Frank Caviggia writes "The Inquirer has a story up about Red Hat providing educational institutions with the ability to certify students as Red Hat Certified Technicians (RHCT) and Red Hat Certified Engineers (RCHE) how this will relate to Microsoft's MSCE program. You can find the story here. Red Hat has more information on the program here."

phatvibez writes "Cnet is running a story that says 'Several companies have joined to launch a consortium to promote Linux for desktop computers, a significant expansion for an operating system that today fits more comfortably on servers.' This is great news, I hope they actually do something and we see some great stuff come from this!" Another submission on this note: TweetZilla writes "According to ExtremeTech, Suse is taking a play from Xandros. Crossover Office and Plugin are now bundled into Suse's desktop to provide Windows and Office compatibility." Update: 02/04 18:18 GMT by T : Here's a link to the consortium's web site.

An anonymous reader writes "Linux Devices reports that Linux now runs on an Apple iPod. Further information about the project can be found on the Linux on iPod Website." Still lacks features like power management and firewire support, but it's still a cool project. CT Ok it's a dupe. But it's still neat!

ucdot writes "Here is the announcement for a port of uClinux to the Apple iPod, checkout the project page for extra details. Currently the frame buffer, audio and IDE devices are working. Still plenty of work to do."

I've just recently returned from Linux Conference Australia 2003, held in Perth, Western Australia. I've had an incredible time, and this has easily been the best technical/Linux show I've been to since ALS was still operating. I've got a write-up below, and some notes on what happened, what's the plan for next year (It'll be in Adelaide, and I'm greatly looking forward to it!), and a photo round up. A number of other articles have appeared, and Kate MacKenzie's write up in The Australian was good as well, in addition to Telsa Gwynne's excellent write-up and Linux Magazine Au has some articles as well. Update: 02/04 02:42 GMT by T : ilovestuff points out ZDNet Australia's coverage as well.

An anonymous reader writes "Xmingwin makes it practical to generate Windows programs from a Linux server. This column gives a recipe for setting up Xmingwin, outlines the most important reasons for doing so and shows you how to generate executables for multiple platforms -- including Windows DLLs -- from a single Linux source."

Ur@eus writes "SVG the w3c format for Scalable Vector Graphics is seen as many as the future of desktop icons as it allows for scaling icons etc. without loss of quality. Dominic Lachowicz has been working hard on fixing bugs in librsvg over the last few days. The result is that librsvg now renders all available SVG icons perfectly. Not only do it render them, but it renders them faster than libpng renders the same images in png format. Together with the gdkpixbuf plugin librsvg offer it means GNOME 2.2 will be able to use SVG images not only for icons or desktop backgrounds, but also for the GUI widgets themselves and the graphics of the window manager. Dom's announcement can be found on the librsvg mailinglist. The librsvg site also offer a GNOME 2.2 metatheme using mostly SVG icons including a nice screenshot."

Stahnke asks "I have two computers that I need to exchange data between. I do music-production on a Windows-based system and have everything else on a Linux system. I need to exchange HUGE amount of data (5GB at a time sometimes) between the two systems as fast as possible while clients are waiting for me. 10/100 Ethernet is too slow, and fiber is just too expensive. Can Linux (2.4) do Firewire networking with a Windows machine? If so, how, and what tools are out there? I have a Firewire card working in Linux, but I haven't had luck with TCP/IP via Firewire yet."

neiljt writes "BBC News have a piece on NASA experiments to use IP for space missions. The article is a little low-tech, but more details available from NASA (OMNI). Is this the first Red Hat in space?" It's worth pointing out as well that Debian made the ride nearly six years ago. Still, great news.

soosterh writes "CNet has an article about a NUMA patch from IBM. It says that the improvement adds some support in Linux for nonuniform memory access, or NUMA, a design for higher-end servers with many processors. Linus Torvalds, the original creator of the operating system and still its top authority, accepted the update this month into version 2.5, the current test version of the software."

viewstyle writes "There is an interesting commentary on eWEEK discussing the 'synergies' between Apple and Linux after visiting LinuxWorld. It makes a good point that advancement of Linux is good for Mac OS X and vice versa, because of the ease of porting across the platforms (soon to get easier with the X11 on Mac OS X)." Next thing you know, most of the Slashdot editors and programmers will be using Macs ...

pknoll writes "Though it probably won't happen soon, IBM is talking about Linux eventually replacing AIX. The article at Globe Technology states there are IBM folks working on 'chips for 2007' systems, and the viewpoint projected is described as 'multidecade,' but it's an interesting view into the future of IBM and Linux."

aeiz writes "Adam Cecchetti put together a Linux cluster using 3 modded Xboxes and was quite surprised with the results. He used the Mandrake Linux distro." illumin8 summarizes Cecchetti's conclusion after investigating "the cost-effectiveness (or lack thereof) and trouble involved in setting up a 3 node Linux cluster based on the Microsoft hardware. The end result: A cheaper Walmart PC would perform better at the same task."

Roblimo has a story over at NewsForge about DevIS, a software company that relies on Free and open source software to not just weather but actually do well in the current software economy. Part of the reason may be that the company doesn't preach software philosophy; they just find that combining well-tested (and mostly GPL'd) software tools is the path of least resistance when it comes to building Internet applications. Most of their work is for the Federal government; always nice to see public dollars supporting public software. Can anyone point out other good examples of similar businesses?

protonman writes "A hefty flame war has broken loose on the debian-devel mailinglist about (amongst other things) the legality of mplayer. The interesting part in this conflict is that unlike in previous alledged GPL violations, the culprit is not the unwillingness to provide the source, but the prohibition of the distribution of binaries, thereby violating section 6 of the GPL: 'You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.' Read also the blurb on the MPlayer homepage."

bobz writes "The Linux Game Tome has announced the winners of the Happypenguin Awards. Games, toys and libraries in 25 different categories were nominated and voted upon by the Linux gaming community. Take a look at the best Linux gaming has to offer." Alas, no SimCity 4, and no Sims Online.

Greg Herlein writes "There is finally a way to do direct PC to Phone calling from linux: GnomeMeeting now supports decent quality, low-cost VoIP calls to any real phone in the world. It's about time." The calls are through a company called MicroTelco; read this FAQ page to learn more about it. (And don't forget TheKompany's approach to IP-telephony-with-Linux, using a Sharp Zaurus plus Net2Phone.)

developerWorks writes "Ever wish you had a place to let your Linux applications play -- where they wouldn't hurt anything else? Do your killer apps spend too much time killing each other? Originally conceived as a kernel developer's tool, UML lets you set up multiple virtual machines that are isolated from each other and from the hardware. Now, you can test applications all the way to failure without breaking the host system -- or even requiring a reboot. Veteran administrator Carla Schroder shows you how in this tutorial."

groovemaneuver asks: "I've managed to get a working OpenLDAP directory running on my network. Linux, Windows, and Apple boxes are all happily authenticating. I have imported the 'apple.schema' file to the LDAP server from one of my Macs, but I cannot seem to find any info on the proper syntax for the various apple schema attributes. Anyone have any idea where one could find this? This is the one obstacle keeping my network from having a single source of authentication, and I'm sure this info would be useful to more than just myself. Thanks!"

BrunoC writes "Looks like Red Hat is getting a little Microsoftish and is quietly introducing its brand new 12-month-only Errata. Quoting The Reg: 'Red Hat's current death list EOLs RH 7.1-8.0 at the end of this year, while 6.2 and 7.0 get theirs as of the end of March.' You can read the whole article here." I don't see how this is "Microsoftish" -- the code Red Hat creates or includes is still GPL, and you can pay anyone willing to fix it. They're not required to support it forever :)