and 2004 (all of which had been audited) and its most recently reported first fiscal quarter 2005 (which has not yet been audited).

A few weeks ago I wrote about installing Apache in a chroot jail, a technique that can reduce the potential damage from a compromise of your server by preventing an attacker from gaining access to your server's root filesystem. In this article I will look at how to configure the Apache server environment to protect your Web site.

The latest version of PHP has a range of new features designed to improve performance and scalability, as well as improve integration with common Internet standards. PHP is an embedded Web scripting system often employed with other open-source technologies such as the Apache Web server and the MySQL database to create dynamic, data-driven Web sites. Around 16 million domains use PHP, although many of these are based at shared hosting facilities, reflecting its typical use in smaller scale projects

Since 1998, when Netscape decided to open-source its flagship Netscape Communicator suite and call the project Mozilla, the software has developed into a modern, flexible collection of applications, including the Mozilla browser, email client, chat client, and Web page creation tool, as well as the dedicated Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird email client. To get a deeper understanding of Mozilla and the direction it is heading in, I spoke to Chris Hofmann, the Mozilla Foundation director of engineering.

Mozilla 1.8 Alpha2 users can now unblock a blocked popup from the Show item on the Tools -> Popup Manager menu or the context menu item on the pop-up indicator icon in the statusbar. Mozilla Mail now has a Global Inbox which allows you to manage multiple POP3 accounts from the same folder hierarchy. Mozilla 1.8 Alpha2 has initial support for the new Netscape Plugin API extensions annouced in the recent press release. See the Scripting Plugins in Mozilla document for more information."

A day after Raleigh-based Red Hat announced that it would restate its earnings from the past three years, at least two law firms said Wednesday that they have filed class-action lawsuits against the Raleigh-based Linux reseller.