Rob_Ogilvie writes "Alan Hicks and his team have finished revising the old 'Slackware Essentials' book and have now released a new and not outdated version for all you Slackware users out there. The old book was getting to be quite outdated, being a few years old. For those of you who like dead trees, this new version is available for pre-order now, in dead-tree format."

KainX writes "As an alternative to the Red Hat-controlled Fedora project, the community-led cAos Foundation decided to create a fully community-built, community-controlled, RPM-based distribution whose foundation would be a self-hosting, self-sufficient core with a 3-5 year support lifetime. The first stable, production-worthy core has now been officially released! Download an ISO from a mirror and try it out."

An anonymous reader writes "Various news sources including ZDnet are today reporting that Microsoft is considering buying out Red Hat, speculating that 'Microsoft could see Red Hat's acquisition as a nice way to undermine IBM, but might not consider that a sufficient reason to do it,' adding that Red Hat is however '...a company that wants to be Microsoft and, like Microsoft, makes its living packaging and selling other people's ideas.'" That description seems to miss the key point that Red Hat releases the software they package and sell as Free software, and that both companies pay coders to create and improve software in the first place.

f5hacka writes "Four students at Clarkson University developed a new linux distribution based on the Xen kernel. The distribution is called Xenophilia. Xenophilia is a derivative of Debian Linux and uses the new Debian installer to install its packages. Its homepage is available at http://cosi.clarkson.edu/xen/. The distribution is available for download at http://mirror.clarkson.edu/pub/distributions/xenop hilia/"

[vmlinuz] writes "Also picked up on The Register, The Inquirer and Linux Today - with the LUGRadio show getting more and more listeners and attracting guests such as Miguel de Icaza, Mark Shuttleworth, Alan Cox, Seth Nickell and more, the growing fanbase will be able to congregate at LUGRadio Live this summer. The day long event includes speakers such as Ian Bell (co-creator of Elite), Simon Willison, Bill Thompson, Christan Schaller and more. In addition to the speakers, an all day bar, multi-player gaming, mini expo and paintball are in the cards. LUGradio Live takes place on Sat 25th June 2005 in Wolverhampton, UK."

E IS mC(Square) writes "Microsoft is planning to celebrate 25 years of DOS. An article at ReallyLinux discusses what lessons Linux can learn from the history of DOS. The article begins with 'What can the Linux world learn from Microsoft's past 25 years of unique experiences and domination?', and ends with 'Only question now is not if but when will Linux become the number one OS on earth?'" From the article: "First, we must admit openly once and for all that the 'best solution' is not always the 'most used solution.' There are few who would be foolish enough to argue that back in 1981 PC-DOS was the best solution. There were obviously a number of choices. PC-DOS was the least robust, the most temperamental, and arguably not very compatible with the IBM hardware and BIOS it was sold to work on. Yet, somewhat like the odd but obvious dominance of the VHS over BETA, this simple, cheap OS stole the show."

diegocgteleline.es writes "According with Tom's Hardware, HP is working with Ubuntu to offer a customized GNU/Linux version that works 100% - wireless, bluetooth, IrDA, IEEE1394 - with HP hardware. This offer will be restricted to Europe, Middle East and Africa. The CD includes free support through online resources as well as paid support through Canonical, the developer of Ubuntu."

sachmet writes "In light of the interview with Fuat Kirccali, James Turner has announced on his blog the immediate resignation of the LinuxWorld senior editorial staff." From the post: "We regret that Sys-Con Media has been unable to apply a standard of journalistic ethics that we can comfortably operate under. We feel that recent articles published with the consent of Sys-Con Media fail to meet minimum generally accepted journalistic codes, and because the management of Sys-Con Media has failed to acknowledge that the articles are by all informed judgment ethically unsupportable, we have decided we must find other avenues for our work."

An anonymous reader writes "The Open Source Industry Australia (OSIA) has lashed out at government schools and education departments for snubbing FOSS. In this column, OSIA says it has been trying for over two years to make headway with these government agencies but 'they tell me that they are scared of doing anything which will upset Microsoft.'" From the article: "If these departments suddenly stopped paying for proprietary software and switched to FOSS, the schools know they won't reap any of the purported savings. So, why would schools bother with trialling FOSS? Where's the incentive?"

Vic writes "If you have ever dreamed of building a home theatre PC, Extremetech has details on building a Linux-based system, and covers all the details of this epic journey. They did get the unit to run lots of features such as CDs, video, TV, weather, media libraries, guide viewing and show recording." From the article: "To paraphrase one forum quote seen during the research phase of this piece: 'Buy the beer first, this ain't gonna be easy.' But there is some good news here too. Getting a Linux-based HTPC has probably never been easier, though that is admittedly damning with faint praise. So here then is the tale of our ongoing adventure toward building a Linux-based HTPC."

Guru Goo writes "Deepak Phatak of the Indian Institute of Technology,Mumbai has begun an effort to create an open-source license that will let programmers share ideas while also letting them retain the rights to their own software modifications.The license will likely function much like the Berkeley Software Distribution or the MIT License programs, he added. The number of open-source licenses has exploded, leaving many in the community miffed. But Phatak's proposal comes with the power of numbers. India's 1,750 colleges with computer science and electrical engineering degrees admit about 250,000 students a year. Combined with the outsourcing boom, that makes India one of the major centers for software development. While the collaboration between academia and industry in india is not as pervasive as in the U.S., it is growing."

seachnasaigh asks: "I love desktop Linux, but the one stumbling block I have with deploying it in some capacity for my userbase is USB Palm Pilots. Once upon a time I managed to get GPilot working with a serial PalmVx, but despite repeated attempts (SuSE 9.2 pro, Fedora Core 3 and several Palm devices) I can't get a synch to happen with the USB version, either through the native Gnome Pilot app or through Evolution (and yes, Kpilot too!). Our standard deployment is a Palm Tungsten T series; most of our desktops are recent Dells. It's embarrassing to have to boot into Windows to synch the Palms. Does anyone have some suggestions out there?"

davidwr writes "UKBuilder.com reports that Borland's structured exception handling (SEH) patent affects Winelib. Winelib allows you to compile Windows-targeted code to run natively on Linux. Because of the patent, gcc does not include support for SEH, which is widely used in the MS-Windows world. There are workarounds, but you won't like them."

Provataki writes "OSNews posted a review of the LinuxCertified LC2210D laptop, running the latest Ubuntu. The laptop delivers pretty well and it has modern characteristics for a fair price but it's not without its small configuration issues. It is also another proof that Linux's ACPI sleep support does not work on most laptops out there, even the ones picked for best compatibility with Linux."

rammerhammer writes "Sharing files amongst different platforms has most always resulted in using samba -- a program based around the windows file sharing protocol. Chungles aims to provide a nice, graphical, easy configurable file sharing alternative. It's written in Java, uses SWT for the UI, and JmDNS (Rendezvous/ZeroConf/Bonjour) for discovery of computers running Chungles."

debiansid writes "The Open Soucre Region Stuttgart is now offering a free demo of the Linux Desktop to users through their web browsers. They had earlier launched a German version before which received more than 100,000 responses, after which they decided to launch an English version. The website requires you to download and run an exe - it does not install anything on to the hard drive. The demo system is Debian based with a v2.4 kernel and KDE."

G Money writes "Novell announced today that they acquired Immunix, a company the produces an alternative mandatory access control solution to SELinux using the LSM. For anyone who hasn't used both Immunix and SELinux, the difference between configuring them is like night and day. There's even a YaST module for configuration. (Disclaimer: I'm on the Defcon Immunix CTF team.)"

rexx mainframe writes "The Fedora Project would like to announce the release of Fedora Core 4 test 3; currently scheduled to be the final test release before Fedora Core 4. Included in this release are many various bugfixes, updated translations, and package updates. Please report problems at: http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla Fedora Core 4 Test 3 is available from: http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux /core/test/3.92/ and at the mirrors."

flood6 writes "On the heels of yesterday's article about unrest at LinuxWorld, editor James Turner is reporting in his blog that Sys-Con Media has decided to purge Maureen O'Gara from the print and online publications." From the post: "Sys-con Media listened to what I and my fellow editors, their advertisers and the readership was saying, and made the correct decision. Maureen O'Gara's bylined material will no longer appear anywhere in the Sys-con universe of sites or publications. We have received this commitment in writing from Fuat Kircaali, the publisher." PJ at Groklaw also has commentary on this development.

diegocgteleline.es writes "Via google news, I found a article at MSNBC claiming that Michael Dell, Dell's founder and chairman, has droped $100M into Red Hat (Michael himself, not his company). Analyists say that "Dell - neither the person nor the company - is interested in acquiring Red Hat", but one wonders what's behind of this move. A fight against their competence in the server market?"