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The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, currently in progress in Austin, Texas, is a small event, with only about 300 invited attendees. Because it is small, you can find yourself face-to-face or in conversation with some of the biggest names in and around the Linux kernel, business, and open source scenes, including Ted Ts'o, Jon "maddog" Hall, Bruce Perens, Dan Frye, and Larry Augustin. The venue for the event -- the J.J. Pickle Research Center Campus at the University of Texas -- is the same place where IBM held its first "secret" Linux summit in 1999 to announce and refine its Linux strategy internally.

South Africa’s minister of public service and administration, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, took centre stage at a protest march in Norway today. The march was held to protest alleged irregularities in the ratification of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) document format as an ISO standard last week. Sections of a speech, given by the minister ahead of the ISO vote last week, were read out to the gathered crowd by Steve Pepper, former chairman of the Norwegian committe responsible for that country’s OOXML vote.

At the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the University of Texas Supercomputing Center April 8, Hewlett-Packard announced the release of its first Linux-powered computer to be sold in the United States, the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 Service Pack 1.

The Asus Eee PC ultraportable comes bundled with a version of Xandros as its operating system. If you would like to try a different Linux distro on your Eee, there are plenty of options to choose from, including eeeXubuntu, EeeDora, ZenEee, EeePCLinuxOS, and Puppeee. The latter is based on Puppy Linux, a tiny Linux distribution that sports a few unique features that make it a perfect candidate for use on machines like the Eee PC.

Storage performance has failed to keep up with that of other major components of computer systems. Hard disks have gotten larger, but their speed has not kept pace with the relative speed improvements in RAM and CPU technology. The potential for your hard drive to be your system's performance bottleneck makes knowing how fast your disks and filesystems are and getting quantitative measurements on any improvements you can make to the disk subsystem important. One way to make disk access faster is to use more disks in combination, as in a RAID-5 configuration.

Guest commentator Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Ziff Davis Enterprise tells what, in his opinion, is important about the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit going on right now in Austin, Texas.

Open Health Tools (OHT), based in the United States, announced its Health Interoperability Framework on Tuesday, which will see the organization work with international standards bodies, governments and companies from the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and the United States to develop common healthcare IT products and services.

Late last week I had the chance to participate in a call with Bob Bickel and Rich Friedman of Ringside Networks who talked us through their plans for the new open source social networking technology vendor. In short, Ringside’s Social Application Server is designed to add social networking capabilities to existing applications and content. It does this providing hooks into enterprise data sources while delivering compatibility and interoperability with Facebook applications via the Facebook API, while support for Google and MySpace’s OpenSocial is also on its way.

After last week's unveiling of Mobile Internet Device (MID) prototypes based on Intel's Atom Centrino chipset, the pundits are weighing in. At ZDNet, Dana Blankenhorn blasts the whole lot as "ugly" while at TechNewsWorld, Rob Enderle calls the new Linux-based Lenovo MID an "iPhone killer."

Live CDs are still something that are relatively new to the Fedora Project, but because of their integration to the build system and the user facing tools such as livecd-tools allowing for easy re-spinning, they’re a fairly central part of what Fedora can offer people. Could you give us a bit of background on this and explain the current state of live spins in Fedora 8?

Microsoft today lifted the lid on 14,000 pages of sketchy versions of tech documentation for core software code. On show for the first time in public are underlying protocols for Office 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. This is Microsoft's latest effort to satisfy anti-trust concerns of the European Union, which is possibly a tougher adversary for the company than Google.

How do I like WordPress 2.5? In a word, "wow." Its developers promised that WordPress 2.5, released last month, was more than just "a fresh coat of paint." Instead, they said, 2.5 was a "from the ground up" redesign. The goal was to create a new WordPress that would be powerful but easy to administer. After upgrading my WordPress installation and using the new format, I found that the WordPress development team has done a fabulous job of making WordPress even better than it was. It's not perfect, but it's darn close.

An API should refrain from making promises that it cannot keep. A recent episode involving the kernel's in_atomic() macro demonstrates how things can go wrong when a function does not really do what it appears to do. It is also a good excuse to look at an under-documented (but fundamental) aspect of kernel code design. Kernel code generally runs in one of two fundamental contexts. Process context reigns when the kernel is running directly on behalf of a (usually) user-space process; the code which implements system calls is one example. When the kernel is running in process context, it is allowed to go to sleep if necessary. But when the kernel is running in atomic context, things like sleeping are not allowed. Code which handles hardware and software interrupts is one obvious example of atomic context.

MARENA, the government agency responsible for the environment in Nicaragua, has asked us to use a biofilter waste water treatment system instead of a traditional septic tank and drain field for the Geek Ranch. The reasoning is that as we are building in a nature reserve, we are being held to higher standards than is typical outside the reserve. While we don't claim to be waste water system experts, we are geeks so this sounded like a technology challenge. Beyond that, the good news, is that a local friend retired from being a wastewater engineer (even though there are many other titles associated with the job) so we have the resources to combine his knowledge of the, shall we say, material handling part of the system with our knowledge of control systems.

Google has opened its cloud to outside developers. Last night, while eating S'mores at an intimate developer gathering dubbed Campfire One, the world's largest ad broker unveiled App Engine, a free service that lets anyone to build and run web apps on Google's very own distributed infrastructure. The cool kids call this cloud computing.

How do you herd cats? Well, as the famous EDS commercial shows, it isn't easy. In a sense, that's what the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit pro-Linux organization, will be doing this week at the invitation-only LF Collaboration Summit at the University of Texas Super Computing Center here. Linux, as anyone who follows it knows, is the result of the efforts of hundreds of developers, and it serves the needs of at least as many companies and--thanks to its role in leading Web sites such as Google and its popularity with Web-hosting companies--hundreds of millions of users.

PC vendor Everex and gOS (Good OS), the Linux distribution based around Google applications, is taking the next step in online-based computing by introducing a limited edition MySpace PC. The companies hope that the white-cased, two-pound MyMiniPC will attract what Everex officials claim is some of the more than 100 million MySpace users. As such, it's the first PC, using any operating system, designed expressly to use with a social network.

IDC analyst Al Gillen, who is giving the opening keynote at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit kicking off today in Austin, Texas, is expected to cite figures from an IDC white paper entitled "The Role of Linux Servers in Commercial Workloads" that show that Linux has done well and proved itself in the enterprise, and is expected to continue that trend through 2011.

The Linux Driver Project (LDP) is alive and well, with over 300 developers wanting to participate, many drivers already written and accepted into the Linux kernel tree, and many more being currently developed. The main problem is a lack of projects. It turns out that there really isn't much hardware that Linux doesn't already support. Almost all new hardware produced is coming with a Linux driver already written by the company, or by the community with help from the company.

Though I have my doubts, PHEV (Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles) may be on the same track towards open hardware we are seeing in some computer components and devices. Be warned, however, the effort is grounded in marketing and survival instincts that just might not suffice to become a success. Although use of open source is established for use in PHEV, the same cannot be said of the hardware components. The reader must recognize what is quoted below is mainly a self interested party pushing a marketing scheme. I would hope it works, however, I have good reasons for skepticism. Moreover, it was the individual, engineering types that created and posted the how-to instructions and schematics.