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Pablo Machon, a founder of the Free Knowledge Foundation(FKnK), told delegates at the second International FLOSS and Free Knowledge workshop yesterday that the successes of the free software movement had created a valuable example of how a similar free knowledge system could work.

IBM today announced that Bryant University, ranked the second most connected campus in America*, has committed to open-source computing by moving its entire data center from proprietary Sun Solaris systems to the IBM POWER™ microprocessor architecture with the open-source Linux® operating system. The IBM solution is the answer to Bryant's growing student body, providing the speed, reliability features and flexibility necessary to support the entire University's student information, financial, human resource, class scheduling and alumni applications. Consolidation to a total Linux on POWER infrastructure has also resulted in an up to twenty-five percent reduction in overhead costs.** Bryant University is following a general trend in academia to advance the capabilities of applications using the Linux operating system, considered to be critical to any organization looking to build a reliable, innovative and flexible technology platform based on open-source solutions. By using the Linux OS, students are collaboratively building their computer skills foundation for application development and as a result, broadening their technical expertise for future job opportunities.

The sedentary art of software development and the extreme sports of kitesurfing, sailplaning and canyoning would appear to have little in common. However, both are examples of a new force that could eventually affect a far broader range of companies and industries: the power of users to shape how products are developed.

Linux distributor Red Hat has teamed up with Hewlett-Packard to create a new performance test lab to help customers deploy enterprise storage across Linux environments.

The leader of the Debian Linux distribution has called for changes to be made to the open source project's trademark policy, to ensure it has the appropriate level of protection against legal challenges. Debian's current trademark policy states that businesses can use the Debian trademark if they make a CD of Debian, but cannot use Debian in the name of their business.

Oracle is considering opening up its software to support other databases. Chief executive Larry Ellison told delegates at the OpenWorld user conference in San Francisco that the company is committed to work with open standards, and will compete on reliability and security. He says Oracle is thinking of making its software open to a number of other database standards, but has not yet made a decision on this.

The Linux kernel coding style document was recently upgraded to say "the preferred form for passing a size of a struct is the following: p = kmalloc(sizeof(*p), ...);". Russell King [interview] disagreed with this suggestion, listing several reasons it was problematic. He was quickly joined by others including Al Viro, Robert Love [interview] and Alan Cox [interview], who agreed and added additional reasons why this coding convention could be problematic, suggesting instead to use "p = kmalloc(sizeof(struct foo), ...)". The reasons cited included the difficulty in grepping for such allocations and initializations, confusion over the fact the sizeof(*p) is the size of for example a void *, not the full space for the object allocated and overall readability.

The Linux Mark Institute (LMI), a non-profit organization that handles trademark issues and licenses for Linux, released a statement in response to an unfavorable court ruling to secure the Linux patent in Australia.

Yahoo! makes a huge leap forward with its new user interface. Some issues still need to be ironed out, and we'd like to see Yahoo! better integrate the calendar and contacts list with the mail application, but we're excited by what we've seen so far.

Do you hate to see a good computer go to waste? I know I do. I have half a dozen Pentium II machines, which came with Windows 98SE. If I trusted Windows 98SE to be even half secure, I'd still be using them. But I don't. So what to do with old boxes? Well one good thing is to run MEPIS' lightweight Linux distribution, MEPISLite.

SSH Tectia Client/Server Solution 5.0 and SSH Tectia Manager 2.0 Now Generally Available

This article was pointed to by a prestigious member of the Lxer community in a post. It's really worth having its own article space. For your information, the post read: Just a reminder of who CAGW really is. (click "Read more" for a snapshot). Warning: laughing so hard that your ribs ache could be hazardous to your health.

After I wound up stuck on a Windows computer for a week, I noticed my mind wondering about the possibility of a virus lurking on my Linux desktop. So I tried an anti-virus program for Linux and found a surprise.

Setting up a bibliography is hard enough, but misleading OOo examples don't help the process. Learn how to do it the right way.

Digium -- provider of the open source private branch exchange (PBX) called Asterisk -- yesterday announced plans to support Intel Corp.'s NetStructure and Dialogic products in its Asterisk Business Edition. Asterisk creator and Digium founder Mark Spencer says the move to support Intel -- a company that among other things is a highly established telephony card vendor -- will translate to more features and functionality for firms that use Asterisk-based telephony systems with Intel components. SearchEnterpriseLinux.com recently spoke with Spencer to find out a little more about this announcement and Asterisk, and to get his thoughts on the open source movement in general.

Users running Firefox on Linux may be vulnerable to a security vulnerability that can be exploited to compromise the user's system. Security firm Secunia warned on Tuesday that a flaw rated as "extremely critical" has been found in Firefox 1.0.6. The flaw can only be exploited on Unix or Linux based environments and can be fixed by upgrading to Firefox 1.0.7.

But it's not all good news for Microsoft, as Dell plans to sell OS-free PCs as well. With Linux becoming more popular, the company recognises there is a sizeable niche market that wants to choose which operating system to use. Adam Griffin, Dimension product marketing manager, made it clear that Dell has no plans to sell PCs running Linux, but believed the move would attract customers who want to install it themselves, and so save money by not paying for Windows XP.

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today criticized a plan in Massachusetts to force all state computer networks to move to an open source format.

Companies can save hundreds of thousands of pounds by switching to the open source database for their data warehousing projects, a PostgreSQL consultant claims

Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7, a security and stability update to the flagship Mozilla browser, is now available for download. Fixes are included for the international domain name (IDN) link buffer overflow vulnerability and the Linux command line URL parsing flaw. There are also other security and stability changes, including a fix for a crash experienced when using certain Proxy Auto-Config scripts. In addition, some regressions introduced by previous 1.0.x security updates have been resolved.