Free Republic

Do you know how many Ubuntu based Linux distribution there are? More than 40. That’s right. More than forty different Linux distros has been forked out of this ever popular Linux distro. While not all of them are worth mentioning, there are some decent distributions that have evolved from it. For instance, Mythbuntu, Ubuntu Ultimate Edition, gOS, and andLinux to name a few. Another Ubuntu based distribution that you might like to checkout is Super Ubuntu. Super Ubuntu contains all that is present on Ubuntu 8.10 and also includes: System and application updates: all updates released for Ubuntu + GIMP...

OK, geeks and geekesses!! The Unix Time is counting down to a cool epoch moment. On Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 23:31:30 UTC (That's 5:31:30 PM CST for you non-geeks out there), the internal clocks of all Unix and Unix-type machines (ie Linux and Mac OSX), will reach 1234567890. While this is cool, it doesn't really mean as much as January of 2038 when 32-bit systems will overflow, causing an issue similar to Y2K. Luckily, computers are starting to migrate towards 64-bit OSes, and the 64-bit time clock won't overflow for hundreds of billions of years, so we're safe. For...

I can't imagine why this would affect us, but it seems to be the buzz on all the forums. At 11:31:30pm UTC on Feb 13, 2009, Unix time will reach 1,234,567,890. Where will you be at this momentous second?" - from Bell Labs This will be Friday, February 13th at 1831 and 30 seconds EST. If you want to find out what time it will be in your local time, try this Perl script courtesy of Matias Palomec: perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"\n";'

Happy New Year and welcome to this year's first issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Perhaps a good way of starting the year is with a look at the 17-year old history of Linux and Linux distributions - from the modest first release of "it won't be as big as GNU" to today's dominance of the free operating system in server rooms, if not yet on the desktop.

Reality, as good writers know, is sometimes stranger than fiction. SCO's recent performance in the U.S. District Court in Utah is a perfect example. With years to prepare, SCO executives made some remarkable statements in their attempt to show that SCO, not Novell, owns Unix's copyright. While this case is not about SCO's claims that IBM and other companies placed Unix IP (intellectual property) into Linux, Novell's attorneys decided that they would address this issue as well. One presumes that, since this may be their one and only chance to attack SCO's Linux claims in a courtroom -- what with...

A reinvigorated SCO Group Inc. goes to trial Tuesday to once again defend its claims to a widely used computer software code against Novell Inc. Although what's at stake in the scheduled four-day trial pales in comparison to the unresolved major claims in the case that have rattled parts of the software community for the past five years, millions of dollars are on the table in a legal battle that has been widely watched. In play in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball is as much as $37 million that Novell claims it is owed in the dispute...

York Capital Management's proposed Asset Purchase Agreement and its associated credit agreement for SCO make it clear that if the bankruptcy court lets York buy SCO, that York will be bankrolling SCO's continued lawsuits against Novell, IBM and other Linux-using companies.

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.

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...

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...

Three and a half years after launching a high-profile legal attack on Linux, The SCO Group has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The Lindon, Utah-based company long has maintained that it had enough money to fight its costly lawsuits against IBM, Novell, Red Hat (which sued SCO proactively), AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler. But on Friday, a month after losing on a crucial legal ruling, the company admitted a grimmer picture. "The Board of Directors of The SCO Group have unanimously determined that Chapter 11 reorganization is in the best long-term interest of SCO and its subsidiaries, as well as its...

The Honorable Dale Kimball has now ruled: there will be no jury at the trial of SCO v. Novell. He granted Novell's motion on that. He will hear it himself. Here's the ruling [PDF], which comes in response to 8 motions, and here's how the judge ruled on them: * The SCO Group, Inc.'s ("SCO") Motion for Entry of Final Judgment Pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(b) -- No, so there will be no immediate partial appeal. * Novell's Motion to Strike Jury Demand -- Yes. No jury trial. Novell is seeking only equitable relief.

In lawsuits, as in baseball, there is no mercy rule. One side can be down by a dozen runs, but the game continues until the bitter end. So it is that SCO filed on Aug. 29 an appeal to the U.S. District Court decision that declared that Novell had never sold Unix's intellectual property to SCO. Spread the word:digg this story On Aug. 12, U.S. District Court Judge Dale Kimball ruled that Novell, not SCO, owns Unix's IP rights. Without Unix's IP, SCO's other cases against IBM, Red Hat and other Linux-using companies cannot be sustained. In Novell's financial earnings...

A US federal court judge has ruled that Novell, and not the SCO Group, is the rightful owner of copyrights covering the Unix operating system (OS), a ruling that should have a major effect on a number of lawsuits, including SCO's actions again Novell, IBM and Red Hat. The 102-page ruling by Judge Dale Kimball refuted many of SCO's claims against Novell, and seemed to remove the basis for its lawsuit against IBM. SCO had previously charged that the Linux operating system was an unauthorised derivative of Unix, which it claimed to have purchased from Novell in 1995. "The court's...

Court Rules: Novell owns the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights! Novell has right to waive! Friday, August 10 2007 @ 04:52 PM EDT Hot off the presses: Judge Dale Kimball has issued a 102-page ruling [PDF] on the numerous summary judgment motions in SCO v. Novell. Here is what matters most: [T]he court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights. That's Aaaaall, Folks! The court also ruled that "SCO is obligated to recognize Novell's waiver of SCO's claims against IBM and Sequent". That's the ball game. There are a couple of loose ends, but the big...

Excerpt - Big UNIX news this morning. Apple has bought out CUPS, the common UNIX printing system. The name may not sound familiar, but it's part of every Mac OS X installation. CUPS implements a cross-platform printing system based on the Internet Printing Protocol and is, according to its web page, the defacto standard printing system for Linux. Until now, CUPS has been distributed by Easy Software Products under the GNU general public license. Although the purchase was announced today, it seems the actual deal went down this past February. In addition to acquiring the CUPS source code ownership, Apple...

NYSE undertakes IBM mainframe migration to Unix and Linux The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is migrating off a 1,600 millions of instructions per second (MIPS) mainframe to IBM System p servers running AIX and x86 Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) servers running Linux, with the first part of the move going live today... ...(SIAC), the NYSE's technology arm, said the bottom line for the migration was the bottom line. He estimates the move will halve the cost of transactions, and though he wouldn't detail how much that would mean on a yearly basis, he said it is "serious financial savings, very...

Here's SCO 10K for the fiscal year ended October 31, 2006. In it, SCO admits: IBM has filed 6 motions for summary judgment that, if granted in whole or in substantial part, could resolve our claims in IBM’s favor or substantially reduce our claims.... We can not guarantee whether our claims against IBM or Novell will be heard by a jury. What they don't tell us is how many employees they've lost since October of 2006, despite reportedly saying at the most recent conference call that they would. They provide the same figure that they gave at the conference call,...

SCO CEO Darl McBride adamantly stated on the company's fourth quarter conference call that the company is not going bankrupt. He did admit, however, that SCO's recent earnings are not very impressive, though he is encouraged by his company's prospects for 2007. SCO (Quote) reported results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year ended October 31, 2006 on Wednesday, and the numbers are none too pretty. SCO reported a net loss for the fourth quarter of 2006 of $3.7 million, or $0.18 per diluted common share. The quarterly loss is nine percent greater that the comparable quarter for the prior year...

I barely know how to tell you this, but SCO has filed a motion for reconsideration of Judge Dale Kimball's November 29th Order in SCO v. IBM, the one affirming Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells' June 28th Order. I guess they figure things are so bad now, they have nothing to lose by trying. Here's the Notice of Conventional Filing [PDF]. Yes. Of course. It's under seal. So is the memorandum in support. Perhaps SCO will grace us with a redacted version in a bit. But in the meanwhile, we are left with our mouths open. Whatever are they thinking? Delay?...