Seeing SuSE’s new desktop—the one using XGL and Compiz—one may be tempted to try and get it working on his own system... Good luck.

US giant chucks out Red Hat Linux to replace it with Suse Linux on store terminals and for its backend point-of-sale management systems.

It's a long-standing joke in the free software world that this will be the year when we see GNU/Linux make its breakthrough on the desktop - just like last year, and the year before that. What's really funny is that all the key GNU/Linux desktop apps are already being widely deployed, but not in the way that people have long assumed.

A few weeks ago, I started looking around for an application that makes it easy to take notes. I do all my writing in Vim, but I wanted something that was good for quick and dirty notetaking and for organizing information without maintaining a collection of text files. After some research, I settled on Tomboy.

At the 2005 World Economic Forum in Switzerland a soft-spoken academic made an announcement that sent seismic waves across the computer industry. Nicholas Negroponte, then director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, spoke of making laptops available at US$100 for schoolchildren in developing nations.

The long-delayed and much-awaited Open Source Initiative report on open-source license proliferation has been released, but the current licenses have been placed into three broad categories and have not been ranked beyond that.

OPEN SOURCE news from Sun continues today, with the release of architectural documents for the OpenSPARC T1 - the open source version of Sun's UltraSPARC T1 processor.

While Red Hat has outlined more strategic reasons for embracing open source, market researcher Gartner says enterprises should not have a strategy specifically for open source.

Were you to walk around LinuxWorld in San Francisco this week, for almost every person you'd see sitting, you'd see a laptop in front of them. And, if you're a snoopy person, like me, you'd also see that about half of those laptops were running Linux.

That doesn't sound like that much? Think again.

I'm at LinuxWorld in San Francisco this week, and it's as interesting, stimulating, and fun as you might imagine. There's a lot going on here, and much of it relates to security. In fact, it sometimes seems like I'm hearing reactions to, and support for, many of the columns I've written in this very space over the years. In particular, one topic strongly stood out for me, but from a new angle that deserves examination.

Microsoft within the "next couple of years" will release a version of its Office productivity to run on Linux, Stuart Cohen, chief executive for the Open Source Development Labs, predicted in an interview with vnunet.com at the Linuxworld conference in San Francisco.

The Zaurus is in a class by itself, being a cross between a PDA and a handheld computer. Rather than running a somewhat limited PDA operating system, it runs Linux which means the CPU and RAM are the only real limit for running Linux applications.

The success of Linux over the past 15 years boils down to a few key factors, according to a panel of Linux luminaries. Larry Augustin, chairman of VA Software, Eric Raymond, founder of the Open Source Institute, Jon maddog Hall of Linux International, Chris DiBona of Google, and Dirk Hohndel of Intel regaled the capacity crowd with tales of their first experiences with Linux and Linus.

Got to give it to those Novell folks: They aren't giving up. These guys want to give Microsoft a kick in the lower regions when it comes to the corporate desktop, they've chosen Linux to do it, and they're not going to quit until they succeed.

To each his own, but I love eye candy. When I heard that you could get the 3D Xgl and Compiz environment running on Ubuntu/Kubuntu dapper, I immediately searched the web for instructions. What follows are instructions for doing the same.

Also: xgl and compiz are almost usable

In the previous lesson we learnt about string comparisons and file parsing. In this lesson we'll see how Perl can interact with the filesystem and execute commands in the Linux operating system. We'll then use what we've learnt to write a little script.

The 1000+ pages of this book are divided into 39 chapters and six parts, with a nice build-up of the material allowing you to smoothly transition from the simplest of topics to those that are more difficult.

If open source were a religion, Linus Torvalds, the Finnish engineer who wrote the core of the operating system that would become Linux, would be its prophet. In an email interview with Red Herring, Mr. Torvalds says his 15-year-old creation is growing up nicely.

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens escalated to new heights the debate over whether the open source Xen virtualization technology is ready for prime-time, saying Novell was being irresponsible and risked damaging enterprises' first experiences with Xen.