Kai Staats of Terra Soft writes "We are pleased to now offer support for bootable iPods and FireWire drives, enabling a highly portable Linux on PowerPC environment." Note that this is about booting a Macintosh into Linux, not running Linux on the iPod.

rafael_es_son writes "The regional Health Service of Extremadura, Spain (Servicio Extremeño de Salud) prepares for what IBM describes as the country's biggest GNU/Linux rollout to date. IBM is to receive $33.8 million USD over a four year period for the development of systems which should enable some 14,000 doctors and other medical professionals access to patient health care data on a region currently described as underserved in comparison with the rest of the country." (Read more below.)

renai42 writes "Linux creator Linus Torvalds said this afternoon that he's now running an Apple Macintosh as his main desktop, mainly for work reasons, although partly simply because he's a self-described "technology whore" and got the machine for free." And yes, he is running Linux on it ;)

planetjay writes "Plextor PVRs now support Linux with an open source SDK for their ConvertX PVR external USB TV tuner/encoder This is great news for Linux PVR users who want to use an external device with hardware based MPEG-2 and MPEG-4/DivX encoding in their MythTV or Freevo homebuilt PVR. "Plextor is strongly committed to supporting the Open Source Software movement with free development tools that help speed the creation of next-generation Linux-based video software," said Dirk Peters, director of marketing, Plextor."

qewl writes "Now there's a live CD that can actually save data back onto its own disk! How does it work? The PC boots with a multi-session CD inserted in the CD-burner drive -- thus, Puppy Linux automatically knows which drive is the CD-burner, in case you have more than one CD/DVD drive. Then you use Puppy in the normal way. At shutdown, all the changed files in your home directory are saved back to CD. That's it. Next time you boot, all the personal files are restored!"

Pinawella writes "It's reported on VNUnet that 'Enemies of Linux' are trying to undermine the OS with a campaign of disinformation. It's based on an interview with an exec from the Open Source Development Labs, but who are these enemies?"

Sujit writes "Are you an Internet security expert at heart or by profession? Ever thought of trying your skill at a professionally set up server? If you are ready, enter. The Linux Server Break-in challenge. You will have a server available on the Internet 96 hours without interruption starting from 9 March 2005 2 AM IST. However, the server's life on the Net is in your hands."

(Score.5, Interestin writes "Security guru Marcus Ranum has some interesting thoughts about how a continuing lack of consistency among Unix systems (and particularly Linux) is hurting Linux (and remaining commercial Unix vendors like Sun) and helping Microsoft. Admittedly this has been said before, but no-one else quite manages to phrase things the way Marcus can."

David Parmet writes "Using data from indeed.com (an aggregator for job sites), Brandon of devnulled did an evaluation of the state of the job market in the US for developers. Some interesting findings - there are more Linux jobs than Solaris jobs. Unix is still competitive with Windows (only 24,000 fewer job listings for Unix than for Windows), Java is beating .Net and overall there seem to be a lot of enterprise / corporate IT jobs available. Indeed has a web services API / XML interface available here, so if you want you can do the analysis yourself."

Reader stormcoder wrote to mention an article on Enterprise Linux I.T. in which the author posits that even though Linux is built on a legend, the reality of Linux outstrips even the myth. From the article: "..the fact that Linux has traditionally been compared to Microsoft's Windows brand products and not the other Unix variants will most likely lead the general public to perceive all this as Linux sailing on to new horizons while Microsoft stalls out. This perceptual shift should totally reverse the previous mainstream view that Microsoft and Intel were somehow at the forefront of high technology computing -- thereby pushing Linux over the magic edge of a social tipping point."

Kez writes "HEXUS.net has an article looking at the current state of Linux gaming and the broad number of supported games both natively and through emulation. Included in the article is a chat with the Product Manager of TransGaming - the creators of Cedega (formerly known as WineX.)" From the article: "Well, Linux certainly isn't most peoples' thought for a games-based PC. Especially one being taken to a big tournament LAN party. However, by design or trickery, none of the tournament games at the event were out-of-bounds to my Linux machine, and rousing games of Call of Duty, Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004 were shared by the HEXUS.net collective and any other gamers who felt like joining in." We ran a story about a similar article back in February.

njcoder writes "CNet reports that Michael Tiemann, vice president of open-source affairs at Linux seller Red Hat and an OSI board member, has taken over from Russell Nelson as president pro tem. 'We thought that Michael would be a better president' Nelson said of the change, declining to share further details. Nelson will remain a board member and active in the group, he said."

Netromancer wrote in to alert us to a Businessweek Online article discussing the downward spiral in SCO's fortunes and luck. From the article: "The mouse that roared is barely squeaking these days. A string of recent setbacks raises grave questions about SCO's finances, its court case, and its management."

kernel_dan writes "Following on the heels of a prior discussion about a kernel numbering scheme, KernelTrap has the conclusion. From summary: "Linus Torvalds decided against trying to add meaning to the odd/even least significant number. Instead, the new plan is to go from the current 2.6.x numbering to a finer-grained 2.6.x.y. Linus will continue to maintain only the 2.6.x releases, and the -rc releases in between. Others will add trivial patches to create the 2.6.x.y releases. Linus cautions that the task of maintaining a 2.6.x.y tree is not going to be enjoyable.'" Torvalds suggested specific guidelines to alleviate burn-out of the .y maintainer and Greg KH volunteered to begin maintainership."

[vmlinuz] writes "With a rapid succession of people moving towards Open Source, advocacy and evangelism is increasingly important in helping organizations to move over. The O'Reilly Network has begun publishing a series of articles about Open Source by Jono Bacon that teaches how to approach advocacy sensibly and more productively." From the article: "Although Aristotle developed his message many, many years ago, the concept of optimizing how we talk to people has developed further throughout history. From Aristotle to Heraclitus to Friedrich Nietzsche to Helen Keller to George Bernard Shaw, many people have advocated new thinking in times of rabid opposition."

An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has a summary of a lengthy discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list, in which Linus Torvalds has suggested using an alternative numbering scheme for kernel development. The current 2.6 kernel has been different than older development trees, as active development has been happening at a rapid rate in the officially "stable" kernel, instead of forking the expected 2.7 "development branch" for this effort. In Linus' latest proposal, he suggests using the same odd and even arrangement where an odd number signifies a development release, and an even number signifies a stable release. The difference being that this will all happen under 2.6 and thus at a much more rapid rate. For example, the upcoming 2.6.12 release would focus on fixing bugs and thus be more stable, while the following 2.6.13 release would include new functionality and thus could be less stable."

DigitumDei writes "Systems management vendor Computer Associates International has confirmed that it intends to pledge a number of its patents to the open source community. This is a move by CA to make it clear that they do not intend to use their patents against Linux. They have, however, ruled out any further large scale donation of CA software code to the open source community as they just released the Ingres database management system under an open source license last year."

darthcamaro writes "Thanks to Sun Wah Linux and VA Linux Systems Japan, Debian is about to get some major exposure in Asia according to a report. Debian developer Matthew Garrett told internetnews.com that Debian has always been one of the most international Linux distributions. "It's wonderful to see initiatives that will increase our representation in countries with a growing interest in Linux," he added. "It's especially heartening to see this move coming from commercial enterprises, as it demonstrates that free software can work with business."" There's also a post on Newsforge as well.

remember_beos writes "Sun created Project Looking Glass (LG3D) as a 'proof of concept' not long ago. It is an environment for Linux, like KDE or Gnome, but with some really great 3D functionality. More than just eye-candy, LG3D provides functional use of an extra spatial dimension on your desktop. Now there is a LiveCD for us all to try it out."

fluor2 writes "The CentOS team is pleased to announce availability of CentOS 4.0. Major new features include the Linux 2.6 Kernel, SELinux, udev replacing the /dev system, Xorg, MySQL4, CyrusIMAPD, Gnome 2.8 and KDE 3.3. These improvements along with many more are detailed in the release notes available online. We read recently about Red Hat & Centos On Name Usage, and the solution is now to link to a Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor (PNAELV).
Go ahead and download CentOs from one of their mirrors."