JayBonci writes "Not popcorn, popcon! (Short for popularity-contest) According to a recent message posted to debian-devel-announce, popcon numbers are being used to determine how things get arranged on the 13 CDs of the upcoming Debian stable release. Participation so far has been good, but the project could use more numbers from a broader user base. Please take a moment to install the package 'popularity-contest,' and help us make the distro better by allowing it to send us anonymous package usage statistics. You can see the results at Popularity Contest page."

Space_Soldier writes "According to News.com, YaST is going open source: 'For years, SUSE has considered its YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool) software for installing, configuring and managing Linux an advantage over its competitors and forbade them from incorporating it into the products they sold. But with the new plan, to be announced Monday at Novell's Brainshare conference, the company will release YAST under the GPL, sources familiar with the plan said.'" Several years ago, when I first used YaST, I found it to be superior to the rest of the all-in-one administation tools around at the time. It was generally regarded as a great program, save for the licensing. Today, that's no longer a concern.

ravydavygravy writes "Novell today released details of the next incarnation of its linux products, Suse 9.1, based on the 2.6 kernel. It will come in both 32 and 64-bit versions, and includes a LiveCD version, to help people convince their Windows-loving friends to make the switch. It'll ship with Gnome 2.4.2 and KDE 3.2.1, as well as demo versions of the text processing application Textmaker and the spreadsheet application Planmaker (from Softmaker - but do we really need another office suite?). Samba 3 will also feature in the default setup."

zensufi writes "CNET News has a story stating that Microsoft has announced plans for a program to help governments produce local language versions of key Microsoft applications, giving the software giant a hedge against a growing international threat from open-source software." The piece explains: 'The Local Language Program will provide local and regional governments with "language interface packs" that government and academic developers can use to produce localized versions of the Windows XP operating system and Office 2003 productivity package.'

neomage86 asks: "I recently had to set up a router for a small company, only five users at any given time, and the needed VPN capabilities are built in. So, instead of using a Cisco or other embedded router, I decided to just install Linux and IPTables on an old 200 MHz PII I had lying around. It's been working fine, and I'm thinking about doing something like this for a much larger network (3000+ users). Does anyone have suggestions on how much I will have to beef up the hardware to provide IP Masquerading for about 1000 users on a T3; provide network-layer filtering of the transmission; and route between 4-5 internal subnets?"

garananda asks: "In spite of being one of the very few sources for customized PC laptops pre-installed with various flavors of GNU/Linux, Qli Linux Computers is closed as of March 15th 2004 after serving the community for six years (thanks for all of your hard work). It is becoming easier to get Linux computers from some of the big vendors, but usually this means no hardware choices and no choice of preferred GNU/Linux distribution. Is any small company providing this service and succeeding (lots of hardware options for desktops, custom laptop options, multiple GNU/Linux distributions, and no mandatory 'Microsoft tax')? How do they do it? Given the low margins in the PC market and given the variance of component quality and component vendor reliability/prices, how would _you_ do it?" When one asks "How does one sell Linux", it's only fair to point out what you don't do. Beyond that, what are other recommendations do you have for putting Linux out there for consumers, in the hopes it will sell your hardware?

An anonymous reader writes "Roblimo looks at why so many Linux products fail in the marketplace, and decides it's not because Linux users want everything free, but because most products they're asked to buy are either poorly marketed or don't work well. He has some good advice for anyone trying to sell stuff to Linux users, except it really applies to *all* computer products, not just Linux." (NewsForge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.)

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine reports that the Mozilla Foundation is cracking down on those selling unofficial Mozilla-branded merchandise. This takes the form of an open letter addressed to retailers of goods that bear the Mozilla name or logos. The letter suggests that the Foundation are willing to work with those selling Mozilla wares, as long as they get a cut and the retailer isn't operating in the US, Canada or Mexico, where they would be competing with the Foundation's own Mozilla Store. Threats of legal action for non-compliance are issued, albeit with friendly overtones. This open letter is part of the Mozilla Foundation's campaign to better enforce its trademarks, an effort that began when the Foundation was launched in July. In a related move, the Foundation announced that the new Firefox artwork is not open-source and can only be used in official builds or those sanctioned by the Foundation - this has led to debates about whether Firefox is free enough to be included in the Debian Linux distribution."

Marcus Thiesen writes "Debian Installer Beta 3 was released two days ago and I wrote a small review concerning the installation part. The new debian installer is good way to set up your favorite distribution. Nontheless there are a few usability things and I thought that it might be a good idea to write a walkthrough from another point of view: Bob 'average' User."

jg21 writes "Following on from yesterday's Slashdot coverage of the idea to launch a games-based Linux distro, LinuxWorld Magazine has held a Gaming Round Table involving Chris DiBona, Ryan Gordon, Timothee Besset, Gavriel State, and Joe Valenzuela about where Linux currently stands and how it will one day become a premier gaming platform. 'It became perfectly clear to me that most of the technological issues are already solved, and that the others won't take too long to fix once the game publishers really get into the mix,' reports Dee-Ann LeBlanc, Gaming Industry Editor for LinuxWorld, who coordinated the round table. Well worth reading."

ThePretender writes "From the Infoworld article, 'Open Source Risk Management LLC (OSRM), a startup company that last month hired Pamela Jones, editor of the popular Groklaw.net Web site, as director of litigation risk research, plans to soon begin offering insurance policies to companies using open source software but fear that they may be sued, according to a company spokeswoman'. What's next - Developers having to pick up 'code malpractice' insurance? Egads." Might as well get some alien abduction insurance while you're at it.

An anonymous reader noted that "Turbolinux just announced they will be distributing TurboLinux 10 Desktop with HP's Compaq business Desktop PCs in 12 Asian countries, including China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. "

mcbridematt writes "Minitar sells a rebadged Edimax Linux based-802.11b Access Point in Australia (no FCC ID yet) for a relatively cheap price (under AUS $100 in places). These access points are based around the Realtek 8181 wireless-system-on-chip design, have 8MB flash rom, and run a 2.4 series Linux kernel. After requests from the community to get the kernel sources, which resulted in a incomplete sourcecode release, we finally have (allegedly) complete and GPL compliant Linux kernel sources for this fine Access Point. Special thanks to chuna, serialmonkey and screwball at Minitar for making this happen, especially after they ran into arguments with their OEM and Realtek over this." From the attached forum discussion, you can see there's disagreement about whether the source code release is as complete as it should be.

An anonymous reader writes "The platforms for the Debian Project Leader candidates are now available here with more information about how votes are tallied. The candidates this year are the incumbent DPL Martin Michlmayr, and developers Branden Robinson, and Gergely Nagy (but if you vote for him, his tamagotchi will sit on you.)" Nagy's platform is interesting reading.

An anonymous reader writes "If in the FOSS community we could only get our act together and launch a game-based distro, we will be home and dry. That, at least, is the view of one British games enthusiast, Ian Bonham, who says in the short Linux World article: 'I would be happy to help a group of volunteers create a distro based on games, because I believe that's where the next generation is - NOT in giving away copies of Linux or OOo. That's a short-term ideal. The PS2 and the X-Box(sic) run Linux, so let's create a distro that turns home PC into a console with development potential. Expand that distro to the consoles. And lets get some 'killer' games on that disk.'"

iswm writes "HP has supposedly been selling MandrakeSoft Linux on the desktop for a while but has been so quiet about it that for all intents and purposes it's been a stealth operation. That's all about to change, with two new Linux desktops ready for rolling out by HP to the North American SMB market, both boxes to be sold with Mandrake Linux."

apropos asks: "An interesting question came up recently when discussing (yet again) starting an open-source based consulting company: 'How would you design the ultimate virtual office with open source software?' With things like fax, VoIP, web, email, security and office suites all available as open source products, what kind of useful things could be done? One idea that came to mind was emailing answering machine recordings. What would you put into your ultimate virtual office solution?"

Vrallis writes "Ten years ago this month, Linux Journal christened their maiden issue with an interview with Linus Torvalds. It is definitely worth the read, and worth some reflection on just how far Linux has come in the last decade."

justinarthur writes "The Linux kernel version 2.6.4 has been released at 03:16 UTC. Included in the changes from version 2.6.3 are fixes to XFS support, Wide Area Networking, USB connectivity, and IEEE1394 connectivity. To download a copy, it is recommended that one utilizes a Linux Kernel Archives mirror. Linus Torvalds' announcement to the Linux Kernel Mailing list concerning this release is available here." Reader k-zed points out that Linux 1.0 was released in March 1994, ten years ago.

An anonymous reader writes "Motorola has announced several new multimedia-enabled mobile phones supporting music and video playback, including one new device based on embedded Linux, according to LinuxDevices.com. The Linux-based Motorola E680 could see US distribution, making it the first of Motorola's Linux-based mobile phones available outside the far East. The E680 will include multimedia playback software supporting a variety of formats, including MP3 audio, MPEG4 video, and RealPlayer multimedia content." The article notes: "Motorola's previous Linux-based phones have been based on MontaVista Linux, and have used the Qt/Embedded graphical application framework."