Hardlines writes "Linuxfest Northwest 2005 presented by the Bellingham Linux Users Group is offering a live webcast of the presenters (in Quicktime). A schedule of presenters is available, for reference, the webcast is taking place in room G-103." As of this moment, former Slashdot editor and general good guy Chris DiBona is about to start a talk on the state of open source projects at Google.

FridayBob writes "The BBC has a story on a new, ultra-thin client that a group of not-for-profit developers, Ndiyo, hope will open up the potential of computing to people in the developing world. Not surprisingly, their system uses open source software. The system runs Ubuntu Linux with a Gnome/KDE deskto and OpenOffice. From the article: 'Licences for software are often a significant part of expenditure for smaller companies which rely on computers. But a recent UK government study, yet to be formally published, has shown that open source software can significantly reduce school budgets dedicated to computing set-ups.'"

bonch writes "Microsoft is reaching out to the OSS community and wanting a sit-down to discuss how to better to interoperate with them. At a conference sponsored by the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) in Cambridge, Md., Microsoft's Brad Smith extended an olive branch to its competitors, including the OSS community. 'We're going to have to figure out how to build some bridges between the various parts of our industry,' he said. Eric Raymond responds, saying the first steps Microsoft could do are to open their file formats and support open standards."

JonLatane writes "Without a doubt, Gentoo has set itself apart from every other distro out there. Because it's source-based, it's notorious for its speed. Because of emerge, it's notorious for being simple to maintain. And because of its "install system" (if it can be called that), it's notorious for scaring off potential users before they even get to try it. Well, that's all going to change, because there is a graphical Gentoo installer in the works. It can run with a dialog frontend that bears a striking similarity to Ubuntu, or for faster systems a GTK+ frontend is available."

SilentBob4 writes "Mad Penguin has published a comprehensive review of the latest Libranet release. New in this release are an improved installer and revamped/modernized AdminMenu that rivals Mandriva's MCC and SUSE's YaST. Aside from major desktop versions lagging behing a version or two, this release easily puts Libranet in the same league as Ubuntu, and the review has sparked some "Ubuntu vs. Libranet" arguements so far, one on the Libranet forum itself. Check it out for yourself. The review is complete with many screenshots as well as Flash movies of the AdminMenu & installer in action."

Kai Staats writes ""With Tiger 'unleashed' in 48 hours and even Microsoft caught-up in the 64-bit wave, we give into peer pressure and release this interim set of ISOs. A compilation of our work to date as we move toward the early summer release of v4.1, Yellow Dog Linux v4.0.90 is built upon eighteen months in-house and customer experience with 64-bit," states Kai Staats, CEO Terra Soft Solutions."

hey writes "Red Hat has been working on early login because, among other reasons, 'If we start GDM sooner, the system will "feel" faster because the user will see a login screen sooner.' Very cool."

apt-get writes "Saw this Linuxworld report from the annual Australian Linux conference, Linux.conf.au, in Canberra last week. The article outlines some of the new features we can expect for the 2.6.12 kernel release, including: support for trusted computing, and security enhanced Linux. The kernel developers are also working on improving the 'feel' of the Linux desktop with inotify for file managers and events notification so hardware 'just works'. Unfortunately no release date other than 'sometime soon' is given."

darthcamaro writes "Newly elected Debian Project Leader Branden Robinson posted his first report as DPL. From the looks of it, Debian is flat broke, with only $40,000 or so in cash on hand. In an interview on internetnews.com, though, Robinson talks about whether Debian should even hold onto any money at all. Holding onto cash is also likely not what those who donate to the Debian Project expect either, according to Robinson. "People who donate us money ... seem to expect us to put the money to work for us in the near-term, not towards establishing an endowment,' he said."

Vidar writes "HP has a line of thin clients, however, only one of these run Linux. But, being generic x86 hardware, you can install Linux on them. And it has been done, running Damn Small Linux from the flash of those devices. The article has a complete walkthrough for the procedure, as well as some toughts on the topic. It can be added that the rdesktop client is quicker than Microsoft's own RDP client. Also, with Linux it is easy to upgrade remotely, or even change to an entirely new protocol. Once one terminal is upgraded, the rest is done with dd and a USB stick!"

An anonymous reader writes "Taking a page from Microsoft's playbook, MontaVista today announced an embedded Linux platform aimed specifically at mobile phones. 'Mobilinux' is based on a 2.6 kernel with real-time and power-management enhancements, and targets 'feature-phones' as well as the higher-end devices targeted by Microsoft with its Windows Mobile for Smartphones offering."

mshiltonj writes "You know its what we've all been waiting for: RMS weighs in on the BitKeeper debacle. An excerpt: "I want to thank Larry McVoy. He recently eliminated a major weakness of the free software community, by announcing the end of his campaign to entice free software projects to use and promote his non-free software. Soon, Linux development will no longer use this program, and no longer spread the message that non-free software is a good thing if it's convenient."

petrus4 writes "Groklaw has an update on the Laura DiDio saga. Apparently, her complaints about "Linux extremists" notwithstanding, cooler heads than the usual suspects are asking questions about her research. A very interesting read, and one which will hopefully encourage corporate readers to regard the Yankee Group's findings with the requisite metric ton of salt in the future."

Press the Buttons has a post up about a Linux version of Tetris called Bastard Tetris. The name is well founded, as the game evaluates what shape you need the least and sends that as your next piece. From the Bastet site: "Have you ever thought Tetris(R) was evil because it wouldn't send you that straight "I" brick you needed in order to clear four rows at the same time? Well Tetris(R) probably isn't evil, but Bastet certainly is. >:-) Bastet stands for "bastard tetris", and is a simple ncurses-based Tetris(R) clone for Linux. Unlike normal Tetris(R), however, Bastet does not choose your next brick at random. Instead, Bastet uses a special algorithm designed to choose the worst brick possible. As you can imagine, playing Bastet can be a very frustrating experience!" Sounds like the sailing puzzle in Puzzle Pirates.

Anonymous Coward writes "IBM has released a Linux based technology enabling spatiotemporal modeling of infectious agents across the United States, providing scientists and public health officials with a powerful tool for understanding, and potentially preventing, the spread of infectious diseases. The new STEM technology provides Geographic Information System (GIS) data for every county in the United States supplied by TIGER files."

sebFlyte writes "Andrew Morton, a Linux kernel maintainer, has said that he thinks that the lack 'credit or money or anything' given to those people who put in long hours testing Linux releases is going to cause serious problems further down the line. In his speech at Linux.Conf.Au he also waded into the ongoing BitKeeper debate, saying 'If you pick a good technology and the developers are insane, it's all going to come to tears.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Havoc Pennington, lead developer of GNOME, wants to fork GNOME 3. 'So the forces of existing userbase, the easiest-to-reach future userbase, cross-platform applications, and funded development efforts are strongly pulling GNOME 2 toward conservatism. I think GNOME 3 should be a fork for that reason.'" This has been a common practice for not only many open source projects, but proprietary systems such as Solaris for major revisions, so it's not as tumultous a change as the word "fork" may imply.

karvind writes "Groklaw has posted another interesting article about AIX/Monterey/POWER research. The primary purpose of Project Monterey was to provide a stepping stone to Linux. IBM clearly stated this in promotional and technical materials, some of which SCO participated in publishing. It was always the plan that Project Monterey would be for POWER and SCO knew about IBM using SVR4 on POWER as far back as 2001. The article asks (and answers) some interesting questions: 'Where is the monetary damage to SCO? Where is there copyright infringement? Was SCO fully aware how quickly Linux would develop, that it would replace Unix, or did it take them by surprise?'"

zaxios writes "Techworld is reporting that Microsoft has announced support for running Linux on their virtualization software, Virtual Server 2005. From the article: '[Microsoft] can't compete against VMware without support for other operating systems.' Perhaps the significance of this is that Microsoft has acknowledged Linux as an OS people might want to use, which seems an upgrade from its previous status as a communist cancer."

BlakeCaldwell writes "CNet reports: 'Linux founder and leader Linus Torvalds has launched a new tool, called Git, to manage his software project, after a dispute led him to drop the previous system.' He will start using Git instead of BitKeeper to control the flow of updates and track changes in the kernel." We've covered this previously. Relatedly, ChocLinux writes "Jeremy Allison, who wrote Samba with Andrew 'Tridge' Tridgell, is sticking up for his friend in the row over BitKeeper. "