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There has been a lot of commentary recently about Gnome, and a common source of confusion seems to be Gconf - what is it, how does it work, and so on. Some people even seem to confuse Gconf with the registry database in Windows. I will attempt to clear some of this confusion and give an overview of Gconf, and why it looks the way it does.

Exactly one year after IBM top boss, Sam Palmisano's maiden Indian visit that centred around Linux and open source computing, IBM's Linux point man, Jims Stallings, is now on a whirlwind tour to India meeting up customers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and various governments.

Does your job require you to create designs or documents with special fonts? Ever wonder what anti-aliasing fonts or hinting really means? Fonts can improve readability for computer users and are important as elements of style and design. Users of Apple and Windows operating systems have long had a large number of fonts on their systems. Today, Linux is gaining both enhanced font technologies and access to large font foundries as the first independent digital foundry, Bitstream, is working to make sure that users of open source have the same rich text experience as those using other OSes.

Of the 50 financial data managers surveyed for the research, 61% reported that their banks had already moved from mainframes to PC servers in certain key areas. However 73% felt that over-reliance on Windows-based systems could leave banks vulnerable to security breaches and, because of this, 86% would consider using an alternative operating system such as Linux (65%) which is also seen as more cost-effective.

A group of eleven companies and two US national laboratories is forming a consortium to define a standard Linux implementation of the Infiniband interconnect.

On the eve of the one-year anniversary of its Express line of server-based applications, IBM on Monday said it is shipping a Linux-based version of Content Manager Express to beta testers and also touted plans to deliver the product on its iSeries platform shortly, with both the Linux and iSeries versions intended for midsize companies.

IBM today unveiled its Linux Centre of Competency here, which, it said, will help its clients from industry, academia and government move to computing environment based on open standards.

Citing increasing customer demand for open applications, IBM has launched a new Open Software Client Services blueprint for customers in Brazil.

The latest beta of Nvu, the Web publishing tool based on Mozilla Composer, has been released. Nvu 0.30, which is based on Mozilla 1.7 RC3, adds support for the file:/// protocol, a spellchecker and a tip-of-the-day box as well as a host of other improvements and bug fixes. The new release can be downloaded for Linspire (formerly LindowsOS), other Linux distributions and Windows.

Ayamon has announced a public beta program to test its new open source software (OSS) support website that is intended to help businesses and individuals find commercial support and consulting services.

One of the hurdles to Australian companies adopting Linux is a perceived lack of support, which is misguided, according to US Linux guru, Gary Porter. Porter will be doing his bit to overcome these concerns as he tours Australia and New Zealand next month, giving eight one-day seminars and training sessions on the operating system. They are aimed at both the channel and IT decision-makers.

I picked up the phone, and the voice at the other end said, "Rob, can you help me with a PDF file? I can't read it." It was my Beverly Hills attorney brother, who had received a 1MB PDF file via his Web-based email client and didn't know how to download it and read it, especially since he had no Acrobot reader installed. After some mutual grumbling about Acrobat being an unnecessary step in the document-reading process, I discovered a fairly painless solution to the whole mess, thanks to a little-known program called pdftohtml.

Bynari and Broadleaf Partner to Deliver Turnkey Groupware Appliance Automatically Serves, Stores and Protects Mail and Shared Calendars for Small and Mid-Sized Businesses. Bynari's Outlook-compatible Microsoft Exchange(TM) alternative now available on Broadleaf's no maintenance self-protecting ARCHEON server platform to deliver affordable groupware with instant onsite recovery and one phone call disaster recovery.

Red Hat Chief Financial Officer Kevin Thompson will resign, the Linux seller announced on Monday, raising eyebrows three days before its scheduled announcement of quarterly financial results.

The school district wants to move its Oracle database and Business Objects Crystal Enterprise business-intelligence software from Windows to Linux., and the debut of Business Objects' Crystal Enterprise 10 for Linux moved it a step closer to that goal.

Munich may become the biggest Microsoft Corp. customer to switch to Linux personal-computer software this week, as the city decides whether to remove the Windows operating system from 14,000 municipal computers.

The Mozilla Foundation today released Mozilla Firefox 0.9, and now begins its final push towards a 1.0 release of Firefox. New features in this release include a new default theme, a new browser migration tool, reworked theme and extension managers, a much smaller download size, a new help system, and many small bug fixes and speed tweaks. More on what's new can be found in the Burning Edge's Bigger Picture or in the Mozilla Foundation's press release about Firefox 0.9.

Looking to seize a greater share of the growing Linux-based thin-client market, Wyse Technology Inc. on Monday introduced enhanced management, security, and Web-browser capabilities on two of its Winterm desktops. Wyse also introduced version 3.2 of its thin-client Linux operating system.

I've had my primary email address for many years, and I also get email through a number of work-related aliases, including editors at newsforge.com, roblimo at slashdot.org, and rmiller at osdn.com. So I get spam. Tons of spam. And I filter it all. I filter viruses, too, not because they can affect my Linux computer, but because they suck up bandwidth. And my virus email traffic now exceeds my spam traffic by a factor of at least two to one.

A Linux bug was recently uncovered by a young Norwegian programmer that, when exploited by a simple C program, could crash most Linux 2.4 or 2.6 distributions running on an x86 architecture. "Using this exploit to crash Linux systems requires the (ab)user to have shell access or other means of uploading and running the program—like cgi-bin and FTP access," reports the discoverer, Øyvind Sæther.