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In yesterday's annual strategy memo to Microsoft employees, CEO Steve Ballmer declared: "Noncommercial software products in general, and Linux in particular, present a competitive challenge for us and for our entire industry, and they require our concentrated focus and attention."

It's 'ciao, Microsoft' week for Brazilian public servants. Over 2,200 civil servants are in Brasília, Brazil's capital, for training in free software The program's intention is turn the participants into propagators of open source. The use of open source represents annual savings of US$ 1.1 billion for the Brazilian government.

European Commission funds will help to pay for pilots of open-source technology for the public sector.

Distinctive Devices says it has received a $3.2 million dollar purchase order for embedded Linux based set-top boxes (STBs) that it calls "representative" of other deals. Italian digital TV vendor Goldtop will buy the devices and resell them into both terrestrial and satellite-based digital television markets.

This interview with Red Hat Vice President James Prasad, who heads up the company's embedded operations, discusses Red Hat's background in embedded systems, embedded Linux market strategy and product plans, and recent partnership with Wind River Systems. Prasad came to Red Hat via its acquisition of Cygnus Solutions in January, 2000.

Sun's president and COO Jonathan Schwartz said that Red Hat Linux' kernel was proprietary. You might have had a similar impact describing the Pope as Jewish.

If you've been developing for Windows for (n+1) years, you might consider venturing into open source software development a daunting prospect. Reading the Free Software Foundation Web site makes it look like all development is done in straight C -- of course there's no Visual C++ or Visual Basic. Linux doesn't have its own component model and there is nothing even remotely like DirectX for low-level hardware access. It's just too hard for the dyed-in-the-wool Windows developer to program for Linux.

As reported on Slashdot and elsewhere, Linux kernel hackers have discovered that some proprietary modules running on the Linux kernel have been "lying" about their licensing. Doing so allows those modules to pass the automated license test done when they are loaded and thus escape the "tainted kernel" messages the loader would otherwise produce. NewsForge has gone behind the scenes and spoken to Linus Torvalds and the CEO of one of the firms providing proprietary modules for Linux to learn more about this story.

Born in Mexico City, Miguel de Icaza was the driving force behind the creation of the Gnome free software desktop, and co-founded the open source company Ximian, bought last August by Novell. In July 2001, he helped start another ambitious project, Mono: a free implementation for GNU/Linux of Microsoft's .Net framework. He talks to Glyn Moody about Mono's progress, how Ximian was bought by Novell, and why he is so scared of Microsoft's Longhorn.

The Debian Non-Profit custom Debian distribution is a great effort to meet the needs of smaller non-profit and community organisations. Alastair Otter spent some time with a copy and has become a fan

In an ideal world, all your code is packaged into a universal install script, with dependency checking, updating, and logging services handled automatically. Conflicts between resources required by different applications are resolved according to predefined policies. Site-specific configuration changes are automatically applied as part of the unattended installation, and tests are run across the environment to confirm that everything is good to go. Autonomic computing technology brings this vision closer to an achievable reality.

A few weeks ago I got my hands on a copy of Debian Non-Profit, one of a growing list of Custom Debian Distributions. And after spending a few weeks installing and re-installing it on my painfully old (433MHz AMD) work machine for testing purposes I've become something of a fan. There are some issues that could do with a little more attention (in my opinion) but as a whole the Morphix-based Debian NP is a formidable start to what could be a very important project.

> While most people bicker about which OS is best, the truth is much vaguer: what computer is sitting on your desk has more to do with your comfort level than intellectual choice.

If you need a markup language to create nicely formatted documents, Linux has plenty of them to choose from -- DocBook, TeX and LaTeX, Lout, the roff family, and of course (X)HTML and XML. So do we really need another? I didn't think so, until I ran across Almost Plain Text (APT), a simple system for marking up text in which most of the formatting is done using indentation and ordinary keyboard characters. Using APT's command-line formatting engine, you can output APT documents to PostScript, PDF, LaTeX, and HTML.

IBM's Systems and Technology Group has introduced its Virtualization Engine, which allows a Unix-based system to be partitioned just like a mainframe, enabling it to run as many as 10 servers per processor.

Because of the high TCO for storage area networks (SANs), demand for Linux-based network attached storage (NAS) devices is expected to see an increase in the US SOHO (small office and home office) market by 2005, according to sources

With recent advances in freely available LDAP client utilities, Linux administrators can now take advantage of some of the benefits of network groups without the overhead of maintaining a NIS server. In this article, I'll explain what netgroups are, and how they can help you get finer-grained control over your local system security.

The Dublin Institute of Technology has said that a new e-learning system is transforming student life and its lecturers' attitudes to teaching.

NAS devices using Linux will be more widely adopted in the small office and home office market than Windows, say reports coming out of Taiwan. NAS and Open SAN storage should grow to 60 per cent of the total network storage market in 2005 from the current 40 per cent, whereas the direct attached storage (DAS) market is likely to drop below 40 per cent from its current 60 per cent.

Linux clustering is catching on in corporate America, thanks to newfound support from major systems and software vendors, says Chuck Foley, executive vice president for clustering solutions vendor InfiniCon Systems of King of Prussia, Pa. Of course, where success goes, Microsoft follows. In this interview, Foley covers the clustering waterfront, from Microsoft's involvement in clustering to InfiniCon's new partnership with Penguin Computing to the turnaround in the fortunes of Linux clustering resulting from Unix vendors' facing of some hard facts. InfiniCon and Penguin have teamed up to bring Linux clusters on Intel to high speed network infrastructures, switching and virtualization systems.