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Austin is playing host to a new con this week. It's a Linux con. It's a science fiction con. It's Linucon. The show is a sister show to Penguincon, held in Michigan. It is the result of a grass-roots organizing effort by Rob Landley and Stu Green, two longtime members of Austin's Linux scene.

Linucon -- what a great concept: A convention focused half on science fiction and half on Linux. As a fan of both who just attended the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston last month, I see huge similarities between the two constituencies.

IBM India, Center for Development of Advanced Computing and IIT Bombay have joined hands to set up an 'Open Source Software Resource Center'. The center has been set up at a cost of Rs. 5 crore. The move is an attempt to create an ecosystem to push the open source software development nationwide. Other academic and research institutes in the country are expected to be a part of the initiative once the framework is set up.

At last spring's BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City, Novell CIO Debra Anderson revealed she'd been charged with migrating 5,000 Novell employees to Linux by BrainShare 2005. Half were due to be moved by October. But so far, according to the news article, only 1,500 have been moved which means the company is 1,000 short of its interim goal. Novell's director of Linux, Brian Green, is quoted as saying that Novell hopes to get the vast majority of employees migrated to Linux by year-end. That seems to be quite ambitious.

Linux Gazette is a reader-supported monthly ezine dedicated to two simple ideas: making Linux a little more fun, and sharing ideas and discoveries.

I believe that many IT CEOs want to beat down Microsoft in the new embedded systems market, but they always encounter numerous obstacles. Why? They need a strong and well-define embedded system environment. Where is it? You will know it after you read the following information. And, why can uClinux and SSP(SoC Software Platform) technology beat down Microsoft in the embedded systems market? There are some evidences in the following:

Why the combination of a DSP and uClinux works especially well for the embedded Linux gadgets turning up everywhere in the consumer electronics market.

When I was in college in the early 1980s studying mathematics and computer science, I had the opportunity to correspond with Len Adleman of RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) cryptosystem fame, who sent me a thick envelope by parcel post with some of his results in extending the Diffie-Hellman encryption algorithm (this was in the days before email and URLs dramatically simplified such correspondence).

Jon 'Maddog' Hall, the president of open-source organisation Linux International, told the LinuxWorld Expo in London on Wednesday that open-source voice-over-IP (VoIP) will be bigger than Linux. "I predict that over next three years, VoIP using an open-source solution, such as Asterisk, will generate more business than the entire Linux marketplace today," said Hall.

At aKademy I had the chance to talk to Chris Schlaeger about SUSE, its relationship with the KDE community, his view of the Linux enterprise desktop and the speed of development of several key features in KDE (a Dutch translation can be found at Bart&David).

Novell plans to release in early November a new version of its open-source operating system for desktops.

Sun's Java Desktop System (JDS) has faced a lot of flack from the Free Software community. People object to Sun's naming scheme and branding, and have cried out in angst about JDS's complex and unattractive end-user licensing agreement. It seems odd that strident objections are being directed at the very best, most complete, and thoroughly integrated GNU/Linux distro on the market. Upon close inspection, the discrepancy is about the different objectives of individual open source developers and enterprise software vendors. And in the end, the high quality of Sun's new desktop system stands firm as a testament to our shared values for open standards and competitive functionality.

'Red Hat and the open-source community should be ecstatic,' says Matthew Szulik

Open-Xchange Server—the engine behind Novell's SuSE Linux Openexchange Server—is a modular, standards-based communications tool that provides businesses with groupware functions including e-mail, calendar, contacts, tasks and real-time document storage.

Novell's Nat Friedman, vice-president of its desktop technology group, said open source vendors work off a modular, flexible development model that allows them to deliver new features to customers more regularly than Microsoft. Novell has also said Microsoft's Longhorn delay will give it more time to push iFolder, which, like WinFS, stores data in a user's real file system and tracks metadata in a separate location.

RealNetworks has signed up a new Linux partner to distribute its audio and video player, China-based Red Flag Linux, the company announced Wednesday during the LinuxWorld conference in London.

The company unveils SuSE Linux Professional 9.2, which features wireless networking support, at LinuxWorld Expo in London, and says it will deliver its desktop Linux software by the end of the year. Also, HP's head of Linux says advances in security and high-performance computing are pushing Linux into new realms.

Richard Stallman from the FSF, Ray Saunders from the World Scout Bureau and the author discuss the connections between free software and Scouting philosophies.

Email has gained acceptance as a quick, easy way to communicate. Some have even gone as far as to say that the time-honored custom of writing letters and sending them via postal mail (or snail mail, a reference to the lack of speed some perceive from the U.S. Postal Service's delivery times) is a dying one. For those who still need it, however, a new service based on open source software makes it possible to send actual hard copy "snail mail" directly from your Web browser.

This years largest Pike event will be the Pike Camp in Essen, Germany from October 13th through the 19th. Users and developers of the Pike Language will be arriving in Essen from all over the world, including Sweden, USA, Latvia, Hungary, Austria, France and Germany for a week of talks, technical workshops and tutorials. Included in the week's events are the 3rd annual Pike Conference, 2nd annual Caudium conference, sTeam developer day and PSYC MODIv: the 5th PSYC modification event.