Alex_Ionescu writes "WineHQ brings us the scoop on the latest developments in ReactOS, as well as on Steven Edward's excellent job on porting Wine to MingGW and linking the two platforms together. This is an interesting insight into the WINE and ReactOS project, and a must-read for anyone interested into the future of Windows-replacement projects like these."

Bill Harper writes "Open source software is a 'waste of money,' a Microsoft executive has said. He goes on to say that governments planning to use it will damage their own economies and that giving away source code is shooting yourself in the foot. What's interesting though is that this is just the latest in a series of nonsense arguments put forward by MS in Asia because it's scared of Linux stealing the market. An early one was that open-source software is anti-competitive!" Funny thing is, the MS executive (Chris Sharp) used to work for Red Hat.

EvilAlien writes "Mandrakelinux has released the ISOs for Mandrakelinux 10.0. Mandrakelinux 10 is one of the first commercially available Linux distributions to feature the 2.6 kernel by default. As always, you can download the release via FTP or Bittorrent. Remember, if you use Mandrakelinux, join the club or buy a box to support them."

darthcamaro writes "Not that long ago it was a serious pain to get an 802.11b card to work on a Linux machine. [ed note: We love you Jean Tourrilhes!] Wi-Fi Planet has a story where they do an overview of a wad of open source Wi-Fi projects. Did you realize that you don't even need to spend the dough for an Access Point? - standard Linux routing is enough to create your own access point, with a few other tools like Public IP's Zone CD or the Less Networks Hotspot server, you can freely create a hotspot and manage it all in minutes. I guess all this means that both Wi-Fi and open source are literally 'everywhere'."

millette writes ""Under the enhanced kernel submission process, contributions to the Linux kernel may only be made by individuals who acknowledge their right to make the contribution under an appropriate open source license. The acknowledgement, called the DCO, tracks contributions and contributors. The DCO ensures that appropriate attribution is given to developers of original contributions and derivative works, as well to those contributors who receive submissions and pass them, unchanged, up the kernel tree. All contributors are called upon to "sign off" on a submission before it may be considered for inclusion in the kernel." From the press release. Also seen in the New York Times"

bwy asks: "I'm building a digital picture frame, inspired by a story here at Slashdot. Currently, I'm using Red Hat 9 with GDM autologin, icewm, and a slideshow program autostarting. I've installed code to hide the mouse pointer and the 'powerswitch' kernel module to allow the frame to run a proper shutdown (instead of a suspend) when the ATX power switch is pressed. The hardware is an EPIA 5000 with a laptop drive. I think this is overkill, however, and I am a purist. Is there a lightweight distribution that is EPIA friendly? Such a distro shouldn't install GCC, so I'll need all the software as binaries. How would I go about booting from a ramdisk? This would make the 'powerwitch' kernel mod not so important since there is no worry of corrupting the file system." Does anyone have distribution suggestions, or pointers to other information that might be helpful for such a project?

Bruce Perens writes "Computer Associates is releasing CA Advantage Ingres as Open Source under a variant of the Common Public License. The press release is here. This is a commercial fork of the public-domain University Ingres of the '80's, probably the first real relational database. CA's product added SQL and in general brought the program up to enterprise quality. So has the PostgreSQL project. It will be interesting to see if there can be any synergies between the two products. The BSD licensing on PostgreSQL would allow it." Here's an article at CRN on this and a few other open source moves announced today by CA; can anyone find a link to the text of CA's "Trusted Open Source License"? Related news, contributed by an semi-anonymous reader, is that CA has established "a new open-source foundation that will support Plone, the content management system built on the free Zope Application server," and that Plone's license will change as a result.

shadfc asks: "I'm starting a new job as the system administrator for a small company in Tampa. They currently have 10 Red Hat servers (they are open to distribution change) that have not been actively maintained for a few months. I'm a Junior in College with a decent amount of Linux experience, but this will be my first job in this kind of position and responsibility. I'm asking for resources that can help fill in the holes in my knowledge and help make me a better administrator. Quality books on the subject would be preferred, but any advice is welcome. Thanks!"

shystershep writes "Various sources are reporting that Microsoft's appeal in the Lindows trademark infringement suit was rejected by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. At issue was the trial judge's decision [PDF link] to 'instruct a jury to consider only whether 'windows' was a generic term before November 1985, when the first version of Microsoft's Windows was released.' This is significant because a generic mark receives no trademark protection, and the ruling that the jury must make that determination based only on the use of the term before 1985 is a major blow to Microsoft."

Anonymous Coward writes "Usenix Association president Marshall Kirk McKusick is a veteran of BSD's intellectual property scuffle with AT&T in the 1990s, and he's got some thoughts and advice for the keepers of the Linux kernel going forward, commenting: 'There isn't a well-documented ownership trail with Linux. So, they have opened themselves up to a swamp of 'he said-she said' about where code came from'."

Kalki writes "In an e-mail to the Linux kernel mailing list, sent Saturday, Torvalds proposed that kernel developers begin certifying that the code that they contribute is entitled to be included in the Linux kernel as well as a technique for "signing off on patches" that would better track which developers had handled source code contributions. check this Infoworld story on it."

SilentBob4 writes "Today, a review of CrossOver Office 3 (written by Preston St. Pierre) as well as an interview with the founder of CodeWeavers Inc., Jeremy White (written by Adam Doxtater) have been published for mass consumption. It looks like CrossOver Office/Wine has come a long way since the dark ages of Linux science. Congratulations to the developers on both teams on a job well done. The interview with Jeremy is better than any I have seen recently."

schwatoo writes "It seems Fedora Core doesn't like to boot alongside Windows 2K or XP. According to a bug first reported in February on Fedora's bugzilla site it has a tendency to chew up partition maps making it impossible to dual boot into Windows. No one seems to know quite what is causing the problem and a lot of people are ending up with unbootable machines."

Timex writes "Linux Devices is reporting that the COO of Linux startup Symbio Technologies, Roger Del Russo, claims that the recycling programs of Dell and HP are nothing more than a means of getting older systems out of use, to be replaced by newer systems. Mr Del Russo then makes the case for putting the older systems to good use as thin clients, using the Linux Terminal Server Project."

Anon. writes "Linux.com is carrying a pretty damning review of Sun Java Desktop System version 2. JDS seemed to have issues with almost each and every machine the author tested it on, support was quite bad - and to top it all, the software comes with a seven page license document. Something seems to be terribly wrong somewhere - otherwise why would Sun decide to ship JDS with kernel 2.4.19 at this stage?" (Slashdot and Linux.com are both part of OSDN.)

BigFire writes "Professor Tanenbaum responds to the slashdot effect and a small critique of Ken Brown's forthcoming book in his followup. A small gem is where he disclosed that Ken Brown can't multiply simple positive integers."

GhostCypher asks: "I've been a Mac user for nigh on 12 years, and recently made the reverse-switch (yes, Mac to PC) due to an unfortunate accident to my PowerBook. Now that I have this spiffy new HP laptop, I want to run Linux or Unix of some flavor on it, but I don't know the best one to run. I've been considering FreeBSD and OpenBSD, as well as SuSE Linux, Fedora, and Mandrake. Could the wisened Linux gurus here offer some insight as to the best package for a former Mac user to introduce him to the greater world of Linux without major headaches in setting it all up?"

An anonymous reader writes "In a wide-ranging interview, Microsoft's senior VP Bob Muglia talks about the work involved in getting Longhorn Server out by 2007. He also gives the lowdown on the next major release of Windows Server, code-named Blackcomb. 'If Indigo (a major feature of Longhorn) took four years to develop, some major infrastructure things inside Blackcomb will also take four years to develop,' Muglia said. On competition from Linux, he said: 'When I think of Linux, I don't think about it as our competitor. I think about Linux as a technology that is used by our competitors to build competitive offerings.' Very different from what Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates have been saying but Muglia says he's trying to teach them a thing or two."

An anonymous reader writes "Linuxlookup.com staff member Rich Hughes posted his thoughts on the latest Fedora release with this Core 2 Review. "Fedora Core 2 is the newest release from The Distro Formerly Known As RedHat. Updates include the 2.6 kernel, KDE 3.2, Gnome 2.6, X.org replacing Xfree86 and numerous package updates. Having played around with SuSE 9.1, Arch .6 and Slackware 9 with the 2.6 kernel, I was interested in seeing how the Fedora team did with this release.""

Andy Tanenbaum writes "Ken Brown has just released a book on open source code. In it, he claims (1) to have interviewed me, and (2) that Linus Torvalds didn't write Linux. I think Brown is batting .500, which is not bad for an amateur (for people other than Americans, Japanese, and Cubans, this is an obscure reference to baseball). Since I am one of the principals in this matter, I thought it might be useful for me to put my 2 eurocents' worth into the hopper. If you were weren't hacking much code in the 1980s, you might learn something." Tanenbaum's description of the interview process with Brown is classic. See also Slashdot's original story and Linus' reply.