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OpenSSO Express has been removed for download from Oracle's website, leaving users of the community version of what was Sun's single sign-on platform to either, build their own version from source code, or to go to a third party. Norwegian company ForgeRock has stepped in and released OpenAM, based on OpenSSO source code. The ForgeRock builds are available to download. ForgeRock CEO, Lasse Andresen called Oracle's move "surprising", but said ForgeRock would be the new home for OpenSSO, now called OpenAM due to Oracle IP issues.

There's a fantastic little story in the Guardian today that says a US lobby group is trying to get the US government to consider open source as the equivalent to piracy. The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), an umbrella group for American publishing, software, film, television and music associations, has asked with the US Trade Representative (USTR) to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its "Special 301 watchlist" because they encourage the use of open source software. A Special 301, according to Guardian's Bobbie Johnson is: "a report that examines the 'adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights' around the planet - effectively the list of countries that the US government considers enemies of capitalism. It often gets wheeled out as a form of trading pressure - often around pharmaceuticals and counterfeited goods - to try and force governments to change their behaviours."

Amazon.com has signed a patent agreement with Microsoft over the use of Linux in its Kindle e-readers. In other open source legal news, the Jacobsen v. Katzer model railroad software case was settled, providing precedent for open source developers to seek monetary damages for copyright infringement, says BetaNews.

Every year was going to be ‘the year of Linux on the desktop’, until many began to wonder when the FOSS (free and open source software) breakthrough would come. As we watched for signs of hope in netbook sales, Drupal sites and partly-FOSS Android phones, a revolution was taking place all around, in the physical world but not entirely away from the internet. Enter, the Arduino: a low-cost, open source, tiny hardware board for connecting the real world to your computer, and/or to the whole internet. What can be done with it? Everything. The limit is the imagination, and as you’ll see from a few of the example creations we review here, imaginative use is the norm.

Looking for a desktop-centric version of BSD? Check out the latest from PC-BSD, released on Monday. New in this release are improvements in ZFS, KDE 4.3.5 with a new theme, the ability to run 32-bit packages on 64-bit systems, and improvements to the software manager for PC-BSD.

If you use Linux in any depth, you’re eventually have to install a program from source code. Normally the process is pretty quick and painless, but it still has some drawbacks, especially when it comes to upgrading or uninstalling that program. To help resolve this, we’ve got checkinstall, a useful tool that adds some cleverness to the process by keeping track of file changes and generating binary packages from your tarballs. With checkinstall, you can generate a RPM, deb, or Slackware package that can be ported between systems for easy install and removal.

I have a HTC Hero since it was launched, and I have been satisfied with it, and think it can fill most people's needs. However, this phone also has a lot of faults, especially hardware-wise. But the android operating system makes this phone a great one, and the sense UI from HTC makes it even better! For those interested, the technical specifications are here. From there, you can see that it isn't even near the performance of current generation smartphones. However, it offers great functionality and covers the needs of most people. It can be used to listen to music, update status on sotial networks, browse the web, update you on the weather and make a phone call, all at the same time! (try doing that on a factory iPhone!! xD), although you'll get some lag, especially on the browser (the browser is great and deals with page rendering and javascript magnificiently! But I can't blame it if it lags on pages full of ads, JavaScript and images, although I don't experience any lag on mostly text pages).

Chat, instant messaging and video communication: the KDE Real Time Communication and Collaboration (RTCC) project wants to improve the integration of real time communication into the desktop environment.

The GNU Project has provided dozens of useful utilities that you can find on almost every major Linux system, but many new Linux users have no idea where to start to learn these handy utilities. In this tutorial, I'll cover a few of the utilities that you can use to measure file system usage, verify the size of files, and take a peek into larger text files like Apache logs. Virtually ever major Linux distro comes with these utilities installed. Some distros designed for resource constrained systems might make use of BusyBox, which includes replacements for most of the GNU utilities. In that case, you should have the same utilities, but they may lack features found in the GNU utils or have slightly different options, etc. However, if you're using the mainstream distros like Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Mandriva, Slackware, etc., you should have the standard utils from the start.

GNU Midnight Commander (MC), Vifm and Last File Manager (Lfm) are 3 visual file manager applications for the Linux console. All of these 3 applications will remind you of Norton Commander - with the main interface consisting of two panels which display the file system -, but each has something special. Read about these 3 great console file managers for Linux and let us know your favourite in the comments!

LXer Feature: 24-Feb-2010

Looking for something cool to show your love for LXer that will make you the envy of geeks everywhere? Then check out the new LXer Swag Shop!

How much would it cost the European Union to cobble together the Linux kernel from scratch? The development costs would reach over a billion euros (or about £900m, or $1.4bn USD), according to researchers from the University of Oviendo, Spain. Jesús García-García and Mª Isabel Alonso de Magdaleno are set to present this open source thought experiment at the European Union's Conference on Corporate R&D next month.

A man who claims to be the head of the Aryan Nations says he wants to move their national headquarters into my little hometown in Eastern Oregon. This is alarming news, because we don't care to have organized crime, hatred, and intolerance invade our little community. He thinks we share his values and won't mind... But even though we are a rural area that has been especially hard-hit by the recession, we have some powerful tools that our predecessors did not have. Like Facebook.

Almost exactly one month ago we reported that Roderick Colenbrander was working on a new open-source project after his once-popular NVClock program has since largely faded away. Details were scarce on the project originally, but we knew it was to do with Linux gaming. Today we now know that this project is called "Kwaak3" and it's a port of Quake 3 to Google's Android platform.

Novell continues to push beyond the SUSE Linux market. Among the major moves: The company is beta testing Novell Cloud Security Service, which is scheduled for general availability in May or June 2010. Here are the implications.

We have tested a few interesting Intel Atom-powered nettop computers lately from the ASRock ION 330HT-BD that bears a Blu-ray drive and an Intel Atom 330 CPU with NVIDIA ION graphics to the ASUS Eee Top that packaged the entire system within a touch-screen monitor. In this article we are trying out the CompuLab Fit-PC2, which is definitely the smallest Atom-powered computer we have tested to date. The Fit-PC2 easily fits in the palm of your hand and it packs an Intel Atom Z530 processor with a Poulsbo graphics processor, a 160GB SATA HDD, and 1GB of system memory.

PCs running Ubuntu will be getting more social thanks to changes that will set the popular Linux distro's look and feel for the next five years. Lucid Lynx, due this April, will bring social applications like Twitter and Facebook directly into the software, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has said in an interview here.

Configuration Management is a term that may not be familiar to many Linux users. But for system administrators the concept will be well known. In a nutshell, Configuration Management software enables administrators to automatically manage the entire configuration of one or multiple computers.

This document describes how to install a Proftpd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota with this setup.

For the past four years, the "brightest minds in Linux" have come together at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit to "tackle and solve the most pressing issues facing Linux today." The opportunity to solve is coming up quickly, and those who want in on the tackling had better move fast.