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For many a GNU/Linux user, the command line is supreme. But can you manipulate images without switching to the GUI and using the resource-hungry GIMP? You can, using the fantastic ImageMagick suite.

Let there be no doubt that Red Hat the company has become a monster success story. We'll get to Red Hat the investment in a bit, but all the folks who doubted that an essentially free product could be repackaged with services and sold at a premium must feel a bit silly now. I never publicly said so, but you can count me among one of the former doubters. I always thought Linux the product would do well, but I had my doubts about Red Hat making much on it.

The Mozilla Foundation is testing a patch to its Firefox browser that puts the kibosh on popup ads which have been slipping through the open-source browser's blocker.

Opinion:Finally, finally, someone is withdrawing an open-source license. Now, if only about a few dozen other companies and groups get the idea, we'll all be better off.

The impression I gathered from last week's BrainShare is that Novell's current thrust is going to be all about the packaging and the marketing.

Open source solutions have clearly moved beyond the initial “free, as in beer”, appeal. According to IDC predictions for 2005, Linux shipments will account for more than 20 per cent of server volume shipments, growing at twice the rate of Windows. Most interestingly, IDC notes that within the manufacturing, financial services, telecom, and government verticals, organisations are clearly moving towards enterprise-grade, commercially supported Linux distributions — that means “paid”. I, too, am now willing to pay for the functionality I have enjoyed at little cost for years now.

Continued growth in its enterprise subscription revenue helps the company's total revenue for fiscal year 2005 jumps to $196.5 million, an increase of 58 percent from 2004.

Less than half of those selected to the project's governance board are expected to be Sun staff members; the majority are thought to be from the company's customer base, the industry and the open-source community.

IN our Clear Choice test of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0, (we tested RHEL 4.0 Advanced Server, Red Hat’s most robust Linux distribution), we found huge performance gains over previous editions, beefed up security options and vastly improved hardware detection mechanisms.

OSDir.com Weekly Screenshot Tours for March 31, 2005. We had another great week in the screenie department at OSDir, grabbing nice shots of Linspire 5.0, SkyOS 5.0 Beta 8.4, Foresight Desktop Linux 0.6, Conectiva Linux 10 and Turkix 10.0 Alpha

Gentoo is happy to announce the first experimental release of Gentoo for the NT kernel! Away from mainstream Gentoo a group of developers has managed to push the flexibility of our distribution to new heights and getting it to run natively on the well-known NT kernel!

Every year thelkml sees a handful of April 1'st gags, and this year was no exception.

When it comes to importing generic XML into OpenOffice, the user is on his own. This article offers a quick XSLT tool for this purpose and demonstrates the Calc import of records-oriented XML. In addition to learning a practical trick for working with Calc, you might also learn a few handy XSLT techniques for using dynamic criteria to transform XML.

Maria Winslow has done the open source advocate a treat. Her book is a great tool you can use to not only create awareness of open source, but also buy-in from senior management. Do not miss out.

CSC, formerly Computer Sciences Corporation, is a fortune 500 company supplying high level IT services to companies and government agencies in 76 locations on 6 continents . The organisation employs nearly 80 000 people and reported revenues of US$13.9 billion last year. In November CSC Leading Edge Forum completed 18 months of research into OSS. The report Open Source: Open for Business (7.8 MB) explores the usage and potential of open source both within the company and amongst its heavyweight client base.

Since the election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil has gradually become a beachhead for Open Source, and consequently a thorn in Microsoft's side. Soon after his election, President da Silva appointed Sergio Amadeu, an academic and Open Source enthusiast, to head Brazil's National Information Technology Institute.

In an effort to be more competitive with other Linux news sites, LXer.com has improved the site interface and added more visually appealing graphics and advertising. Editors Note: The author of this story (Paul Ferris) wishes to apologize to the members of the Linux Community that were unintentionally offended by this article.

Asa Dotzler wrote in to tell us that the Mozilla Foundation is testing a patch for Mozilla Firefox that improves popup blocking. In a recent weeks, a number of advertising networks (once again, we won't mention Fastclick by name) have started exploiting the fact that Firefox's popup blocker doesn't stop popups launched by plugins (for example, Flash movies) by default. The patch, which is available as a signed extension for testing purposes, adds no new functionality but does change a couple of hidden preferences.

a new programming language has been sighted, it goes by the affectionate name "nessie" and it claims to be the loch ness monster of programming languages.

The advent of open-source software has been hailed as the most significant event in computing since Apple played David to IBM's Goliath. Yet, while open-source code can be found practically everywhere these days, the companies dedicated to bringing it into the mainstream have had a rough time staying afloat. To economists, open-source's growing pains offer fascinating insights into the impact of technological change on the way markets are organized. But to firms now investing billions of dollars in IT infrastructure, there's nothing academic about the issue.