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The Intel Atom powered Asus Eee PC 901 arrives before the month is out, with price drops for the existing 900 and 701 models. But when will Australia see the Eee 1000H model with real hard disk and larger keyboard? The Asus Eee PC revolution kicks into higher gear with the impending release of the Eee 901, an enhanced version of the recently released 900 series, replacing the Celeron 900MHz processor with the new Intel Atom processor running at 1.6Ghz – or in a turbo charged 1.9Ghz mode.

I was a little surprised to hear Nokia vice president of software Ari Jaaski's comments last week. Not long ago, Nokia got off to a great start by embracing open source for its mobile device business. But now, according to Jaaski, it's the open source developer community that needs to adapt to the ways of commercial software vendors, not the other way around.

Organic open source. Non-organic open source. Genetically modified free software. None of these are phrases that are in common usage but exploring what they mean is an interesting exercise. MySQL's Brian Aker used the first two terms when responding to a post by Linux kernel guru Ted T'so about what Sun was trying to do with its OpenSolaris project. I made up the third one myself! And whatever follows is my take on these terms.

DSL 4.4 was just released on June 9th, so this past weekend I installed it on my Compaq Deskpro Pentium III 800 Mhz machine. It only has 256 megs of RAM, so a lightweight distribution like DSL is a good choice for it. Their site claims you can run DSL 486 DX with 16 megs of RAM, so even this old Compaq should fly with what it’s got.

Most anyone in the free and open source Verio brings something extra to Linux: reliability. Click to learn about free test. Latest News about open source software realm can tell you not only that Linux is better than Windows, but also that it is an optimal alternative to the closed-source and proprietary operating system from Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Free Trial. Security Software As A Service From Webroot. Latest News about Microsoft. Anyone at a Linux-oriented event or group can assure you that you have no need or even legitimate reason to continue using commercial operating systems nowadays.

Free Software development is often a fun task for developers, and it is its low barrier to entry (on average) that makes it possible to have so much available software for so many different tasks. This low barrier to entry, though, is also probably the cause of the widely varying quality of the code of these projects. Most of the time, the quality issues one can find are not related to developers' lack of skill, but rather to lack of knowledge of how the tools work, in particular, the compiler. For non-interpreted languages, the compiler is probably the most complex tool developers have to deal with. Because a lot of Free Software is written in C, GCC is often the compiler of choice.

Asus will bring the Eee Box desktop to the UK in August, the company announced today. However, it confirmed to Register Hardware that machine will initially only ship with Windows XP Home Edition. The compact desktop contains not Intel's desktop-oriented Atom 230 processor, as anticipated, but the less power-hungry notebook version, the N270, Asus revealed. Both CPUs are clocked at 1.6GHz and contain 512KB of L2 cache. But the N270 consumes 2.5W of power, while the 230 has a 4.5W TDP.

The makers of Wine claim that version 1.0 is the first such "stable" release and have said that although compatibility is not perfect, thousands of applications are reported to "work very well." Member and former president of Linux Australia Jonathon Oxer told ZDNet.com.au that the Wine project is "an attempt to make Windows irrelevant." "Essentially, it's an effort to supplant the underlying operating system layer and allow Windows software to run on a Linux platform without requiring Windows to be installed," he said.

Since the dawn of time -- or, at least, the dawn of personal computers -- the holy wars over desktop operating systems have raged, with each faction proclaiming the unrivaled superiority of its chosen OS and the vile loathsomeness of all others.

Today Novell makes a play for Linux users new and old with the release of its openSUSE 11 distribution. Version 11 introduces an installer, improved package management and updated key open source packages. The new distribution is Novell's attempt to put its best stuff out on the field as it ramps up the competition against Red Hat's Fedora and Ubuntu Linux in the growing Linux community.

Linux specialist Red Hat has announced it is developing an embedded hypervisor product that it claims will complement, rather than compete with, its existing virtualisation strategy. Launched on the first day of the company's annual user conference in Boston, the Embedded Linux Hypervisor is currently in beta, and no commitment has been made as to when the product will eventually ship or how it will be distributed to customers, Red Hat said.

Linux Mint is a heavily customized community-driven derivative built on top of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. According to the creators, its purpose is "to produce an elegant, up-to-date, and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution." The latest release, Linux Mint 5.0 "Elyssa", released this month, retains most of Ubuntu's stability and features, but distinguish itself with unique features and tweaks. Although Mint is a great desktop, a few problems keep it from perfection. Mint is available in two editions: a main edition, which includes proprietary codecs, and a light edition, which doesn't. Since I was unable to find a 64-bit version of Elyssa, I downloaded and installed the 32-bit main edition on my test machine, with an Athlon 64 X2 5200+ processor, 2GB of memory, two Nvidia GeForce 8600GT video cards on a Scalable Link Interface (SLI), and a 160GB SATA hard drive.

ZFS is an advanced filesystem created by Sun Microsystems but not supported in the Linux kernel. The ZFS_on_FUSE project allows you to use ZFS through the Linux kernel as a FUSE filesystem. This means that a ZFS filesystem will be accessible just like any other filesystem the Linux kernel lets you use. Apart from any technical or funding issues, a major reason that ZFS support has not been integrated into the Linux kernel is that Sun has released it under its Common Development and Distribution License, which is incompatible with the GPL used by the kernel. There are also patent issues with ZFS. However, the source code for ZFS is available, and running ZFS through FUSE does not violate any licenses, because you are not linking CDDL and GPL code together. You're on your own as far as patents go.

The office where I am network administrator switched most users to OpenOffice.org (OOo) back at version 1.1, and has followed the upgrade process to the current version 2.3 (a few poor users who have to exchange documents outside the office with high fidelity are still clinging to their MS Office 97). Our receptionist does a lot of general secretarial duties, including lots of letters, envelopes, and labels that involve mail merge. Since this seems to be a sticking point for many people, I am putting everything I have learned from helping her and have gleaned from various sources on the Internet together in this tutorial.

Wine is well-known on Linux forums. Many a new Linux user has sought to run their old Windows applications on their new operating system. Short of having a clear open source alternative that reads and writes to the same file formats â?? for instance, Open Office is a viable solution to opening archived Microsoft Word documents â?? the venerable Wine is regularly touted as the first option. Wine, simply put, facilitates running Microsoft Windows applications within Linux. The programs will display in their own windows just as if they were native Linux applications.

One of the unsung heroes of the Unix realm is — I kid you not — IBM. Stop laughing, I'm serious. I completely realize that IBM is a (if not the) giant of Unix and Linux on just about any platform it makes, and to assign the label "unsung" probably sounds a bit ridiculous. But, at least in one area, I don't think it is given nearly as much credit as it deserves.

Android developer advocate, Dan Morrill had a prototype unit to show delegates when he presented on the Android platform and the software developers kit. iTWire was not able to get a look at it, but Morrill said his presentation was very similar to one given at the Google IO developer event in the US at the end of May, a video of which is available online. Morrill confirmed that the first Android handset would hit the market before the end of 2008, but declined to say who would manufacture it or to name any manufacturers that had commited to make Android handsets.

Andrew Morton is well-known in the kernel community for doing a wide variety of different tasks: maintaining the -mm tree for patches that may be on their way to the mainline, reviewing lots of patches, giving presentations about working with the community, and, in general, handling lots of important and visible kernel development chores. Things are changing in the way he does things, though, so we asked him a few questions by email. He responded at length about the -mm tree and how that is changing with the advent of linux-next, kernel quality, and what folks can do to help make the kernel better.

I have recently read an eye-opening email from Ian Lynch about what happened in the UK with BECTA. I have received his permission to republish here his thoughts. I think his email speaks volumes about what happened.

As expected, the US has the greatest number of computers in the list, in fact slightly more than half. Of the rest, most (37%) are in Europe with a small number of systems in Japan (22), China (12) and India (6). Of much more interest, as I alluded to in a recent article is the penetration of Linux into this arena. Depending upon how you count the numbers provided by TOP500, between 85% and 89% of the Supercomputers are running some version of Linux. Of those that identify the distro, SuSE outnumbers Red Hat 10 to 1. No others are identified.