Karma Sucks writes "Rekall is one of those killer apps alongside Scribus, Evolution, OpenOffice and Mozilla that could make all the difference for Linux desktop productivity. For those of you not in the know, Rekall is a RAD DBMS similar to MS Access or Paradox and has now been GPL'ed by theKompany. Community development and organization is to take place on rekallrevealed.org."

Zardus writes "According to Forbes, Gateway has named SuSE a "strategic partner" and will be offering SuSE Linux on all of their servers. I always thought SuSE would be a nice name for a cow, but I guess I'll have to settle with it being the OS of a spotted server." The article notes: "SuSE has long sought a greater presence in the United States, where rival Red Hat has taken the lead in selling Linux server software to businesses."

An anonymous reader writes "Citing economic as well as social reasons, Brazil's government is opting to move away from Windows, opting instead for Open Source (read: Linux) solutions. Interestingly, Microsoft's representative in Brazil decries this as a movement away from freedom and choice..."

An anonymous reader writes "DesktopLinux.com, in coordination with the Desktop Linux Consortium, is making select presentations from Monday's groundbreaking Desktop Linux conference at Boston University's Corporate Education Center available. Sessions from the well-received program included talks from key companies and open source projects bringing Desktop Linux into the enterprise. The first presentation available is from IBM's Sam Docknevich, Linux and Grid Services Executive for IBM Global Services and is titled "Open Source Desktop - Directions for today... and Tomorrow". His presentation discusses IBM's push into the Linux desktop market, an initiative from inside Big Blue."

geoff313 writes "Good news week for Linux users in the education field, as both Red Hat and SUSE have announced that they will provide academic discounts in an effort to attract "students and educational institutions." According to this article published on CNET, while both companies have decided to offer discounts, they are each going about it a different way. SUSE has begun to offer "schools, students, universities and nonprofit customers a discount of more than 40 percent through two sales partners, CCV Software and Ricis." Red Hat, on the other hand, plans to offer two new versions of its distributions, based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) line. The first, aimed at students and named Red Hat Academic Desktop, will sell for $25 and is based on RHEL WS. The second, to be sold to schools and named Red Hat Academic Server, will sell for $50 and is based off RHEL ES. Both products will include online updates (presumably through its Red Hat Network) but will not include telephone support. Bulk pricing is also available, and administrative licenses will be available soon."

Russ Nelson writes "The Handhelds.org project has released Familiar 0.7.2, a Linux-based firmware replacement for HP iPAQ handhelds. New to this release is support for the h5400 and h5500, which have built-in wlan interfaces. Both GPE (gtk/X) and Opie (Qt) are at or past version 1.0, and we now have a Python-gtk distribution called 'pypaq'. Why waste that commute time playing Tetris when you could be hacking on Python code?"

An anonymous reader writes "Over at LinMagAu There is an interesting look at the new beta version of the Next Gerneration Debian Installer. Putting aside the fuss around Ian Murdock, Progeny and Anaconda, this is how Debian is constructing the future of what is known to be it's Achilles heel. It's a well done beginning." While still not a graphical installer (and the article does a good job of explaining why that's not a priority) the installer now autodetects hardware, streamlining module selection, which was previously one of the more confusing parts of the install for newbies.

Kickstart70 asks: "Recently myself and a number of friends of mine who work or worked in IT jobs have been remarking on absolutely horrible job postings for low-level IT jobs paying small change. It seems the headhunters and employers are still wanting knowledge in everything, at least one degree but preferably two, and want to keep employees on minimal wages (in the job listing linked, the wage is in Canadian dollars). Is this common everywhere? What's the worst job posting you have seen?"

joestar writes "Since LG has released updated firmwares and a recovery procedure for all so-called ATAPI LG cd-rom drives that were "destroyed" by a feature of Mandrake 9.2, MandrakeSoft has publicly released the set of Mandrake 9.2 ISO images which are now available on a number of FTP mirrors. Mandrake 9.2 is one of the few remaining 100%-OSS major Linux distributions, so considering a MandrakeClub membership or joining Cooker - Mandrake's open development version - is certainly an excellent idea." Here's the feature list.

geoff313 writes " For all of you who might be worried about what financial consequences Linus Torvalds might have to endure as a result of being subpoenaed by SCO, fear not: the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) will pay for its law firm to represent him. the OSDL, who are Torvalds' employer, will announce on Friday that the "OSDL has agreed to fund legal representation for Torvalds and any other employees of the lab who may become involved in the litigation." Just in case you didn't you didn't know, the OSDL is funded by a variety of corporations including (but not limitied to) IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, Cisco, Computer Associates, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Nokia. "

curious-embed asks: "I'm currently involved in a project which is moving towards using Linux in an embedded environment. However, I am having a lot of trouble finding a reasonably priced dev kit to tinker with and move towards something more production ready. Linuxdevices.com has a guide The Linux-friendly Embedded SBCs Quick Reference Guide but most of the listed manufacturers won't talk to you unless you are buying 100+ kits. I'm specifically looking for something ~$200 with USB/Audio/Video that is Linux friendly. Ideas anyone?"

Red Hat has made several changes in how they run their business, notably concentrating more (perhaps one might say "entirely") on enterprise-level Linux users. Some of Red Hat's moves have upset long-time users, and many people seem to have trouble understanding exactly where Fedora fits into all this. Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik has offered to answer your questions and clear things up, so ask away. Please don't ask questions he's answered in recent interviews and statements, and try -- hard though this may be for some -- to ask only one question per post. We'll forward 10 or 12 of the highest-moderated questions to Szulik tomorrow, and run his answers when he gets them back to us.

Psyke writes "The Australian Financial Review is reporting that 'IBM, Red Hat and a consortium of computer makers backed by the likes of Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Intel will push to move the Linux operating system out of the back office from next year.' and 'Meanwhile, the OSDL, which has largely worked on improving Linux's ability to run large servers, said it would work on improving Linux's performance on ordinary desktop computers.'" The article itself is a little off- those companies are working *through* the OSDL of which they are members - along with a number of additional companies as well.

There's a new article in First Monday entitled "The Open Code Market". Jordi Carrasco-Munoz, the author has some interesting comments about the article itself, which I've put below, but the overall direction of the piece is, in his words: "In short, The Open Code Market aims to become a Free Market for software, as well as a market for Free Software. The OCM introduces into the Free/Open Source movement an economic incentive, to help align the priorities of Free/Open Source developers with those of the end users. "

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com reports that Sharp will introduce a new member in its Linux-based Zaurus PDA family in the Japanese market on Nov. 27, 2003. The SL-C860 appears to be a more powerful and feature-rich version of the much-reviewed SL-C750/760. The device boasts a 400MHz Intel PXA255 processor equipped with 128MB of Flash memory (65MB available for user programs) along with 64MB of SDRAM memory, has a 640x480 resolution full-VGA color display, and runs an embedded Linux operating system based on Metrowerks's OpenPDA handheld device software stack."

Bombcar asks: "Samba 3.0 is an excellent CIFS server, but there are some limitations. For one, you can get a networked mapped drive, but some programs (Oracle, Exchange) refuse to run on a mapped drive, but only on local drives. I know there are some closed source (read: expensive) drivers that allow a SMB share to appear to be a physical disk. Is there any equivalent in the OSS community? What I want to be able to do is mount a share from a Linux server under Windows 2000 and have it appear as if it were a local disk. This will allow many programs that refuse (for what ever reason) to use anything but physical drives to access the network." Might such software be seen as a 'circumvention device' as specified by the DMCA? The submittor mentions that there are companies in this market already, but that doesn't mean that it will remain safe.

JigSaw writes "OSNews has reviewed the Fedora Core 1 Linux distro, but the author personally found lots of usability problems and bugs with the distro, making Fedora Core a trying experience. The writer puts the blame on poor QA of Fedora Core 1 done by its community, since Red Hat has shifted focus to Enterprise, with Fedora serving merely as a testbed for them."

Teppy writes "I noticed something unexpected the other day when reviewing the subscriber counts for our MMORPG, A Tale In The Desert. Of everyone who tries our game, Linux users are definitely more inclined to pay money to subscribe. In fact, overall, about 15.6% of Windows users who do the free trial will subscribe, while among Linux users the number is 19.3%. Furthermore, Linux users tend to remain subscribers for a longer time. Are we the only game company noticing this?" Is this down to loyalty, choice, or other mysterious factors?

Matt Will writes "The Official Samba 3 How-To and Reference Guide was written by John H. Terpstra and Jelmer Rinze Vernooij in collaboration with the core developers of the Samba-Team (www.samba.org) and expert end users. The book is written with special focus towards administrators of Microsoft Windows systems, giving them a first insight into the capabilities of Samba and a well guided step-by-step guide for migrating systems from a Microsoft solution to Samba." Read on for the rest of Will's review.

Mecha-A writes "Linux From Scratch 5.0 was released earlier this month, incorporating GRUB as a bootloader, GNU coreutils, GCC 3.3, and lots of other package upgrades among other improvements. If you haven't tried it, LFS is a procedural outline for building a Linux system from the ground up. For those who can't get enough customizability..."