Members of the Free and Open Source Community and its associated ecosystem are giving the thumbs up to the first draft of the new GPL 3 license.
Barely a week old, GPL 3 is a draft intended to solicit discussion and comment.
While IBM and Novell think that it’s still a bit early to tell, others, such as the leader of the community-based Debian GNU/Linux distribution, are a bit more vocal in their satisfaction with the direction the draft is taking.
Unlike commercial Linux distributions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell’s SUSE Linux, Debian’s core distribution adheres to a strict interpretation of Free Software as defined in the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). Read the rest of this entry »

The Ubuntu foundation announced yesterday the first official release of the Ubuntu Server distribution. Available for AMD64, i386, and PowerPC architectures, Ubuntu Server 5.10 provides a complete Ubuntu-based server installation ready for production environments. Developed and maintained by the Ubuntu Server Team, the new server distribution will bring the power and flexibility of the Ubuntu Linux distribution to data centers and web servers.
The Ubuntu Server Team is established to pursue short term, high impact goals for the Ubuntu 6.04 release, such as server hardware testing and kernel quality assurance. Plans are laid for future developments in “Just Works” server setup and operation. Join the Ubuntu Server Team today, and bring the spirit of Ubuntu to the server world: HEAVY METAL FOR HUMAN BEINGS! Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft’s controversial program, “Get the Facts”, offers what they call third party white papers and research reports comparing Microsoft and Linux. But we wonder what they really offer? Already aware of a possible ownership bias with Gartner, any reports from them featured on Microsoft’s web site raises an eyebrow over here.
Now we get word of a three page report called “Costs and Benefits Still Favor Windows Over Linux Among Midsize Businesses” aimed at priorities of the typical midsize business CIO.
The report, written by Gartner Research Vice President Mika Yamamoto Krammer, opens with the Gartner prediction that Microsoft will remain the dominant server operating systems provider for midsize businesses through 2010 (0.8 probability).
We have also gotten word of a release today showing the findings of comparing two platforms: Windows Server System and Novell Inc.’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The study supposedly demonstrates evolving business requirements over an extended period of time. Read the rest of this entry »

After two days, the big Linux trade show here hasn’t produced any big surprises or high drama. But there is plenty of evidence that the alternative operating system is sitting solidly in the mainstream. So solidly that “over 50% of our customers will use Linux in the next five years, if not sooner,” Phillips said.
By most measures, Linux is growing faster than any other operating system, although the same measures show that the free alternative is still very much a minority in both business and home computing. In 2004, sales of Linux server software grew by 44% to $4.25 billion. But the overall market, which is still dominated by Unix and Windows, totaled $46.2 billion, according to market researcher IDC.
Even David Patrick, who heads the Linux efforts of Novell(NOVL Quote), admits that a world in which most people run Linux on their desktop computers — a bit of hype that once received a surprisingly credulous reception — is far off. “We feel like it is a long road for us. It certainly has not been an overnight shift,” he told reporters on Tuesday. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s face it: Symbian has no future and mobile Linux is coming… and Qtopia has chances to become de-facto standard for GUIs in mobile Linux!
Largest Independent Design House Uses Qtopia Technology for its Newest Linux-Based Handset Platform
Trolltech, provider of leading technologies for Linux and cross-platform software development, today announced that its Qtopia software for Linux-based mobile phones is the application development foundation for Cellon International’s new C8000 handset platform. Cellon International, the world’s largest independent design house for wireless devices, has used Qtopia to build, customize and extend the Linux-based software applications and graphical user interface (GUI) for the C8000.
A major European Vendor has already shipped the first mobile phones built on the C8000 platform in the third quarter of 2005. Read the rest of this entry »

In a move officials say will spur more end-user interest in its software, Novell is going to open up a community effort around its SUSE Linux Professional operating system.
The software will be used as a foundation for a new community project called the OpenSUSE Project, which opens up shop on Tuesday at www.opensuse.org.
The Waltham, Mass.-based company will drop “Professional” from the software name, marketing its project under an outreach initiative called “Lizard Blizzard.” The term is a reference to the company’s reptilian mascot, Geeko.
Once the project’s been established, the company expects to include other open source projects that can be used with SUSE Linux. Read the rest of this entry »

The latest and greatest version of the king of live Linux distributions, Knoppix, has been released at LinuxTag early this week. DVD based Knoppix version 4.0 includes as much as 4GB of applications, utilities and games. But can it live up to the hype?
Live Linux distributions are extremely useful in different ways: they can be used for demo systems, to test new applications without installing anything on the hard drives, to quickly deploy tens or hundreds of identical workstations for events, as rescue disks, or just to have a «highly portable» workstation by just carrying a CD/DVD and a writable media unit (typically a USB token). Read the rest of this entry »

Red Hat is changing course again with its free Fedora version of Linux, announcing Friday that it will turn over copyrights and development work to an outside entity called the Fedora Foundation.
Red Hat once had just one version of Linux, but beginning in 2002 it split the product into the commercially supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the free and fast-moving Fedora. But the company struggled to meet the original Fedora goal of attracting widespread outside involvement.
Given that Red Hat treated Fedora as a proving ground to rapidly mature features it wanted to add into RHEL, it’s not a surprise programmers saw it as a Red Hat project. But the Raleigh, N.C.-based company is making concrete moves to help Fedora stand on its own.
The establishment of the foundation comes on the eve of a new version of the software. Fedora Core 4 is due to ship Monday, bringing broader processor support, the Xen software for running multiple operating systems on one computer, version 4 of the GCC compiler, and other features. Read the rest of this entry »

Knoppix is a Live-CD distribution. You burn it to a CD, put the CD into the CD drive and reboot into a Linux environment. When you are done, take out the CD and reboot. It is a swiss army knife of utilities useful for many tasks. However very few books have been so far written exploring its full power. One of the best books on Knoppix is Knoppix Hacks. The author, Kyle Rankin, explores all the factes of this versatile distribution in his book. The book is an essential reference for anyone who has to fix computers, whether SysAdmin, or the family “Computer Guy”.

The book has 9 chapters, each covering a certain aspect of Knoppix. It’s grouped by subject, and each hack stands on its own, without depending on any other hack. However there are a lot of cross references. The book includes a CD of Knoppix 3.4, which is currently a little dated, the latest version of Knoppix (at the time of writing) being 3.6. Read the rest of this entry »

Our member Dr. Mandar Mitra from ISI, Kolkata has about 99 sets of Ubuntu CDs for distribution. He is busy at this moment, if you want to grab a copy send me your request at this address -> indradg (at) icbic (dot) com