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Open-source suppliers have not been successful with their appeal against the award of a contract by the Federal computer science at Microsoft. [PJ: That's the Google Translate version. According to a comment on Jan Wildeboer's coverage, "If within 18 months, 100 000 Swiss voters sign a petition for a referendum (Volksabstimmung), new legislation can be introduced via this mechanism."]

Maybe I missed the memo - but whoever said Linux works with all hardware? Some feel Linux is a poor operating system for a desktop computer because "Linux doesn't work with my X". Ahh yes, I completely understand. Just because Linux didn't work with your hardware means it is "not ready for main stream" or "is a poor operating system".

OpenGeo today announced that Kenneth Bossung has been appointed senior vice president of sales. With deep experience in geospatial web services, IT and systems integration professional services, Bossung brings a strong combination of sales expertise and entrepreneurial leadership to the web-based geospatial technology provider.

FemtoLinux is a new Linux flavor optimized for real-time embedded systems. Our design goal is a low system call and interrupt-to-application latency and overhead. We achieve this by allowing to run critical Linux applications in kernel mode.

CMS-Maestro is a new PHP-based content management system (CMS) released by South African Web development company Valente Online. Easy to install and use, CMS-Maestro offers the basics such as page and article management and adds to that the ability to add additional widgets, and manage menus and a range of media formats. In a release the company says that “CMS-Maestro is built with extensibility in mind and is designed in a modular fashion, therefore additional features and functionality can be added easily to the Maestro”.

Regardless of how you view Novell as a company, few would argue that their release of SLED10 back in July of 2006 was one of the most well engineered Linux Desktops ever released. It was the first release to include "3D Desktop Effects" thanks to David Reveman, a Novell Employee. It had the most comprehensive integration with Samba thanks to their Samba team, which, at the time, included Samba Superstar Jeremy Allison. It had one of the best and fastest OpenOffice.org implementations, thanks to the Novell OpenOffice.org team, which started the excellent go-oo.org development version, and many more features.

Dell is working with Canonical to help customers float Ubuntu-powered open-source clouds while also cozying up to developers. The hardware maker, better known for flogging PCs and servers running Linux's chief OS rival Windows, is working with Canonical on plans to take the sweat out of setting up Ubuntu clouds on its data-hungry Poweredge C 1100, 2100, and 6100 1U-to-4U servers. Dell's director of cloud software solutions John Igoe has promised The Reg that reference implementations for Dell's servers running the Amazon-cloud-ready Ubuntu will be ready in the "next few months".

In the past, she has used a Windows XP machine to get this done. She is painfully aware of how user-unfriendly Windows Explorer can be...especially when she is dealing with hundreds of pictures to be renamed, sorted and moved to different folders. And yeah, there are third-party apps...but that only adds to the time and expense. She used to dread getting a call for contract work. Last week, we got the XP machine files transferred to the computer and I sat down with her to show her how the Linux file system works. ***hint...if you are in a troubled or stressed relationship, this might not be the time to do this....I'm just sayin...

I took ZaReason's Teo netbook, running Ubuntu 10.04, on a 2500-mile road trip. How practical is a tiny netbook? Does it make sense in real life, doing real jobs? Yessirree it does. A couple of months ago the nice ZaReason people sent me their Teo Ubuntu netbook to review. I was favorably impressed and gave it a positive review. Then they let me take it on my vacation, so little Teo traveled 2500 miles with us. This was the ultimate portability, performance, and battery test. How did Teo do? Splendidly.

One of the most asked features for Samba is a graphical user interface to help with configuration and management, there are now several GUI interfaces to Samba available

As part of its effort to graduate its Chrome browser to the upcoming Chome OS, Google is working to add device orientation to the browser's capabilities. Not that orientation — the ability for an app or OS to know that up is up and down is down — is all that revolutionary of a breakthrough. Developers have been tapping to that ability on the iPhone (UIDeviceOrientation) and Android-based devices (SensorManager) for some time. But adding it into the browser itself is another step towards the Google Grail: the browser as operating system.

If you're using Sudo, you've probably already discovered that the increased privileges apply only to the first command typed and don't extend to any input or output redirection. For example: "sudo iptables -L > /etc/iptables" will give you a 'Permission denied' error because the shell interprets the first command (with sudo), then pipes it into the second command (without sudo). One solution to this is to jump straight into the root user shell with su. However, this ignores all the many very good reasons to use sudo in the first place (including logging, ticketing and a lower risk of accidentally doing something foolish because you've left a root shell lying around). Here's a better solution.

Buzzbird is a Firefox based twitter client for Linux. And like Firefox, Buzzbird too, just works. Buzzbird is fast, have all the basic functionalities and it almost never crashes.

The good folks at Ars Technica benchmarked and compared JavaScript performance between Android 2.2 and iOS 4. The results were overwhelmingly in Android's favor as it performed almost twice as well in the SunSpider benchmark and nearly five times better at the V8 benchmark.

Find out how those two leaders of the mobile world stack up against each other. They are both amazing, but which one is better? Here's a side-by-side comparison.

Greenplum, which uses the open source PostgreSQL database as a base for its data warehousing and business intelligence software, has been acquired by storage company EMC. The move will allow EMC to compete directly with Oracle and its Exadata software. No details were given on the value of the transaction, but the companies expect the deal to be completed by the end of the third quarter 2010.

We've kept a fairly low profile and have not commented much on the Oracle / NetApp lawsuit. Today, however, Coraid announced that they have received a letter from NetApp threatening them; Coraid has decided therefore to stop reselling their ZFS based storage appliance. As the leading vendor of ZFS based storage appliances and a long time supporter of AoE and a technical partner of Coraid, we're inevitably mentioned in discussions about this lawsuit. Rather than rehash the entire case I'll just make a few points that have been missing from the commentary I have seen today so far:... If you are one of the 78% percent of enterprises that support OpenSource (see my related blog on a recent Accenture survey), now is the time to stop buying solutions from legacy vendors that resort to lawsuits.

The Mozilla Foundation has released an early beta of the upcoming version 4 of Firefox, its flagship cross-platform browser for Windows, OS X, and Linux. HTML 5 and CSS 3, the standards that are slated to power next-generation Websites, are clearly at the forefront of Mozilla's development efforts. Firefox 4 includes extended support for many of the new features that those two technologies introduce, including the Websocket API, which enables Web-based applications to access servers using arbitrary protocols like, for example, the one used by e-mail clients. Most interestingly, Mozilla has chosen to support HTML 5 video playback by implementing Google's WebM video codec, which, like Firefox, is open-source and (at least in theory) unencumbered by patents.

One of the great things about Linux is how easy it is to customize. Now unfortunately if you don't know what you're doing and sometimes even if you do know what you're doing, you can get into trouble. I found this method to be very useful in times of stress. As you all may know everything in Linux is a file, all of the settings are files. Inside your Home folder is where all of the settings and user specific files are located. Remove these folders to reset Ubuntu/Gnome back to its default.

Robotics and artificial intelligence enthusiast Francisco Paz has launched a new open source robot called Qbo. Armless fun or Henry with attitude? Regardless, it's probably the most impressive open source project we've ever seen…