An anonymous reader writes "News.com has reported that the federal judge overseeing the SCO Group's suit against IBM has voiced loud skepticism about SCO's case. "Viewed against the backdrop of SCO's plethora of public statements concerning IBM's and others' infringement of SCO's purported copyrights to the Unix software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO's alleged copyrights through IBM's Linux activities," said U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball." Commentary available on Groklaw as well.

Carewolf writes "Finally the KDE 3.4 beta 2 has been released (codename "Keinstein"). Besides being the latest and greatest, it also marks the KDE 3.4 feature freeze and will provide a good demonstration of the splendors that will be KDE 3.4. Feature and release plans can be found here, and the news is also covered on the dot. Download now and help hunt the last bugs for the next major release of KDE."

r3lody (Raymond Lodato) writes "Writing Linux applications is not a simple endeavor. The Linux operating system provides a sophisticated framework for running programs, and learning how to take advantage of that framework requires some research. The book Linux Application Development, 2nd Ed., by Michael K. Johnson and Erik W. Troan provides much of what you need to know within its sturdy covers. Pitched to the intermediate to advanced programmer, all of the basic programming APIs are covered -- some in detail, some in brief." Read on for the rest of Lodato's review of this book.

jbltgz writes "Zen Linux 1.0 was just released today. Zen Linux is a bootable LiveCD distribution. More than that it is a 100% compatible Debian installer. It boasts easy remastering for creating your own personalized versions. Most configuration is done automatically upon boot and requires no user interaction, things 'just work.' Zen Linux currently comes in three flavors Core, Gnome, and KDE. Zen Linux is built on the latest Debian unstable repositories and is 100% Debian compatible. You can expect frequent up to date maintenence releases for all supported flavors."

CodeGeekGuy asks: "I've been thinking of doing the big switcheroo from Windows to Linux. I have, in the past, had various levels of success using Linux, but I generally have to give up as soon as I feel like playing a game. I've done dual booting before, but find it a pain if you're waiting for something to finish and just want a quick game of Half Life 2 or WoW. I'm willing to give this another shot (as I hear that Cedega plays HL2 and WoW quite nicely). I've used Mandrake and Fedora Core and even Redhat, is there another distribution out there that is the best distro to use to get Cedega (and ultimately games) to work well? "

Phoenix-IT writes "How many of you remember the classic strategy game Archon? Curve Software is remaking the original game for DirectX with support for network play. Distribution details are undetermined. There are long term plans to port to Macintosh and UNIX environments, but no details at the moment. The game is not open source because it contains some of the original 8-bit code, which was donated to the project, but a public beta might be on the way!"

Martin Taylor is Microsoft's global general manager of platform strategy, but he's best-known as the man the company trots out to refute claims of Linux superiority. Here are links to several interviews he's done in the past two years: vnunet.com; CMP; Computerworld; and one on Microsoft's own site. As usual, please submit one question per post. We'll present 10 - 12 of the highest-moderated questions to Mr. Taylor about 24 hours after this post appears, and we expect to publish his answers within the next week.

sebFlyte writes "The KDE Cygwin team are reportedly closing in on a native port for QT to allow said graphical framework to run over Windows. This has upset a few people, who think that porting open source apps to Windows is strengthening MS's near monopoly and damaging Linux." (Of course, KDE also runs on OSes besides Linux.)

The LinuxTimes Editor wrote in to alert us to a LinuxTimes article entitled Arch In-Depth, discussing the Arch Distribution. From the article: "First of all, let me go ahead and say I'm not approaching Arch with a completely clean slate. I've heard things about Arch Linux before. I've heard that it resembles Slackware in the way it was lean and meant for "advanced users". I've heard about its package manager called Pacman which is supposed to be all the rage. I've heard it's optimized for i686 by default which can arguably improve performance. I've heard it's Gentoo without "all that compiling". So when Arch 0.7 got out a few days ago I simply had to try it out."

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet Australia is reporting that Linux Australia has launched a new website devoted to aggregating the blogs of prominent Australian Linux and open source developers. One of the bloggers that the site is Rusty Russell, who currently works for IBM's Linux Technology Center in Canberra."

wikinerd writes "Slackware 10.1 was released and it contains the Linux kernel 2.4.29/2.6.10, X.org X11R6.8.1, KDE 3.3.2, Mozilla 1.7.5, Xfce 4.2.0 and several other updated software, as you can see in the official changelog. You can download it right now via BitTorrent."

sebFlyte writes "Fighting the MS FUD machine is a full time job for some open source developers, especially now Microsoft have thrown in the issue of the possibility of Linux forking (as Unix did)... it would also seem that Gates has moved on from telling people to 'get the facts' and creating FUD around patents and IP to criticising the open source communty's ability to create interoperable software."

robstah writes "The Debian project have announced the opening of nominations for this year's Debian Project Leader (DPL) elections. The first nomination, that of Matthew Garrett (of Dasher fame) has also been announced on Debian Planet."

An anonymous reader writes "IBM will demo their PPC based servers including their new OpenServer 710 at SCALE 3x this week. In addition they have their i5/520 running Power Linux, Intel Linux, AIX, i5/OS (OS/400), and Windows all simultaneously. SCALE will be held this weekend in Los Angeles at the LA Convention Center. Speakers include Kevin Foreman (Real Networks), Jon Hall (Linux International), Larry McVoy (CEO BitMover), Marc Hamilton (Sun) & 30 other sessions. In addtion to the talks there will be over 40 exhibitors including IBM & Novell. If you're in LA drop by on 2/12-2/13. There will also be a dinner and GPG Key Signing party. (For a free exhibit hall pass register with the promo code "FREE" or a discounted full access pass with "NEWSP".")

An anonymous reader writes "Looking for a suitable VoIP phone, I came across these Full-Screen Thin-Client Phones. Not only do they do voice, but they also have a 480x640 screen running at 65K colors and run a number of apps remotely via VNC. They seem to allow a lot more functionality than normal phones, and look really cool too. The site says they have 70 phones running in their office. This seems the way forward for telephony-computer convergence in the 21st century. A document at the end of the page explains their approach and has some cool pictures as well."

wikinerd writes "Linux kernel maintainer Alan Cox was among those celebrating the EU decision to rethink the introduction of software patents in Europe, while Debian developer Wookey says that 'This is a very encouraging sign.' However, Alan Cox adds that 'the battle isn't over.' The EU software patent directive was criticised as anti-opensource and anti-smallbusiness, while the US patent office has granted various controversial patents like the one-click shopping."

comforteagle writes "W. McDonald Buck, retired CTO of World Bank, believes we need to take a more honest and frank look at the Cost Analyses it will take to put Linux on the corporate desktop. In Part I of Corporate Desktop Linux - The Hard Truth he begins with one of the most common misconceptions... that a business can buy a computer without Windows and save money in the transaction."

startleman writes "A story on Tom's Hardware reports that Walmart apparently will offer a Linare-equipped notebook below the $500 mark. Manufacturer Linare said that it will bring a Linux-based device to the retailer 'within the next few days.' Specs include an AMD Athlon 1800+, a 40 GByte harddrive, 128 MByte memory, a CD-ROM drive, an Ethernet port and the firm's Linare OS as well as Open Office."

Srikant_Chaudhry writes "CTZ has an interesting article that talks about hardware and software problems, along with others, that is limiting Linux gaming as a whole. Here's a quote from their concluding paragraph: "As of this moment, gaming on Linux is still a little like the Wild West. It's somewhat chaotic, random and empty, but it can be very exciting too. As time progresses and the market matures, we will see a plethora of games on Linux. Right now, many distributions are concentrating on other materials, like making their distributions easy to use, and making sure they work well with all the different hardware. Once the Linux desktop has stabilized to a certain extent, you can expect to see developers turn their energies to better gaming support under Linux. That's when the Linux gaming market will really take off."

codermarc writes ""If you're getting into open source because you see it as a career path, you're doing something wrong." It's not that Linux creator Linus Torvalds thinks open-source programmers should work for peanuts (he doesn't), but rather that they should be properly motivated. Call it software with a soul, if you like. Only the truly passionate need apply."