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Just like open source, right? Cloud computing is the new open-source for Sun Microsystems, which has promised to next month reveal more about a cloud platform it's building.…Free Download - A practical guide to disaster recovery planning

Issue #21 of Full Circle, the Ubuntu community magazine is now out with the usual lineup of tips, tricks and games. Highlights in this issue include more tips on using the command line to format output, part five of programming in C, and a case study on using the Creative Zen V music player in Ubuntu.

Debian's long-delayed 5.0 release (aka, "Lenny") will likely launch over the Valentine's-slash-President's day weekend, five months late, but with a lusty wink. A look at Lenny's new installer hints that Debian's long-cherished "when it's ready" release schedule may be headed for divorce court, though.

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz talks about the economy, disruptive technologies and necessity as the mother of invention. Jonathan thinks that the economic downturn and the Wall Street meltdown will make IT managers more open to change than they have ever been before. And that is going to benefit Sun and its open-source strategy, contends Schwartz, who is also the company's president and a high-profile blogger.

Following the plan outlined in the previous release update, we are now in deep freeze, which means that we'll only be migrating to testing packages that fix RC bugs. The weekend of February 14th is going to be our tentative target for release. We've checked with all the involved teams (which are many!), and the date works for all of them. The intention is only to lift that date if something really critical pops up that is not possible to handle as an errata, or if we end up technically unable to release that weekend (eg., a needed machine crashes). Every other fix that doesn't make it in time will be r1 material. Please be sure to contact us about the RC fixes you'd like included in the point release!

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A new "Crystal Desktop Search" Plasmoid, allowing searching through NEPOMUK indexes. Support for "grep-like behaviour" in the "FileWatcher" Plasma applet, and support for custom server addresses for the "Pastebin" applet. Further developments in the "System Load Viewer" and "Video Player" applets. An option to show Plasma panels during active KWin-Composite window switching effects, and a configuration dialog for changing the animation duration for the "Magic Lamp" effect. Work on Replay Gain support, and "basic playlist sorting" in Amarok 2. Inline image support for HTML messages in KMail. Porting to Akonadi in Mailody and much, much more.

The first alpha of Intel's Linux-based Moblin 2 platform has been released for testing. The Moblin Project pushed out the initial version Monday, hoping to lure a community of developers to its open-source stack for netbooks and other low-power devices running on Intel's Atom processors. Alpha 1 includes the Linux 2.6.29-rc2 kernal and ready for initial testing of Moblin 2's developer tools, boot processes, package interactions, and new internet connection manager.

Wi-Fi networks make an excellent breeding ground for worms and other malware, according to a newly published university study. According to a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, four researchers at Indiana University in Bloomington conducted a series of simulated malware attacks on Wi-Fi networks in seven U.S. cities that produced an epidemic spreading to thousands of Wi-Fi routers in less than 24 hours. A simulated attack in New York infected more than 18,000 wireless routers in a two-week time span.

[The FOSS angle? Don't trust closed routers. Grab a copy of Carla's cookbook and build an open, Linux-based access point. -- Sander]

The government program "Holland Open in Connection" (Nederland Open in Verbinding) and The OpenDoc Society are collaborating on an online document factory to compare office suite applications. The free webservice Officeshots.org will start at the end of next month. Users will be able to compare online the output quality of office suites as well as web-based productivity applications. The collaboration was announced during a well visited ODF congress in Maarssen, The Netherlands. The project is financially supported by a one-time funding by the Dutch NLNet Foundation.

[Disclaimer: Your editor is one of the core developers on the Officeshots project -- Sander]

The dying light of the George W. Bush presidency was marked by, among other things, a legislative move to derail recent gains in the federal government's opening of science. In particular, the innocuous sounding “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act” introduced into the House by John Conyers, Jr., on 9 September 2008 was poised to shut down the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy, as well as forestall the spread of this open-access spirit to other areas of federally sponsored research and scholarship. Hearings were held, but the bill did not make it through the House. End of story? Not quite.

[Not directly FOSS related, but definitely very interesting, since open access publishing has the same philosophy and ethos as FOSS. Thanks to Dr.ir. Jens Staal for the tip. -- Sander]

Linux had its chance there for a while in netbooks, but has now been duly "kicked to the curb" by Microsoft, never to surface again. This according to Robin Harris, apparently an expert in storage, who in an amusing, penguin-baiting rant published by ZDNet, ventures his opinion on desktop Linux.

In Part I Eric Geier showed us several options for remoting between Linux and Windows machines, and settled on VNC. Today we'll learn how to configure routers for connections over the Internet,and how to safely encrypt our remote graphical desktop sessions.

Akaza Research announces the first annual OpenClinica European Summit. The event will be held on April 14, 2009 in Brussels, Belgium and bring together users, developers, and leading service providers of the OpenClinica open source electronic data capture (EDC) software. This event is for users, developers, and other interested parties to share information about the OpenClinica open source electronic data capture platform. Early bird registration deadline is January 30th.

Details are scarce, unless Russian is your language of choice, but one news outlet is reporting that Russia plans to develop its own national operating system. The move is designed to reduce the country's reliance on foreign software and licensing agreements. And the alleged "open-code" solution, likely a Linux/GNU derivative, will give Russia a greater degree of customization, as well as increased control over how the potentially free operating system is used and accessed.

The South African Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) has made good on its promise to open up its website to free software users. With just three weeks to go to the final voter registration date for this year’s national elections the IEC has removed the error messages that greeted non-Microsoft users and allowed them access to the full site.

Welcome to this year's 1st issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. This issue is dedicated to Thiemo Seufer, who died on 26 December 2008 in a tragic car accident. Topics covered in this issue include "Bits from the Debian CD team", "Bits from the Debian Installer team" and "Results from the Lenny release GR".

Debian developer Thiemo Seufer was tragically killed in a car accident in Germany, reports Debian Project Leader Steve McIntryre in an e-mail to the developers announcement list.

The US National Security Agency has helped put together a list of the world's most dangerous coding mistakes. The 25 entry list contains errors that can lead to security holes or vulnerable areas that can be targeted by cyber criminals. Experts say many of these errors are not well understood by programmers.

With apologies to my boss, a story in today's Wall Street Journal has me thinking that the future of Linux deployment might perhaps be even better than he predicted. The topic [of the article] was netbooks, and how hardware vendors are scrambling to get some new offerings out the factory doors after the very popular Asus Eee PC came out in 2007 and made a big splash in an otherwise bleak electronics market. It's not just updating product lineups with brand-new netbook solution. An alternative is to get existing laptops to behave more like netbooks. If done right, this is a win-win for hardware OEMs, since with just a little modification, they can roll right into the netbook market.

From the very start, anyone who paid attention to SCO's attempts to throw a spanner in the Linux works, knew that they had no case. Over the years, I've covered their decline from the last major x86 Unix power to an industry joke. And, now SCO's story is almost over. It's garbage time now for SCO. Those of you who follow basketball know exactly what I mean. This is when the winning team, Linux, and its chief champions in the SCO lawsuits. Novell and IBM, can send in the reserves from the end of the bench. SCO's lawsuits are smashed to bits. As the clock ever so slowly winds down, SCO is now dumping what was once its heart, its Unix OpenServer and UnixWare business, and its newer mobile software, to continue its forlorn lawsuits. SCO has filed a new reorganization plan with the federal bankruptcy court in Delaware on January 8th.