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A few tips and tricks for finding Wi-Fi access on you next road trip.

You know you're living in a cutthroat world when your BIOS lies to your operating system at boot time. Yet that's exactly what often happens, to one degree or another, depending on the manufacturer and model of the system. Some of the BIOS lies cause problems for Linux and some don't. The dmidecode project provides the means to learn exactly what claims your BIOS is making about your hardware. Strange as it might seem, it's useful information, even when it's not 100% reliable.

The SCO website appears to have been hacked over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. A page at http://www.sco.com/redhat/ displays a "SCO vs World" story which proclaims "Recently we found parts of our code in almost all Microsoft(R) software. We want to bring an action against Microsoft(R) and our legal department is working on that."

If Linux is the platform that you plan to move to, support is probably the number one issue popping into your head, as the technology is notorious for its paucity of high quality support from vendors. Apparel manufacturer Bossini can attest to this, but it is also proud to say that it has found ways to circumvent the problems. In fact, the Hong Kong headquartered company, which runs retail stores in China, Taiwan, and Singapore, switched to Linux three years ago, and has found compelling reasons to stay faithful to the platform. Over time, it has even migrated more applications to it.

In a move dear to the hearts of conspiracy theorists, Microsoft has taken a minority position in Vintela Inc, a sister company of the SCO Group by virtue of the Canopy Group, their common investor.

Linux provides new choice to Small to Medium-sized Business. IBM News interviews Laurie Jelinek, VP SMB, Central Region, Americas.

Linux Netwosix 1.2 solves all the critical problems discovered into releases 1.0 and 1.1 and now could be considered like one of the most important distribution in this field thanks to its lightweight and clear structure and now it's more configurable and secure.

The cameraProbe8 is an environmental and security monitoring device which integrates a camera with multiple sensors. The cameraProbe8 can log the sensor data and associated images whenever a door is opened, motion is detected, there is water on the floor, air flow is diminished, smoke is present, a dry contact or alarm panel alerts, the temperature is out of range, voltage on any device is missing, a UPS is low on battery and many more. There are 8 intelligent autosense ports included to support customized environmental sensing. This version of the cameraProbe8 includes full Linux.

Open-source leader Eric Raymond spells out his objections to Sun President Jonathan Schwartz's contention that the Java Community Process is truer to open-source ideas than is Linux.

Three of the largest IT companies have developed an open-source implementation of a standard from OASIS to ensure reliable messaging between Web services applications.

After several months, amidst various delays and other issues, this author has had the opportunity, at long last, to install and evaluate the latest iteration of Lycoris' Desktop LX, Amethyst 1.4.

Matthew Revell critiques Linspire's new OOoFf! package, from a marketing perspective. "OOoFf! seems like the kind of poorly thought out product that gives people, like Fizz, the wrong idea about branding. I think OOoFf! stems from the good intention of bringing the idea of open source software to more people. It just appears not to have been done with the involvement of the projects behind the software in OOoFf! and the communications and branding don't seem to have been handled very well."

Microsoft Jamaica has challenged an assertion by a Jamaican government agency that the use of software offered by its competitors - open systems - could possibly be more more economical, with Microsoft claiming that in most instances, the buyer of utility alternatives ends up paying more.

Most of the desktop computers in the UK's Department for Work and Pensions were paralysed for four days on Monday, when a failed upgrade took them offline. The outage, covering 75-80 per cent of the DWP's 80,000 PCs, is one of the largest in the UK Government's not entirely impressive IT history.

In the past week at OSDir our screenshot tour list included OpenOffice.org 1.1 Calc, SAM Mini Live Linux 1.1, Progeny Debian 2.0 RC1, and Damn Small Linux 0.8.4. Head over and check it out.

A complete listing of our Linux and Open Source screenshot tours is here.

All of the contents in an OpenOffice.org Writer document is one of three things: text characters, fields or objects. Objects is a large category that includes formulas, drawing objects and so-called OLE Objects, but it is represented most often by graphics. All objects are added to Writer using a frame, and most of the time, it is the frame that you are editing. The object itself sits sublimely above your changes, its appearance in the document altering but not the object itself.

What do you want from a desktop operating system? Of course programs for everyday use (a Web browser, office tools, games, etc.), but those programs are not the main criteria, especially with GNU/Linux, since you can use almost any Linux application easily on your distribution of choice. The real criteria are stability, package management, hardware compatibility, and the people behind the software, the community. For its superiority in those areas, I made Debian my workstation OS.

Clockwork has launched what it claims is the UK's first open-source payroll system, which it says will be cheaper than existing software from Sage and Northgate

The company running the German railway system has moved half of its servers to Linux, and expects to have more than 300 Linux servers in operation by the end of this year

Daffodil Software (http://www.daffodildb.com) has formally announced the Open Source release of Daffodil Replicator, a powerful data replication tool supporting heterogeneous databases, at SourceForge.net (http://sourceforge.net/projects/daffodilreplica/).