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In this article we will explore how most Linux distributions boot, in some detail. I haven't seem many full explanations of this, and it's not terribly complex, although it is somewhat long. I will use a Red Hat 9 system to explain it, but most distributions should be almost the same... except Slackware and its derivatives.

Windowing environments are in their third decade, and they still do little more than open and close. There's no reason windows can't be more sophisticated.

The Open Source community would be overjoyed, and the Java user community would be relieved, if Sun were to guarantee the perpetually open nature of Java by Open Source-ing its implementations. But what's in it for Sun?

The World Bank recently issued a report on Open Source software, providing international agencies and governments some instructive guidelines on the its use of Open Source, and how best to implement Open Source solutions to tie in with existing commercial software from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and others.

PDA Buyer's Guide has published an extensive article reviewing a number of commercial and free applications available for Sharp's popular Zaurus line of PDAs based on embedded Linux and Qtopia.

Microsoft has gone on the warpath trying to convince customers it is safer and, more importantly, cheaper to choose Windows over Linux. In fact it has been the basis of a recent ad campaign.

As we reported Thursday, Sun Microsystems is indeed meeting privately with IBM to discuss working together on an open source implementation of Java, but the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company won't be talking about it publicly anytime soon, a Sun spokeswoman told NewsForge Friday.

Towards promoting the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement in India , the Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies will be holding an all-India free software festival on Saturday and Sunday.

Steve Kemp discovered a number of buffer overflow vulnerabilities in xboing, a game, which could be exploited by a local attacker to gain gid "games".

Society is better off when consumers have choices and when products compete with one another on the basis of functionality and price, and inventing is facilitated when inventors share their ideas. USENIX supports the right of programmers to choose whether to charge for their programs or to make them available for free, and we oppose any attempt to change the balance inherent in our intellectual property laws.

Magellan Technology of Sydney, Australia, is using embedded Linux to build advanced RFID tunnel readers capable of reading 50 words of data from 500 stacked tags in under one second. RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification, is intended as a work-saving replacement for bar-code scanning, and is expected to gain market traction in 2004, in part due to mandates for adoption set by Walmart, the US Department of Defense, and others.

As a result of some good feedback I received earlier this week from Mandrake Linux founder Gaël Duval, I have implemented some internationalization features into LXer. Click to read more.

When Joseph L. Guallar-Esteve was laid off from IBM in the summer of 2001, he thought it would take months to find another job in technology. After all, he had seen some of his friends remain unemployed for nearly a year before finding work. But Guallar-Esteve had an edge: He knew Linux. The free open-source software is becoming an increasingly popular alternative to Microsoft's Windows for running large computer networks and desktop PCs. That surging demand is good news for technology workers familiar with Linux.

Taiwanese embedded software firm EzHomeTech is shipping a Linux implementation for inexpensive consumer-electronic devices based on Sigma Designs system-on-chip (SoC) processors. It is also offering an application stack that enables such devices to be used as low-cost PCs or notebooks costing less than $100.

The global spread of freely available Linux software is the biggest competitive threat to Microsoft Corp. and other developers that keep the inner workings of their programs under wraps, Red Hat Inc. Chief Executive Matthew Szulik said on Thursday.

Sun critics claim only making Java open source will guarantee its ubiquity and its power as a weapon against Microsoft, and this week IBM adopted the popular publicity tactic of the 'open letter', calling on Sun to open up the Java specifications.

The Board of Directors of Usenix, the Advanced Computing Systems Association, has followed up SCO's campaign of sending letters to US Congressmen urging them to speak out against the use of Free Software with a campaign of their own.

In response to an open letter from IBM asking Sun Microsystems Inc. to join the company in developing an open-source version of Java, Sun plans to meet with IBM to discuss the issue, Sun sources said.

...with the surging interest in Linux, combined with the new FreeBSD Unix foundation for Apple's Mac OS X operating system, dowdy text commands are seeing something of a renaissance.

With the server market's heavy pricing pressure, revenue growth has typically been far less than unit shipment growth--when any revenue growth could be found in the last three difficult years. But in Linux servers, revenue growth outpaced unit shipments, according to fourth-quarter figures from market research firm IDC.