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Imagine a utility that lets you make an annotated backup of any of your project files with the click of a mouse or a single command. It would let you review the history of your backups and recover any version you wished. And it would integrate with your file browser and would keep track of files that have changed since your last backup. The utility exists -- Subversion, and its companion program TortoiseSVN, can help you safely manage your files as you work with them.

Nokia last month released a Linux-based handheld computer aimed at mobile power users and gadget enthusiasts alike. About the size of a disposable camera, the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet runs a mini desktop Linux distribution put together by the phone maker. The interface is a 4-inch touch screen, which is used to access Web browsing, e-mail, some office productivity applications, as well as an RSS news reader, a digital music file player, and tools for viewing movies and photos. Future releases are said to include applications for presence management and VoIP.

Company that sells supercomputers built from clusters of interconnected Linux servers names Robert "Bo" Ewald its new chief.

Apple is leaving the PowerPC chip family behind, but Linux on Power vendors, Terra Soft, Red Hat and Novell/SuSE are staying with the IBM chip family.

The newly launched Linux distribution has a glitch--some versions were released with default security updates turned off.

Welcome to the Mandriva Linux Community Newsletter -- dedicated to keeping you up-to-date with the latest Mandriva-related news & info.

Getting a grip on all the legalities associated with open source and proprietary software licensing is a daunting task. To gain that understanding, says Mark Webbink, general counsel for Red Hat, one first needs to understand the true legal implications of words like patent, copyright, proprietary and open. After that, students of software law can get into more advanced subjects, such as an examination of what happens when developers mingle applications that were created under different licenses.

Firefox continues to gain users in Europe as it does in the U.S., a French Web metrics firm said Tuesday, although the rate of increase appears to be slowing. The Mozilla Foundation's reaction? It's the bottom line market share numbers that matter, not how fast, or slow, Firefox attracts fans.

The GNU Compiler for Java (GCJ), a free software implementation of Java, has been in development for seven years, but with the Free Software Foundation's recent call for volunteers, the project is suddenly receiving more attention than ever before. For many, GCJ is seen as a means of ensuring that the next version of OpenOffice.org does not require non-free versions of Java for full functionality. Yet the scope of the project goes far beyond this immediate need.

A number of open-source software projects will have to decide before the end of the month whether they want to continue using the proprietary source code management system, BitKeeper.

Research from two Harvard boffins claims to prove that the Open Sauce [sic?] movement will not wipe out the activities of Microsoft. Harvard Business School professors Pankaj Ghemawat and Ramon Casadesus-Masanell said that most research into the OSS movement has focused on the organisation and management issues, that makes Open Source look good.

In an interview at Red Hat's inaugural user conference here, CEO Matthew Szulik said that the best opportunities for the company's open-source software stack lie outside the US.

Linux screen recordings with vnc2swf and vnc2rec, More kernel compiling fun, We discuss the Apple move to Intel and the possible ramifications for GNU/Linux, Debian finally has a new release, And much, much more

Effective this morning, Bruce Perens has joined the open source support firm SourceLabs as vice president of Developer Relations and Policy. Perens describes his mission at SourceLabs as being "to build bridges between enterprise IT and the open source community." There is something of an "Odd Couple" flavor to the deal since one of the two primary venture capitalists behind SourceLabs is none other than Microsoft's recently departed chief financial officer, Brad Silverberg. NewsForge spoke briefly with Perens about his new job yesterday.

InsynQ Releases MyBooks Professional Software for Linspire, Filling Linux Application Gap

Tuxcards and KnowIt are two twists on the same idea. These open source two-pane outliners can be used as quickly searchable notebooks, or collections of Web clippings, to-do lists, or projects in progress. Both make fine text databases, and both are handy for the planning of complex documents.

The MEPIS community asked for an "easy migration path from Windows 98," and this week MEPIS LLC delivered with MEPISLite 3.3.1 -- a lightweight version of SimplyMEPIS 3.3.1 optimized for "modest hardware." To run gently on older machines, MEPISLite includes skinnier packages and a number of tweaks to minimize "disk thrashing."

Many firms today profess a desire for the price/performance, security and reliability associated with Linux. But, Novell strategist John Dobbs points out, most are still only experimenting with the open source operating system while proprietary offerings hum with life on the majority of their desktops and servers.

Unisys has strengthened its commitment to Novell's SUSE Linux operating system, creating a migration center in Europe to help users migrate to SUSE Linux Enterprise server from Unix.

The Debian Project has finally released a long-anticipated new version of its widely-used Linux distribution.