A Masquerade writes "When Microsoft's market position was threatened by projects within the UK government evaluating open source solutions, it chose an interesting way to fight back. Computer Weekly has a piece by a Microsoft manager explaining they're paying for an external audit of the IT services for a specific UK local authority, Newham Council, to provide a cost justification for Windows and Office on the desktop, as opposed to an open source solution. The Register comments that 'if Microsoft succeeds in holding on to Newham, it will have knocked a considerable amount of wind out of the pilot schemes before they've even kicked off properly.'"

CmdrStone writes "Michael Robertson, the Lindows founder, has announced in his 'Michael's Minute' newsletter that Lindows has started the creation of a Frontpage-type program for Linux, called Nvu." Nvu promises to be "...a complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver", is "100% open source", and will be free to download when it launches.

Ridgelift writes "Eric S. Raymond is proposing a new logo for Hackerdom. 'The Linux folks have their penguin and the BSDers their demon. Perl's got a camel, FSF fans have their gnu and OSI's got an open-source logo. What we haven't had, historically, is an emblem that represents the entire hacker community of which all these groups are parts. This is a proposal that we adopt one - the glider pattern from the Game of Life.'"

Sri Lumpa writes "It will come as little surprise for those of you that followed the SCO stories and read their latest filing that an IP attorney, Douglas Steele, Esq., thinks that 'SCO is trying to get the judge to declare all works released under the GPL for the last 3 years put into the public domain.' Meanwhile, more lawyers give their opinions, with Eben Moglen saying 'It's just rubbish,' while another says of SCO's defense: 'From the outside, it appears so bizarre and so ridiculous that I fear their argument is being misstated,' while Blake Stowell of SCO believes Congress has drawn a boundary between proprietary and open source and still insists that IBM should indemnify its Linux users while refusing to indemnify SCO's Samba users against a potential MS lawsuit. More links to related news stories continue to appear in the comment section of the first link, thanks to the Groklaw readers." Read on for another handful of updates in SCO vs. The World.

Jan Stafford writes "In this interview, Linus Torvalds talks up the test version of the 2.6 Linux kernel released last weekend. He also hints at when a stable, production 2.6.0 might be released." Specifically, Linux encourages big shops to test out the improved high-end capabilities.

An anonymous reader writes "This article shows how to access a non-booting Linux system with a Knoppix CD, get read-write permissions on configuration files, create and manage partitions and filesystems, and copy files to various storage media and over the network. You can use Knoppix for hardware and system configuration detection and for creating and managing partitions and filesystems. You can do it all from Knoppix's excellent graphical utilities, or from the command line."

AstroDrabb writes "It seems that CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office 2.1 now supports Dreamweaver MX and Flash MX. So for those who have been waiting to ditch MS Windows because of these two apps, now is your chance. The announcement from CodeWeavers can be found here and the changelog can be found here. The list of supported applications is also getting pretty impressive."

chicagoan asks: "Last weekend I, like many other people across the US, saw Scary Movie 3. During the movie an actress gets on the web to help her in her quest. Looking closer I noticed that the Desktop environment she was using was GNOME and the Web Browser was Mozilla's Firebird. Where have you spotted actor's using Linux in movies or on TV shows?"

dmorelli writes "Since it seems to be a SuSE news day, here's something from Friday this past. Novell tried and failed to buy SuSE, according to the Linux Business week story."

SilentBob4 writes "On October 7th, the developers at Vector Linux released the latest version of their lightweight Linux distro, version 4. Vector has always been built upon the Slackware Linux framework and this time around it is based on Slack 9.0. The interesting thing here is that there was quite a delay between releases from the Vector camp, so as they were readying version 4, Pat Volkerding was releasing version 9.1 of his Slackware distro. This past Friday, the first review of Vector Linux was released (Distrowatch.com posted a link to it today). It was a pretty good review for the most part, but the interesting thing about it was that they actually benchmarked it against Slackware 9.1 and posted the results. I'll spoil the ending right now and tell you that Vector Linux won, but you should check out the findings. There are some pretty interesting numbers obtained from the two distros. The reviewer has published three PDF documents detailing the results. Everything was tested from the kernel to filesystem performance. It is interesting to say the least. Even if you don't have to time to read the whole article (it's two pages long), do check out the benchmark results. "

IAEBG writes "SuSE Linux has enlisted the backing of server-software maker Veritas, an important step in supporting the needs of business computing and keeping up with top Linux seller Red Hat. Check out the article on News.com." Interesting step - now to see how it all pans out.

An anonymous reader writes "According to an article on The Inquirer, a UK based company has set up a GPL'd Linux-based storage management project called Openfiler, and donated its code to it. There are some nice screenshots showing off its features. Apparently, the code itself will be available for download on 30th of October. There is a press release on the company's website. The concept of special purpose Linux distributions for enterprise applications seems to be picking up in recent years, with release of products from SuSE, Smoothwall and the like."

securitas writes "The New York Times' Steve Lohr reports on a fundamental shift taking place in Silicon Valley in the post-dotcom era: the geeks are back in charge. New start-ups and companies that survived the bubble 'are based on innovation and are run by people with deep technical skills.' These companies have real technology and a solid technical base that have historically been the bedrock of Silicon Valley - something that was temporarily forgotten during the dotcom bubble. Profiled companies include Tellme Networks (speech recognition), InterTrust (DRM - digital rights management), VMware (virtual machines) and Scalix (Linux e-mail servers)."

keesh writes "Linux kernel 2.6.0-test9 is now out. Changes include SATA support and XFS and CIFS fixes. Because of the change freeze, this is a fairly minor update. In the announcement, Linus suggests that -test10 will be the final release before 2.6.0-final. Don't forget to use a mirror."

An anonymous reader writes "The latest offering of Mandrake's distribution, 9.2, has been found to not only be incompatible with some LG CD-ROM drives, but to destroy them during the installation process. Mandrake have posted information on their errata page and further information can be found on this thread [google]. Along with over 350Mb of updates within a week of release, it's not been a good start for this latest release."

JoeBuck writes "According to this message from Ian Murdock on the Debian developer's mailing list, the Progeny folks have ported Red Hat's Anaconda installer to Debian. They have also written a tool that "facilitates the creation of Anaconda-based Debian installation CD sets". They are also engaged in other interesting unification work, and hope to be able to allow collections of managed RPM and .deb packages to coexist side-by-side." uberkludge points out an article with more details at Ars Technica.

Bombcar writes "This Migration Document is also available. It has details on going from WinNT to Linux/FLOSS/Samba et.al, with less detail on RedHat/Ximian/GNOME and more on SuSE/Mandrake/KDE. See Kurt's post to Samba Technical for more details."

Glowing Fish asks: "I am volunteering for a non-profit that is currently in the process of giving away grants of systems (some using Linux and some without an OS) to various non-profit organizations. One of the problems is that many of these organizations have a somewhat skewed version of what they need, thinking they need Pentium IV systems with 100s of megs of RAM with Windows XP installed. I have been given the job of politely explaining that for most non-profit organizations, it is not necessary to have this type of computing power. What is the best (and politest) way to explain to people that they don't really need this type of computing investment? Without Microsoft-bashing, how would you explain the ever spiraling relationship between RAM and OS bloat? What type of systems would you suggest to a non-profit organization for office work, and why?"

theblackdeer writes "eWeek has an article up about an Evans Data Corp survey that the majority of Windows developers agree that linux is a more secure OS. "Linux scored high for innate security among respondents, more than two- thirds of whom 'use or target Windows with their code.' Indeed, only 23 percent of the developers were primarily Linux developers.""

An anonymous reader writes "It's official, Samba creator Andrew Tridgell is Australia's smartest man... in IT anyway. He's received Bulletin magazine's 'Smart 100' award for the IT sector. He's also written about how Samba came into being, which was basically because he was trying to avoid doing any real work on his PhD. He also tells us how he discovered Linux and why he believes Open Source Software is superior to proprietary code... He also talks about rsync and his plans for the future..."