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Duke Nukem Forever and Linux on the desktop...To understand the markets you have to know something about magicians, and how they work.The magician will typically flourish something or gesture expansively with his right hand, while surreptitiously moving his left hand inside his jacket to remove or hide the next object to be palmed, so the trick with magicians is never look at what they want you to look at, and all of a sudden everything becomes quite clear, it is not magic, it is pop psychology, body language and misdirection. You have to do the same thing with Linux on...

A little over a week ago, reviews of Asus's Eee PC 701 started to trickle out onto the Internet. Some of the larger publications, like CNet and LAPTOP Magazine got their hands on the unit first, but as it has become more widely available sites like HotHardware and PC Perspective have now put out their own reviews of the Eee PC. The overall verdict is fairly unanimous: the device's keyboard is a bit cramped, but in terms of price, performance, and features the Eee PC hits the trifecta. Indeed, Asus appears to have gotten so many things right with the...

Linux, the free operating system that's a perpetual underdog in the desktop market, will get another chance this holiday season at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. The chain was taking orders online Wednesday for a computer called the "Green gPC" that is made by Everex of Taiwan, costs $199 and runs Linux. It will be available in about 600 stores, as well as online, Wal-Mart said. A comparable Everex PC that comes with Windows Vista Home Basic and more memory costs $99 more, or $298, partly because the manufacturer has to pay Microsoft Corp. for a software license. Both computers come with...

My boss has asked me to find the version of Linux/Unix that Samba is developed and tested on, in that we might find the most reliable Samba platform. I'm guessing it's developed on Fedora, and tested on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), which would mean www.centos.org would qualify, but I'd like to hear what knowledgeable FRiends ... know. Thank you.

Linux users from around the world are filling out the Linux Foundation's desktop survey. But what John Cherry, the foundation's director of global Linux workgroups, wants to know is, "Where are the responses from the North America?"

The part that I find interesting is the “Grandma’s linux is called Mac OS X” bit. Not because it’s likely to be controversial but because I’ve come to the same conclusion over the past few months too. I have the belief that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all OS. For the most part Windows continues to dominate, although it’s hard to say how much of that is due to the fact that it fits most of the people most of the time and how much of it is down to people assuming that Windows is something that comes with...

The SCO Group, working to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, hopes to sell its Unix assets to York Capital Management for up to $36 million, the company said this week in regulatory and bankruptcy court filings. Through the deal, York would provide SCO with $10 million in cash; up to $10 million in credit to fund its Linux-related legal fight and to get 20 percent of revenue from that action; $10 million for a 20 percent stake in the company; and $6 million to license the Hipcheck products from SCO's Me mobile device software effort and to share revenue...

The KDE Community is happy to release the third Beta for KDE 4.0. This Beta is aimed at further polishing of the KDE codebase and also marks the freeze of the KDE Development Platform. We are joined in this release by the KOffice project which releases its 4th alpha release, bringing many improvements in OpenDocument support, a KChart Flake shape and much more to those willing to test. Since the last Beta, most of KDE has been frozen for new features, instead receiving the necessary polish and bugfixing. The components which were exempt from this freeze saw significant improvements as...

Novell's long journey from NetWare to Linux is finally complete. On Oct. 8, Novell released Open Enterprise Server 2 to its customers worldwide. Shortly after acquiring SUSE and its enterprise-focused Linux distribution, Novell announced that its follow-on to NetWare 6.5 would ship as a set of network services that could run atop the NetWare and the Linux kernel, OES (Open Enterprise Server) 1.0. OES, which began shipping in April 2005, was the first major step in Novell moving NetWare's services from its native operating system to Linux. Now, with OES 2.0, the NetWare operating system kernel, NetWare 6.5 SP7, is...

The head of the Open Invention Network (OIN) has dismissed Microsoft's claims that Linux violates over 200 of its patents. OIN chief executive Jerry Rosenthal said that Microsoft's assertions are simply an attempt to undermine the open source movement. Rosenthal added that it is time for Microsoft to reveal the patents that are supposedly being infringed, or to drop the claims. "The FUD is clear. If you have a patent that you are proud of, then disclose it," he said. "If your patent is a good patent then you are not worried about revealing it before going to court because...

When it comes to launching online attacks, criminals are getting more organised and branching out from the Windows operating system, says eBay's security chief. eBay recently did an in-depth analysis of its threat situation, and while the company is not releasing the results of this analysis, it did uncover a huge number of hacked, botnet computers, said Dave Cullinane, eBay's chief information and security officer, speaking at a Microsoft-sponsored security symposium at Santa Clara University. Cullinane, who one year ago downplayed the role of organised crime in phishing ("It's not the Sopranos," he said), believes that online attackers are indeed...

LINUX runs the Google servers that manage billions of searches each day. It also runs the TiVo digital video recorder, the Motorola Razr cellphone and countless other electronic devices. But why would anyone want to use Linux, an open-source operating system, to run a PC? “For a lot of people,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, “Linux is a political idea — an idea of freedom. They don’t want to be tied to Microsoft or Apple. They want choice. To them it’s a greater cause.” That’s not the most compelling reason for consumers. There is the price:...

If the corporate Grim Reaper is truly knocking on the door of The SCO Group Inc., no one apparently told the company's CEO and president, Darl C. McBride. Despite SCO's a major court loss last month in its legal case against Novell Inc., its bankruptcy reorganization filing and an ominous-sounding quarterly U.S Securities and Exchange Commission filing last week in which SCO said there is "substantial doubt about the company's ability to continue as a going concern," McBride insists that no one should be lining up yet for his company's funeral parade. On the heels of all of that news,...

Losing in court, vilified on blogs and in bankruptcy proceedings, SCO Group CEO Darl McBride still says pronouncements of the death of the Utah software company are premature, if not greatly exaggerated. Within weeks, McBride said, the Lindon company that filed lawsuits against IBM and then Novell in celebrated battles over ownership and use of software code will have announcements about reorganization plans. He refused to provide details. "I can tell you that other parties are very interested in our business," McBride said in an interview this week. "We are in discussions. Again, I think our enemies who have pronounced...

Jesper Johansson--a former senior program manager for security policy at Microsoft who moved to Amazon in September last year--wrote in his blog on Monday that he may drop Windows Media Center for LinuxMCE, a free open-source add-on to the Kubuntu desktop operating system, because problems caused by Microsoft's digital-rights management (DRM) software have proven so difficult to fix. After Johansson's 5-year-old child complained that cable network Comcast's On Demand video system was not working with Windows Media Center, Johansson wrote, he attempted to resolve the problem. "Upon inspecting the problem I found that the video would turn on, the screen...

Way back in January, I announced a program to write Linux drivers for companies for free. When I did that, I never expected the response to be as large as it was. It turns out that there were two large groups of people who responded to the announcement, companies wanting drivers, and developers wanting to help out. I never imagined that so many different people would offer to help out. There is a real need for a place where developers can find a "real" project to work on in the Linux kernel. The Kernel Janitors project is a great place...

Novell's Linux business has soared 243 percent since last November when the company signed its controversial deal with Microsoft. "The affect on sales year over year, for Novell's first three quarters of our fiscal year, which ends Oct. 31 -- our Linux business was up 243 percent year over year," said Justin Steinman, director of marketing at Novell, who, along with executives from both companies, spoke at a program hosted by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. And, that growth doesn't seem to be short-lived. "We're continuing to see above market growth year [over] year and that clearly has resulted in...

Fearing the restrictions it places on their work, the majority of open source software developers do not plan to publish code in the next year under a controversial new license authored by the main governing body for open source and free software, according to a survey released Wednesday. In addition, more than 40% of those surveyed said they won't ever publish their work under Version 3 of the General Public License, which was released earlier this year by the Free Software Foundation. "GPLv3 is controversial because it imposes restrictions on what you can do with programs," said John Andrews, CEO...

From the ReactOS website... React Operating System ReactOS® is an advanced free open source operating system providing a ground-up implementation of a Microsoft Windows® XP compatible operating system. ReactOS aims to achieve complete binary compatibility with both applications and device drivers meant for NT and XP operating systems, by using a similar architecture and providing a complete and equivalent public interface. ReactOS is the most complete working model of a Windows® like operating system available. Consequently, working programmers will learn a great deal by studying ReactOS source code and even participating in ReactOS development. In short, ReactOS is aiming to...

Linux users want two things for their hardware: drivers; and easy access to those drivers. The first is finally happening; and now, thanks to a Dell Linux project called DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support), the other is on its way. Spread the word: digg this story Dell and Linux distributors have been working on DKMS for about five years now. Its purpose is to create a framework where kernel-dependent module source can reside, so that it is very easy to rebuild modules. In turn, this enables Linux distributors and driver developers to create driver drops without having to wait for...