It doesn't come easy writes "According to the Register, Novell expects the cost of upgrading to Vista will encourage many companies to turn to Linux instead. From the article: 'Jack Messman, chief executive of networking software vendor Novell says that 2006 will see widespread adoption of Linux on the corporate desktop. According to Messman the catalyst will be the release of Microsoft Windows Vista and the high costs associated with upgrading. Obviously, if they're right Novell hopes that turn will be toward SUSE Linux.'" We touched on this issue late last month, as well.

Charli125 asks: "I have been a Windows administrator ever since I got into the tech industry. I have no working experience with any other OS except for those from Apple. I am currently working with a small company that has 1 server and around 15 workstations. I would like to faze out all of the Windows software, in order to avoid having to deal with viruses, save money, and learn how the other half lives. Since I have never so much as installed Linux, I am looking for resources or advice on how to get started, and how to plan the change over. Can anyone help me?"

wbglinks writes "An informative interview with Linux guru Alan Cox, with an emphasis on Linux and security. Alan will be the keynote speaker at EuroOSCON this October." From the article: "It is beginning to improve, but at the moment computer security is rather basic and mostly reactive. Systems fail absolutely rather than degrade. We are still in a world where an attack like the slammer worm combined with a PC BIOS eraser or disk locking tool could wipe out half the PCs exposed to the internet in a few hours. In a sense we are fortunate that most attackers want to control and use systems they attack rather than destroy them."

An anonymous reader writes "A Linux implementation delivering single-digit microsecond responsiveness on 64-bit dual-core AMD Opteron processors is being demonstrated at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston this week. From the article: "According to FSMLabs, an AMD Opteron 265 dual-core system running RTLinux can deliver guaranteed interrupt latencies of no more than five microseconds, with scheduling jitter of no more than eight microseconds, even with Linux under a heavy load." Heck, with numbers like that it seems like Linux could run circles around XP Pro for audio/video apps such as streaming, recording, and playback!"

wellington wrote to mention a ZDNet blurb about a Gartner group study. Gartner indicates that 'mainstream' use of open source in IT environments may be 5 years away. From the article: "Gartner's latest Linux 'hype cycle' report shows that open source is halfway to maturity but warns the biggest test will be whether it can demonstrate the necessary performance and security to function as a data centre server for mission-critical applications. Leading-edge businesses are generally still in the early stages of Linux deployments but Gartner expects increased commercialisation and improved storage and systems management for the operating system by the end of 2005, with Linux being used primarily for WebSphere and infrastructure applications on mainframes and web services on blades and racks."

mu22le writes "Andrea Arcangeli has created a new tool, 'klive', to automatically track the amount of testing that each kernel gets before release. According to Kernel Traffic "There was some discussion [on making it a kernel config option] that public perception might put this in the "spyware" category", but still the ability to track a kernel usage and reliability would be valuable to both developers and users."

burninginside writes "Yahoo is reporting that Trolltech, the world's biggest producer of Linux software for mobile devices, may be heading public. 'Sources close to the company' said the move may come as soon as 12 months but the official word is still that it 'is not in our immediate plans.'"

It doesn't come easy writes "A short blurb over at The Register reports that Munich has decided to extend the pilot phase of their Linux migration project. One smart move mentioned: Many of their office workers will switch to OpenOffice on Windows first where it is comfortable, easing the transition."

corso64 writes "Ohio Linux Fest 2005, a free conference/event for Linux and OSS enthusiasts, looks to be every bit as good, if not better than Ohio Linux Fest 2004. Last year, IBM, Novell, Apache, Beowulf, Mozilla, along with Jon "Maddog" Hall made Ohio Linux Festival 2004 a huge success along with tons of swag, freebies, and door prizes (including a Linus-autographed cdrom of the original source release of Linux). This year IBM, Novell, Apache, Digium, KDE and others will be doing sessions on Asterisk, KDE, Digital Forensics,Unified Threat Management, Ubuntu, Server Farms and lots of other topics. Check it out this October 1st!"

drunkennewfiemidget writes "The people at Linspire are giving Linspire 5.0 away for free (digital download only) until September 6th. Simply go to purchase the $49.95 digital edition, and then enter coupon code 'freespire' to receive a $49.95 discount." From the site: "'Freespire' was the term Andrew Betts gave to a private project he had been working on. The project comprised various open source components, taken from the freely available source repository for the Linspire operating system...Linspire has no problem with anyone using the open source code from our operating system - in fact we applaud such projects. The name Freespire, however, did create some confusion in the short time it was used...We thought it would be fun, for all of those who were looking at this project to experience a true 'Freespire', to give away a free digital copy of Linspire for a few days!"

UltimaGuy writes "Anadtech has an article up comparing the IBM G5 with Intel's CPU. This gives us insight on the strength and weakness of Mac OS X. It also has some thoughts of what they perceive to be OS X's Achilles Heel." From the article: "That is what we'll be doing in this article: we will shed more light on the whole Apple versus x86 PC, IBM G5 versus Intel CPU discussion by showing you what the G5 is capable of when running Linux. This gives us insight on the strength and weakness of Mac OS X, as we compare Linux and Mac OS X on the same machine. The article won't answer all the questions that the first one had unintentionally created. As we told you in the previous article, Apple pointed out that Oracle and Sybase should fare better than MySQL on the Xserve platform. We will postpone the more in-depth database testing (including Oracle) to a later point in time, when we can test the new Apple Intel platform." This is the sequel to another article, reported on in June.

PenguinCandidate writes "The OSDL's Stuart Cohen has been in the news lately following a clandestine meeting with Microsoft about a dubiously independent TCO study; a study that has since been rejected by the OSDL. The idea of an independent Windows/Linux TCO comparison may be dead, but did Cohen have an additional card up his sleeve? In this interview, Cohen states that while he "awaits the reply from MS's Martin Taylor on the results of his internal investigation" into how an off-the-record meeting became public, he will continue to promote his belief that MS will eventually have to accept Linux as customer demand increases."

Tontoman writes "Information Week reports that two research reports sponsored by IBM argue that Linux is less expensive to buy and operate than Windows or Unix. The first, a Robert Frances Group study, concluded: 'Linux is 40% less expensive than a comparable x86-based Windows server and 54% less than a comparable Sparc-based Solaris server. The Linux server's costs were $40,149, compared with $67,559 for Windows and $86,478 for Solaris.' The second, a Pund-IT report, titled 'Beyond TCO--The Unanticipated Second Stage Benefits Of Linux,' indicates that 'Linux is enormously popular among IT staff members, many of whom are at the beginning of their careers, as well as with IT educators in universities and technical institutions worldwide.' This has resulted in Linux playing a significant role in the recruitment and retention of IT staff and managers."

GP writes "One to stir the open source debate. The CIO of global consumer goods giant Unilever says in this interview with silicon.com that the company has ditched plans to migrate its enterprise IT platform to Linux running on Itanium. He reckons hidden support costs and security issues have emerged over the past two years with open source and that proprietary vendors have also raised their game in response to the 'threat'."

jonsmirl writes "I've written a lengthy article covering what I learned during the last two years building the Xegl display server. Topics include the current X server, framebuffer, Xgl, graphics drivers, multiuser support, using the GPU, and a new display server design. Hopefully it will help you fill in the pieces and build an overall picture of the graphics landscape."

An anonymous reader writes "More than 10 percent of the 90-odd organisations which received a letter asking them to relinquish any legal claim to the 'Linux' name have agreed to do so. Jeremy Malcolm, the lawyer who's leading the charge on behalf of Linux Mark Institute, described the response and favorable, saying: "Not all of the recipients were using Linux as part of their business of product/service names. He added that one of the purposes of sending the letter out in the first place was to discern which organisations might use the name for commercial gain."

chromis asks: "I am a 'Linux-from-scratch' like Linux user. I maintain my system for almost 4 years that way. I'm still using kernel 2.4, and I'm a little bit afraid for updating to 2.6 because of the problems like stability issues, driver subsystem problems, etc. I once tried 2.6.0 a long time ago, but I experienced random freezes which I could not diagnose. We all know about the development model issues, and I often read complaints about current kernel development practices. Now that kernel 2.6.13 is out, I really want to ask Slashdot: if you are a vanilla 2.6 kernel user, how are your experiences with these plain kernel.org 2.6 kernels? Is it really as bad as some people claim, or is 2.6 only usable when using a distro from a large vendor like Red Hat, SuSE, etc? I really would like to upgrade to the new vanilla 2.6 kernel eventually, but I'm a little hesitant. Any advice?"

UltimaGuy writes "Linux-watch has a humorous article about the top 5 reasons for not using Linux. It does provoke some thought aside from bringing a smile to our lips :)"

LynuxFre@k writes "Linux Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.13 Linux kernel. He noted that there was a major change to the x86 PCI code, and that while all bugs from the change were believed to be found during the release candidate phase, it's possible that some devices may have problems. From this release on, it is intended that major changes only be merged into the kernel within two weeks after a major release. The rest of the time will be spent fixing bugs, with the goal of both increasing overall stability and decreasing the amount of time between major releases. Download the latest Linux kernel from a kernel.org mirror."

Jac writes "An interview with ZDNet reveals the low opinion Stuart Cohen, chief of Open Source Development Labs(OSDL), has of a recent Microsoft proposal to conduct a joint study on on deploying Microsoft Vs Linux. From the article: 'As far as working with Microsoft on a study, Microsoft could probably find one negative line on Linux in a 100-page research report that it would spend $10 million marketing while ignoring the other 99 pages...' An interesting follow-up to a recent Slashdot article.