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Brazil's government says it will train a thousand state workers to use freely available software as part of an effort to save more than 18 million pounds in information technology costs.

Linux is powering the infrastructure behind a distributed global network hosting images of the current Mars Rover and the European Space Agency's recent Rosetta comet chaser mission.

...Furthermore, government departments are banned from using products that do not support open standards and specifications, they will seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary products and services, and will consider obtaining full rights to any bespoke code that they commission.

For most application developers, changes between the 2.4 and 2.6 kernel families have little direct impact. However, kernel and system changes that affect how applications spawn and manage other processes and threads are a significant exception to this rule. This whitepaper discusses topics related to migrating existing applications to the 2.6 kernel and the Native POSIX Threading Library (NPTL).

Michael C. Barnes updates his in-depth review of Linux desktop operating systems. In this exclusive article at DesktopLinux.com, Barnes examines how far the Linux distributions have come over the past year, updating his popular first article and evaluating the current versions of leading Desktop Linux desktop options including Ark Linux, ELX Linux, Lycoris, MEPHIS, Vector Linux, Xandros, as well as Live CDs including Puppy Linux and Flonix . . .

The leading desktop interfaces for the open-source Linux operating system—KDE and GNOME—are, between them, available in more than twice as many languages as Windows. KDE has already been localised for 42 languages, with a further 46 in the pipeline. Similarly, Mozilla, an open-source web browser, now speaks 65 languages, with 34 more to follow. OpenOffice, the leading open-source office suite, is available in 31 languages, including Slovenian, Basque and Galician, and Indian languages such as Gujarati, Devanagari, Kannada and Malayalam. And another 44 languages including Icelandic, Lao, Latvian, Welsh and Yiddish are on the way

Opera, the company behind the Opera Web browser, raised $34.7 million and will trade on the Oslo stock exchange.

Public spending watchdog the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) has signed a framework pricing agreement for Sun's Linux-based Java Desktop System (JDS) and a series of trials will begin in the New Year.

ISO images of Mandrakelinux 10.0 Community are now publicly available on a number of FTP mirrors.

An introduction to VLANs and VLAN trunking, how Linux interacts with VLANs and how you might use them in networks.

Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft have separately reached agreements with the Chinese government to develop, respectively, open-source and Windows software.

Open Source Business Conference 2004, the premier event for open source software and business, today announced the final line up of venture capital and investment speakers for the March 16 and 17 conference being held at the West St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco.

A few small fixes since -rc3, most notably an OHCI bug that would corrupt memory and seems to have been the reason for the "Bad page flags" bug at least on ppc64 (it's not been reported on x86, as far as I know, but I don't see why the corruption couldn't have happened there too).

Although the governments of some Asian countries like China and Malaysia have openly declared their support for the open source movement, a Microsoft Corp. official remains unfazed, saying this poses no threat to the company's business in the region.

Calife, a program which provides super user privileges to specific users, was found to contain a buffer overflow related to the getpass(3) library function. A local attacker could potentially exploit this vulnerability, given knowledge of a local user's password and the presence of at least one entry in /etc/calife.auth, to execute arbitrary code with root privileges.

As we continue our investigation into the SCO Group of Lindon, Utah and its $50 million infusion of life from a Northern California venture capital firm (and others), we keep uncovering other thought-provoking sidebars. In fact, Wednesday evening was a particularly busy one on the SCO Group beat desk here at NewsForge. Here's a roundup:

Linux can save a company large amounts of money - although it's not appropriate in every situation, it's definitely worth evaluating

Just drawing attention to some interesting projects written specifically for PHP5.

Wouldn't it be nice to sit at your Linux machine and have a crisp little color TV screen right there in one of your desktop windows? Using a cheapo TV tuner card, you can get great picture and sound quality on anything from an old 133 MHz Pentium on up. The hardware requirements, at $20 for a TV card after rebates, are pretty modest, and the payoff is a lot of fun.

The Linux Documentation Project Weekly News Issue Number 10.