metamatic asks: "I'm planning to buy a notebook computer in the near future. Currently I'm looking at an iBook; however, they're a bit larger and heavier than I'd like. PC users are always telling me that PCs are faster and cheaper, and I'd be happy enough running Linux for what I want the notebook for. So: I'm looking for PC notebook computers that outperform the iBook. Must have USB and Firewire, built-in ethernet, and 802.11b support somehow (via a PC card slot is OK). Small is important, lightweight is important, long battery life is important. I don't care about screen size so long as it can do 800x600. Performance isn't a major concern, as I'm not going to be playing 3D games on it. Sounds easy? Here's the catch: I will not purchase Windows!" After all that this industry has gone through in recent years? Does one still have to pay the Microsoft tax when purchasing a laptop?

Robin Rowe of the Film Gimp project has a piece running on NewsForge (also part of OSDN) that says "Film Gimp has recently been adopted by ComputerCafe, the fourth motion picture studio to use it in making feature films." Check out this recent post about Film Gimp to see some great screenshots of behind-the-scenes use. (And Rowe is also hoping you can get to the Linux Movies Track at Creative Cow West 2003, starting Tuesday in Los Angeles.) Update: 02/17 04:04 GMT by T : Brain rebooted, so I added the missing link.

stock points to this story on CNET, excerpting "Red Hat and Intel have settled a licensing hiccup that threatened to prevent the Linux company from contributing to Intel's open-source project--a reminder of the frictions that can arise between the commercial tech world and the open-source community." By adding a BSD-variant license to certain kernel contributions from Intel, the two companies have bridged an impasse between the GPL and Intel's "component architecture" license.

geoffsmith writes "Just stumbled upon a gesture system for the linux desktop called 'wayV'. It works similarly to Mozilla gestures, except at windowing system level. For example, hold down the middle mouse button and draw an 'N' and netscape pops up, or draw a slash through a window and it kills the window's process. There are .debs available and the author is currently porting it to win32."

Seldo writes "C|net is reporting that free open-source J2EE servers are gaining market share. From the article: "Analysts say it's difficult to measure the extent to which open-source Java application servers, such as Tomcat and JBoss, have eaten into the revenue of commercial providers of Java application servers. But the growing popularity of the open-source application servers is undeniable." The article also points out that the emergence of J2EE as a standard led to a commoditization of Java-based application servers, giving the low-cost OSS alternatives an advantage."

clapton_fan writes "Motorola will release a combination phone / PDA this year in Asia using the Linux operating system and Java software. No U.S. release date set." It also packs a camera, Bluetooth, and a media player. Looks pretty sharp too. Update: 02/15 15:25 GMT by CN : Whoops. We mentioned this a couple days ago, but this time around there's pictures!

Mark writes "As this news.com article states, 'Red Hat and Oracle plan to announce on Thursday that the companies have teamed to get Linux evaluated under the Common Criteria, a certification that could open doors for the broader use of open-source software by government agencies.' It looks like this will be an important step in getting Linux to be more widely adopted in governments around the world."

Kevin P. Lawton writes "Plex86 has been completely overhauled, and simplified to be a user (application) code only Virtual Machine technology. For running user code, many of the heavy weight x86-VM techniques are unnecessary. But the bonus is, Linux can easily be made to run inside the plex86 VM, so that the kernel is actually 'pushed down' to user privilege level. This has been demonstrated on both Linux 2.4 and 2.5 kernels. Thus, Linux can run in a plex86 VM without the need for any heavy virtualization. My goal is to keep the code base trim, tight, auditable and get to usable releases quickly. And to favor those goals over adding unnecessary complexities. The first milestones have just been reached, so it's still early in development. There are email lists available on the main plex86 site."

An anonymous reader writes "Open source advocate Tony Stanco, of the George Washington University Cyberspace Policy Institute has been getting flamed for allowing Microsoft reps to speak at an Open Source in government conference he's putting on next month. Today, in a commentary on NewsForge, Tony responds to the flamers. He says, "Leave it to the kooks in the community to make Microsoft look sympathetic." Is he right? Should we be willing to listen to what Microsoft has to say? Aren't open minds important to open source?" Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.

rjnagle writes "The availability of HOW-TOs and newsgroups is supposed to make the sysadmin's job easier, right? Much as I am a proponent of the 'distributed learning model' for Linux, the endless searching for answers on the Web for setting up Linux RAID was getting to be a royal pain. Sure, there was a RAID how-to and an excellent newgroup, but some of the information is out of date, and the tricks suggested by people a year ago may be no longer needed today. Robert reviews the O'Reilly title Managing RAID on Linux below to see how it stacks up to HOWTOs, guesswork and anecdotal evidence.

DaveAtFraud writes "CNET is reporting that Red Hat Advanced server has been certified as a 'Common Operating Environment' (COE) when running on an IBM server by the U.S. Department of Defense. Red Hat Advanced Server is the first version of Linux to receive this certification. The certification clears the way for broader use of Linux in governement computer systems. Its interesting to note that the certification effort was made for the more proprietary (and costlier) Red Hat Advanced Server and not the basic Red Hat distribution." This despite the best efforts of certain lobbyists.

avdi asks: "Every day we see stories on this site and others about how another movie studio is using Linux for production, another Fortune 500 company has switched to Linux to support their infrastructure, another local or national government has mandated use of Open Source technology, or another major vendor has begun marketing a Linux-based product line. Clearly Linux, Open Source, and Free Software has arrived, and in some areas is marching towards dominance. Yet deep in the beige-walled cubicles of the biggest corporations, where Nobody Ever Got Fired for Buying Microsoft (or Sun, or...) the people who make technology decisions have yet to hear of it. In the land of BigCo, Open Source technologies have an artificially low profile due to the insularity of the corporate culture, the marketing budgets of vendors, and are often viewed as risky, untested curiosities. Is anyone out there gathering all the success stories together in an up-to-date, management-readable format? Is anyone collecting hard data on the number of major companies which have trusted mission-critical systems to Linux, the number of vendors who have invested a significant amount in Open Source-based product lines, the amounts saved by various departments which have migrated from proprietary to Free software? Where does one go when researching data in order to sell management on Linux or some other Free Software solution?"

lma asks: "As has been reported previously on Slashdot, Lee Felsenstein is involved in a project to bring wireless internet connectivity (including VOIP) to isolated villages in Laos. Lee is in Laos this week, trying to install and configure the initial systems. He's having a problem getting Linux installed and booting off a M-Systems DiskOnChip(DOC) as described here. Perhaps Slashdot readers could help with this problem, and make themselves available for future technical support issues as well."

Anonymous Coward writes "Castle Technology, who were accused of breaching the GPL in RISC OS 5, have made a press release denying the allegations. This story has been covered on The Iconbar RISC OS news and resource site." We've given Castle some loving here on slashdot recently. Looks like this one isn't going away quietly.

Joe Barr writes " I found a wonderful "how-to" piece called "OpenOffice.org 1.0, ODBC and MySQL," by John McCreesh. In the introduction, McCreesh writes about OpenOffice.org 1.0's "best kept secret" -- that secret being the fact that hidden away inside, completely unknown to most OpenOffice users, is a user-friendly front end for databases that is "a Microsoft Access (and more) equivalent." That may be so, but there is a very good reason why it's a secret: it's too damn hard getting OpenOffice and ODBC wired up correctly."

EmbeddedMan writes "For any potential XScale developers out there, this announcement of a completely free development kit for XScale processors is very interesting. Although I am not using XScale at the moment, I have used the distribution this release will be based on and it is extremely flexible and easy to use. It is good to see that this support will be freely available for everyone to use."

lieutenant writes "Pixar Animation Studios is replacing servers from Sun in its render farm with eight new blade servers from Rackspace. In all, the blade system contains 1,024 Intel 2.8GHz Xeon processors, and it runs the open-source Linux operating system. Pixar has ported its Renderman software to run on Linux." I'd love to see their electric bill ;)

TheAB writes "Japan is betting 50 million yen ($450k US) that the next-generation of high-tech products and computer networks will rely on open-source software. The money is to develop an 'operating system for consumer electronics goods'."

Jonathan Riddell writes "`It would appear that Castle Technology Limited, UK, have taken some of the Linux 2.5 code, and incorporated it into their own product, "RISC OS", which is distributed in binary ROM form built into machines they sell. This code is linked with other proprietary code.' Full details from Russell King on lkml."

FrankBama writes "As a follow-up to the story of a few days ago, Red Hat has started a program in my old hometown. The story's at the News & Record. I love this part '...this training normally would cost more than $10,000. But Weaver students can get Red Hat certification free -- and use it get a job paying more than $30,000 a year right out of high school.'"