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Popularity of Linux helps boost Oracle's database sales. Also: IBM takes steps to promote open source in academia.

Distance education is becoming more important in today's connected world. Universities and schools are supplementing traditional classroom-based learning with electronic learning management systems (LMS) -- software designed to deliver on-line education. You may know such software by other names, such as managed learning environments, virtual learning environments, or course management systems. Moodle is the definitive open source learning management system. Like most LMSes, it make extensive use of the Internet, with features such as discussion forums, chats, journals, automated testing and grading tools, and student tracking. Because it's open source, it's also broadly extensible by its large user community.

Over the course of 5 months, I've taken my wife who knew nothing of Linux and put her through a handful of desktop oriented distros to see if we could shake the Windows bug. The results are contained on Yet Another Linux Blog. If you want to know what a new user thinks about distros such as SimplyMEPIS, PCLinuxOS, Mandrake (Mandriva), Ubuntu, and Fedora Core... you may want to give the experiment a read:

"Linuxblog Introduction: We took an average windows user, gave her a handful of distributions of Linux, and forced her to use each distro for one week. We gave her alsaconf, email servers, and mounted her windows partition to the fresh install. Then, we faded away and quietly watched her in her new environment. You too can join us by reading on...

Freely Available Visual MainWin(R) for J2EE(TM) Developer Edition, Developer Zone Link Visual Studio .NET(R) Developers to Linux(R), Mono(TM)

Steven J Vaughn-Nichols calls it as he sees it: the MSFT-backed, Wipro study on patching has to contort its methodology in order to come to the pre-determined conclusion. Also patching a Linux box doesn't necessarily require a reboot, but patching a Windows box almost always does.

I've been a Linux server administrator for more than eight years, but I've always used Windows on the desktop. The thing that keeps me from moving my desktop to Linux isn't application lock-in or lack of applications (most apps I use are OSS anyway), but the ability to use hotkeys effectively for file management.

Despite some recent criticism -- which included a call to boycott standards based on reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) licensing fees -- the OASIS standards body is behind what many in the open source community view as a primary example of a truly open, industry-accepted standard: the new OpenDocument format.

Interact-TV, a digital media management company based in Westminster, Colo., uses a custom Linux operating system built on Fedora Core as the base for its digital television servers. As a result of his experiences with Linux and other open source software on the production floor, CEO Ken Fuhrman has fired his Web host, fired up some Red Hat servers, and created a custom Web-based engineering environment along with StarOffice and Linux for administrative desktops.

Sun Microsystems has expressed "serious doubts" about the usefulness of the latest Apache Foundation project to create an open source implementation of the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE).

Java technology and XML are arguably the most important programming developments of the last five years. The Java API for XML Processing (JAXP) lets you validate, parse, and transform XML using several different APIs.

This paper aims to show that the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) model is suitable not only to make good software. It might also work in other economic areas. Making a parallel with the collective FOSS property, the possibility and viability of a collective ownership over the knowledge of production is analyzed. The ideas here presented were born and developed in a FOSS community (Libervis) and written in its Wiki section.

Open Source Development Labs, group that employs Linux leader Linus Torvalds, lays off nearly a sixth of its staff.

Getting into Linux, setting up web servers and tinkering with configurations doesn't just satisfy an insatiable desire you and I have to create and achieve, it also makes you cool.

A number of historians have warned that no society can really understand the historical significance of current events as they are happening, but hell, let's give it a try anyways. In fact, I'm gonna really stick my neck out and say that this is the time before abundance in the IT industry, the time before the time when our IT buffet truly offers more than most of us can eat in any one sitting for most applications. The result will be a explosion of creativity from the fringes of the social network, as the demand side increasingly supplies itself, to quote Doc Searls.

"Linux had the luxury of learning from all of Unix's mistakes on the Internet," affirms Con Zymaris of CyberSource as he replies to the 'MS vs Linux' debate

A new wave of freely available open source business applications is already being adopted by a significant number of small and mid-sized businesses. Among the open source applications turning up on small business desktops are word processing and spreadsheet applications like OpenOffice and accounting applications like GnuCash and Grisbi.

Every user whose client connects to the Internet should configure his firewall immediately after installation. Some Linux distributions include firewall configuration as a part of installation, often offering a set of defaults configurations to choose from. However, to ensure that your machine presents the minimum "attack surface" (a measure of the number of vulnerable ports, user accounts, and sockets exposed to attack) to the predatory inhabitants of the Internet, you may need to do some manual configuration of your firewall. Here are three tools that can help.

When the Linux desktop gets performance tweaks, people can see a significant difference. Windows XP just cannot keep up. With the addition of a stream of new applications and multiple ways to run Win32 applications, the case for Linux becomes irrefutable.

The existence of open-source software in Europe may be under threat if companies, including Apple and Microsoft, persuade the European Parliament to expand patent protection in Europe.

Fujitsu Siemens Computers was recently presented with the Novell Technology Partner of the Year Award for operational excellence and its innovative FlexFrame for mySAP Business Suite solution, based on the Linux operating system.