Ithika writes "Justin Piszcz recently did an analysis of some common journaling file systems over at Linux Gazette. Due to the Gazette's ridiculous restrictions on image filesize all of the graphs are pretty much illegible, however. You can see the article as the author originally intended here."

There have been recent reports about programs from Israel, Canada, and The Philippines that let you run Windows software in Linux. Are they really new? Can they succeed? Is this whole effort worth the time and trouble going into it? CodeWeavers CEO and Wine maven Jeremy White ought to know, since he's been working to bring Windows software to Linux users for many years -- with quite a bit of success. We'll forward 10 - 12 of the highest moderated questions posted here to Jeremy, and run his answers as soon as we get them back.

An anonymous reader writes "Mark Shuttleworth ^? , lauched a campaign to increase the use of open-source software in South Africa, according to the Sunday Times. The GO-open source campaign is aimed at households and small businesses. Shuttleworth founded Thawte Consulting in 1995 and subsequently sold it to Verisign for $575 Million."

Big Sav writes "Here is a quick but good interview with Bruce Perens. It also raises the topic of indemnification vis a vis the SCO court case " Interesting interview - talks about Peren's new Open Source Risk Management company.

maradong writes "The new Linux Kernel 2.6.6 has been released just 2 hours ago. The Patch from version 2.6.5 to 2.6.6, which can be downloaded on kernel.org measures 2.4MiB and the Changelog can be found at the known place."

bakwas_internet writes "Konstantin Ryabitsev sent a funny message in form of a irc chat log, revealing how Fedora and the Community Interact, to the development discussions mailing list related to Fedora Core.The story also appeared at lwn.net and OSnews."

An anonymous reader writes "VRizer was developed at the Ars Electronica Futurelab to utilize conventional OpenGL games or OpenGL software for virtual reality or virtual environment setups. This is done in Linux, by creating a library that, when preloaded, intercepts the proper OpenGL/SDL calls to create 2 stereoscopic views out of 1 single frame stream. So the original software (the game) is not altered in any way.
VRizer now works best for UT2003, but a few other games were tested succesfully: FooBillard, TuxRacer, Scorched3D, Neverball, Armagetron, Trackballs. For download (binary only for now) and screenshots see the project and the website"

Aiua writes "Novell and SuSE AG have made the Live Evaluation CD of SuSE Linux 9.1 available for download. A list of mirrors carrying the 680MB ISO image is available on the SuSE Website. The Live CD allows you to test some of the new features of 9.1 without installation, and is a SuSE recommended download to test your computer for distribution compatability. The full Personal and Professional Editions are now shipping and available for purchase in the SuSE Store or your local reseller." Reader Sweetshark points out that the first release of the Live CD has problems, so make sure you get the most recent one: "SUSE Security Announcement: Live CD 9.1 (SuSE-SA:2004:011) describes a big security hole in the SuSE 9.1 Personal Edition Live CD: 'Upon boot, the Live CD will automatically configure a network card if one has been detected. [...] A configuration error on the Live CD allows for a passwordless, remote root login to the system via ssh, if the computer has booted from the Live CD and if it is connected to a network.' A fixed iso is available."

Martin Kotulla writes "SoftMaker, a German software developer, has released the first public beta of PlanMaker 2004, a native-Linux spreadsheet that is highly Excel-compatible ... in fact, this app is basically Microsoft Excel ported to Linux, including Excel-compatible charting and even AutoShapes. Here is a chart comparing Excel, OpenOffice.org, and PlanMaker." Update: 05/07 19:07 GMT by M : Softmaker.de is temporarily down; the site can still be reached at softmaker.com.

Fabrice Mous writes "The Xandros Desktop OS is known for their intuitive graphical environment that works right out of the box. Their polished desktop product is based on KDE. The KDE News website had the privilege to talk to Rick Berenstein, Xandros Chairman and CTO and Ming Poon, Vice President for Software Development about Xandros and their products and the relationship between Xandros and the KDE project. Without further ado ... enjoy the interview!"

linux slacker writes "Ignalum Linux 'is an intuitive graphical environment that works right out of the box and offers unrivaled compatibility with Microsoft Windows' or so says their website. The company is owned by four university students in Ontario, and one of their goals is to allow companies to incorporate Linux into their Windows environment, so users could still run Word, Excel and other popular Microsoft fare."

SafeTinspector writes "Yesterday I attended a Novell/HP Linux seminer "Delivering & Deploying Linux Across the Enterprise" Among the boring and expected stuff, the Novell representative had several slides in his presentation claiming that Novell is going to get heavily involved with LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) to bring policy based security and administration to the LTSP similar to those found in Microsoft and Citrix terminal servers--probably through their venerable Zenworks product line. Also heavily hinted at would be an install wizard provided by Novell that would greatly simplify the installation and configuration of LTSP, which is currently quite complex. I can find no hard information about this on LTSP or Novell websites, nor any information within Google newsgroup search. Does anyone know more about this? On a side note, the laptops of both the HP rep and Novell rep were running SuSE Linux Desktop with Ximian XD2 installed and the presentation was made using OpenOffice Presentation."

The Linux-Egypt group recently held an amazingly successful installfest. This event was a milestone both for Linux installfests in general (was it the largest one ever held?) and for Linux in the Arabic world. Alaa Abd El Fatah, one of the organizers, has offered to answer your questions with help from other Linux-Egypt members. We'll post their answers to 10 or 12 of the highest-moderated questions as soon as we get them back.

Joe Barr writes "What with the spate of professionally PR-generated FUD coming out of Redmond about Linux not being open source, or Windows having a lower TCO, and - believe it or not - even a claim that Windows is more reliable, it's good to read about some real world, grass-root results of successful migrations from Windows to Linux. This story at NewsForge takes a look at the Howard County (Maryland) Public Library's roll-out of over 200 public-use PCs, which used to run on Windows and now run on a custom Linux distribution called Lumix."

sirmikester writes "I wrote a term paper for my University of Illinois law class about the enforceability of the GPL. Unlike most of the papers dealing with the GPL, this one was aimed at a primarily non-technical audience. While a little bit rough around the edges, I'm sure it could give all of the non-technical folks out there a look at the GPL, and why its so important to all of us. There is also a powerpoint presentation available of the speech that I gave to the class about the paper. "

An anonymous reader writes "Even if your work doesn't require you to reboot your Linux machine several times a day, waiting for a system to reboot can be a real drag. Enter kexec. Essentially, kexec is a fast reboot feature that lets you reboot to a new Linux kernel -- without having to go through a bootloader. Faster reboot is a benefit even when uptime isn't mission-critical -- and a lifesaver for kernel and system software developers who need to reboot their machines several times a day. Kexec is currently available on the x86 32-bit platform only."

AArnott writes "Ximian has just released beta 1 of its open-source implementation of Microsoft .NET platform. Mono allows .NET applications to run on Linux, Mac OS X, Unix, Windows. Mono 1.0 is slated for release on June 30, 2004." sjanes71 adds "The first 'beta' always gets heaps of attention, and this is the first of three planned for the Mono project. Some of the new features touted for this release that updates Mono v0.31 include a faster interpreter, a global assembly cache, support for the StrongARM and HPPA platforms, generics support in the VM and C# compiler and an early alpha of System.Windows.Forms. C# and .NET is Microsoft's answer to Sun Microsystem's Java platform and Project Mono aims to create the Open Source, cross-platform version of Microsoft's new development environment."

nostriluu writes "I know, some people want their cell phone to just be a cell phone. To those people, I suggest a second hand phone. For those of us who want to cram as much functionality as possible into a device we are going to bother carrying everywhere, there is the promise of the Linux Smartphone. I've had a P800 for over a year now and while it's great (although a brick), I can't wait for a Linux based device to bring the culture of openness and upgradability, as opposed to the intentional obsolesence and $10 for every little utility someone reinvents for "closed" devices."

Jahf writes "Sun is putting out Java Desktop System Release 2. Some overview information is in this article while more technical information about the new management solutions are in this one. Quickly: the desktop environment is essentially the same, though Sun has added support for GIMLET (allows one to change the current input language on a per-window basis), officially supported Japanese and Korean translations, and is including a Java-based online update client. The bigger changes are management items that are normally hidden from the end-user but valuable to the Admin. Configuration Manager allows admins to setup client preferences for remote desktops and 'protect' those settings to create policies. Sun Control Station (the last remaining Sun product from the Cobalt acquisition) can work as a network imaging server, can monitor remote desktops, and can work as a patch server (both by pushing patches out to many desktops and by serving as an online update server for clients who need to pull additional packages)."

prostoalex writes "USA Today notices significant rise of Linux in the high-end enterprise environment. Although it doesn't provide obligatory pretty pictures, the paper mentions the projects at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and NASA. Also if you've missed the New York Times Google article of the day, the expose on John Doerr from Valley's venerable KPCB talks about venture fund investing $12 million in LinuxCare. NYT quote: "That's a freight train I wouldn't want to get in front of," said Mr. Doerr, explaining the importance to having a stake in a Linux-based venture. "Probably get run over.''"