Oskie-wee-wee writes "Infoworld is carrying a story about Bob Young (Red Hat, Lulu, Classy Formal Wear, Hamilton Tiger-Cats, etc.) and his open letter to SCO and Darl McBride - in response to Darl's open letter 'defending, in one breath, the SCO suit, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and the Supreme Court Decision in the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The Fedora website has posted a schedule for their second release. " Now that the 2.6 Kernel is out, I imagine all the major distributions will have updates relatively soon.

DMCBOSTON writes " LinuxWorld will be at the Hynes Auditorium in Boston, moving from NY in 2005." I'll be doing a Slashdot BOF at what I guess will now be the last New York LinuxWorld at the end of January 2004. I'll be sad to see this show move, as I always enjoy NY immensely, and seek any excuse to go there. Boston is a whole different story ;)

thenextpresident writes "It's here! Just updated on kernel.org, the Linux 2.6.0 kernel has finally arrived! We've been waiting a long time for this, and it had been rumored it was going to be released tonight. Well, it's here indeed. Happy downloading." There's also a changelog online for this long-awaited update.

An anonymous reader writes "In a Linux Journal article, Iraq's 2 person LUG describes the software consumer market in Iraq today, and their hopes for educating the masses about open-source software: 'Iraq is now a blank, unformatted hard disk and can be loaded with anything. Everything is open in Iraq right now. There are no regimented standards or massive expenditure in a particular monopoly's software'."

DJStealth writes "According to this article on Arutz 7/Israel National News, the Israeli Gov't is beginning to move away from Microsoft and is testing localized versions of Mandrake Linux in the Treasury dept. as the contract with MS expires this month. This all despite a recent defense ministry contact with MS."

JigSaw writes "A few moths ago Robert Minvielle put to test AMD's Opteron regarding its 64-bit Linux compatibility. The results back then were not very positive but he is now back testing more 64-bit updated distros: Gentoo, SuSE, Mandrake, Red Hat and Fedora. And this time the results are more positive with Linux offering good Opteron support where Windows-64 doesn't seem to. FreeBSD also lists the AMD64 platform as a tier-1 architecture."

An anonymous reader writes "Xandros is now shipping version 2 of their Desktop Linux distro and it's also possible to purchase a download version. Based on Debian (sarge), KDE 3.1.4, 2.4.22 kernel. Cool CD burning is integrated into the Xandros File manager. Screenshots are here."

mcleodnine writes "In this interview Gael Duval comments on MandrakeSoft's just released financials. He also comments on his decision to base Mandrake on Red Hat (over Slackware), the timeline for getting out of Chapter 11, the recent UserLinux manifesto and barriers to acceptance for Linux on the desktop."

A not-so-anonymous Anonymous Coward asks: "Someone has suggested to make a UserBSD instead of a UserLinux. From what Bruce Perens' anonymous 1-million-$ backers seem to want (no GPL-/Commercial dual-licensed development toolkit like Qt in any library, but only gratis LPGL stuff), this seems to make a lot of sense. After all, only the kernel would be different, the rest of the stuff (including the KDE or GNOME desktops) runs pretty much the same on BSD as it does on Linux. Is it possible to get the legal problems solved with licenses and still create a usable enterprise Unix desktop system on *BSD?" The idea, in and of itself, sounds fine, but does the choice of kernel really matter? What advantages would BSD have over Linux in such a project, and vice-versa?

An anonymous reader writes "This news item at LinuxDevices provides photos and specs of a new Linux-based smartphone being launched today in China. The device, called the E2800, sells for about $600, and targets business users, offering PDA functions, touch-screen, handwriting recognition, a camera, and memory expansion to 512MB through an SD memory card, the article says. The device's manufacturer is a Shanghai company named E28. The E2800 is a 900/1800MHz, GSM/GPRS class 10 device based on dual ARM9 processors, running embedded Linux with a 2.4-series kernel. Other recent Linux-based mobile phone announcements have been Japan's NTT DoCoMo's 3G phones and Motorola's A760."

joestar writes "MandrakeSoft's latest financial results have been posted to their website. Despite a slight decrease in revenues - mostly due to the dollar/euro rate and negative effects of the Chapter 11-like protection - first results seem impressive: "the company reduced operational expenses by a factor of 5, increased gross margins by a factor of 5 and reduced its losses by a factor of 7". As a result, MandrakeSoft has been cash-flow positive since January 2003, and expects its first positive result for the current quarter! Along with latest Mandrake Linux cool products, these are excellent news in my opinion because it shows that an appropriate business model can help Linux companies greatly."

Erik Rauch writes "The European Beagle 2 Mars Lander, set to touch down on Mars on Christmas Day, will be controlled by a single Linux-based workstation. I wonder if the Spacecraft Control Operating System is free software?"

Emre Sevinc writes "Zhang Le, a Chinese scientist working on Natural Language Processing has decided to pack the most important language analysis and processing applications into a single bootable CD: Morphix-NLP. More than 640 MB of NLP specific software is included and there's still a lot of place on the CD which uses a compressed filesystem for bringing us the best of both worlds."

honestpuck writes "Back before the advent of Mac OS X, my favourite (and for many years, only) development environment was one variety of Unix or another. The nicest thing about Unix was that the development environment stayed pretty much the same regardless of the variety; this stayed the same with the introduction of Linux." Honestpuck examines how true this still is (as well how accurate the chosen title is) in his review of Prentice Hall's The Linux Development Platform, below.

ServerSam writes "Sudhian has a review up on EmergeCore's "IT in a Box" IT100. Designed for small business use, it comes equipped with a Transmeta Crusoe 533MHz, 128MB RAM, 20GB IBM TravelStar, 802.11b Access Point, and boots from a 32MB Flash card. The IT100 is powered by a 60 watt external PSU and is smaller than a PS2."

leinad writes "An article in The Age newspaper claims the Australian Capital Territory is set to become the first jurisdiction in the country to adopt a bill which says that public bodies should, as far as practicable, consider the use of open source software when procuring computer software. (The Australian Capital Territory is the small territory/state of Australia in which Canberra, the capital of Australia, is located.)" Seems like requiring blueprints from contractors, to me.

Dan Clough writes "I found Linux Power Tools to be a useful book, although it does have some shortcomings. It's a 644-page, well-written book that covers almost all aspects of managing, administering, and optimizing a working Linux system. The book's cover claims the target audience as intermediate to advanced users, but I think that beginner to intermediate would be more accurate. More advanced users may find Linux Power Tools a little beneath their level." Read on for the rest of Dan's review.

Mr. Plow writes "The National Weather Service is migrating to Linux-based IBM workstations and has purchased 900 IBM computers and 160 servers to do so." He includes links to coverage at Forbes (a Reuters wire service story there), Government Computer News, and Computerworld.

Jan Stafford writes points out an article in which "SearchEnterpriseLinux.com expert Ken Milberg digs under the hood of the upcoming 2.6 Linux kernel and examines the benefits and opportunities it presents for Linux in the enterprise." And Semaphore writes "Linux.com is running a great article on the future of ide-scsi in 2.6. It seems Linus and Joerg Schilling, author of cdrtools disagree on whether the problems are with Linux or the application software. Interesting read.."