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For those that checked in on the state of my thumb, thanks for your concern. If you missed my last column, I gave my thumb a good smashing just before SC10. I managed to navigate the show and New Orleans without any further thumb related issues. The show was a big success breaking last years attendance record of 11,000 people. As always, I have plenty to write about and will be doling out my reports over the next month. And, if you don’t read about it the week after SC, it does not mean the news is less important. There are only so many words, as it were.

When Novell announced that it had agreed to be acquired by Attachmate, someone remarked that they felt a chill passing through the Internet. While the company doesn’t get a great deal of mindshare these days, it was critical to the development of the enterprise that we know today. It was Novell that made networking popular and open to every platform. It was Novell that developed the concept of directory services. And it was Novell that brought us the idea of readily available, reliable network servers long before Microsoft or anyone else was a significant player.

Novell will honour all contractual obligations with its Australian customers and forge ahead with product development following the signing of a definitive merger agreement with Attachmate, according to Novell CEO, Ron Hovesepian. - In a letter to customers, the chief executive wrote that the merger, valued at $US2.2 billion, would in no way affect the company's support and maintenance. "We place tremendous value on the relationships we've cultivated with our customers and I can assure you that providing you with the innovative products, solutions and support you've come to rely on remains a top priority," the letter reads.

The announcement that Novell has agreed to sell itself to Attachmate for $2.2 billion does absolutely nothing to remove the huge question mark hanging over the future of Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), Novell's open source Linux OS. Annoyingly for SLES customers, it actually raises as many questions as it answers. Novell put itself up for sale eight months ago following a takeover offer from hedge find Elliott Associates. Since then, long-suffering SLES customers have had to put up with uncertainty and doubt about the future of the server OS. Many of them must be wishing they'd made life simpler by picking Red Hat as their Linux supplier when they made their original purchasing decision. After all, no-one ever got sacked for not choosing Novell.

Novell did not specify which assets Microsoft will get, but senior IT analyst Katherine Egbert of Jefferies & Co. said in an advisory that they are “most likely related to WordPerfect, which Novell acquired in the late 1990s, and through which Novell had sued Microsoft for anti-competitive behavior.” The WordPerfect product line was sold twice, first to Novell in June 1994, who then sold it to Corel in January 1996. However, Novell kept the WordPerfect Office technology, incorporating it into its GroupWise messaging and collaboration product.

I reduced the DansGuardian user account and blacklist maintenance hassles with my previous two utilities but while working on whitelisting I found the need for a few more.

Offensive Security, leaders in Online information security training, proudly announced a few days ago, on November 19th, the immediate availability for download of a new BackTrack 4 release, their extremely popular security oriented operating system.

The days when Linux is an unknown quantity in a business are largely over — but that doesn't mean that every organization has tons of experience deploying Linux. Even if your organization has deployed Linux before, there are some common mistakes to be aware of. Here's five things you need to watch for when planning a new Linux deployment.

Warren Woodford, founder of MEPIS, has announced the release of SimplyMepis 11.0 Alpha 3 just in time to mark the eighth anniversary of MEPIS on November 21. SimplyMepis usually takes quite a while to cook and no final release date has been given.

Many of us have at least one mobile device. Because we frequently work away from our desks and use our mobile devices as portable offices, Sametime Instant Messaging is designed to go with you. With the Sametime Mobile client your mobile device becomes an extension of your Sametime contact list and allows you to stay in touch with your contacts wherever you are!

GIMP needs no introduction. GIMP is the Open Source answer for Adobe Photoshop, well, almost. We have already featured brilliant wallpapers made using Inkscape and now things are taking a 'GIMP' turn. Here is a nice and simple collection of wallpapers made using GIMP.

Computer monitoring software enables systems and applications of all kinds to be watched autonomously, so that the state of a system is continuously known. If the hardware, software, or the operating system is not functioning properly, the system administrator needs to be alerted at the earliest opportunity to ensure fast problem resolution. Using monitoring software, technical staff can often take remedial action at the first sign of a problem, before business processes, end-users, or customers are even aware that there is an issue.

OpenOffice.org has failed to provide effective user support via email. LibreOffice can and should avoid the same mistake. Here's how

Internet Connectivity and Networking (ICAN) has launched both a seven-inch and a 10-inch tablet running Android 2.1 on a 1GHz processor. The $400 ICAN! 7 and $500 ICAN! 10 ship with 16GB of internal storage, plus SD expansion, Wi-Fi, a 1.3-megapixel webcam, dual USB 2.0 ports, and HDMI ports, says the company.

The EU research project, ALERT, is looking for KDE experts to assist research on free and open source software collaboration processes. The goal of the ALERT project is to develop methods and tools that improve FLOSS coordination by maintaining awareness of community activities through real-time, personalized, context-aware notification. KDE provides one use case for applying and evaluating these methods and tools.

The latest release includes updated and reorganised boot help screens, as well as a reorganised Control Panel that places more frequently used items into the System Tools menu – AppsAudit and Run Command have been moved to the System Tools menu, while PPI Setup and TermServer Setup have been moved to Control Panel. The AppBrowser has also been updated, integrating setdrive, and the ondemand module for the Fast Light Window Manager (flwm_ondemand) has been updated to support a combined, single ondemand directory. Shingledecker also notes that a new data structure is used for wbarconf, which replaces wbar_exclude, so any current wbar_excluded items (xwbar.lst) will need to be remade.

There are plenty of extensions you can install that allow you to create PDF file for any webpage you come across. Well, if you are using Linux (particularly Ubuntu), this PDF creation feature is already inbuilt in your system and you can use it without installing any other extensions/applications. In Ubuntu, regardless which browsers or applications you are using, as long as it supports the “Print” function, you can quickly create a PDF, postscript or SVG file of the work you are doing (or the webpage that you have come across).

Canonical is attracting hordes of new Linux users with a ready-to-go, good-looking distro. But where does a noob go when they are no longer a noob? What is there for an IT pro with little Linux experience? How about the brand-new Bodhi Linux?

Questioning the necessity for Wayland and the wiseness of the choice has become a phenomena, especially after Mark Shuttleworth annouced Ubuntu's plans to eventually switch to Wayland. Following I will provide a concise reasoning why we want Wayland. At the end there are some more links for further reading.

Attachmate says that Novell's openSUSE project will continue to operate as it always has. With Attachmate shelling out $2.2bn acquire Novell, SUSE Linux customers and contributors to the openSUSE project are understandably nervous about what Attachmate is planning for the community development that underpins SUSE Linux.