robyannetta writes "Eweek has an interesting article quoting IDC analyst Al Gillen saying "Linux is no longer a fringe player. Linux is now mainstream." He made that observation because IDC's research predicts that Linux's overall revenue for desktops, servers and packaged software running on Linux will exceed $35 billion by 2008."

andhar writes "Linus Torvalds has made Business Week Magazine's 2004 list of Best Managers, where he finds himself in the company of luminaries such as Hector Ruiz (AMD), John Henry (Boston Red Sox) and Steven Spielberg (Dreamworks SKG). The article lauds the influence of Linux on the server market and drops the names of such heavyweights as IBM, Dell, HP and Intel as Linux supporters. Linus is quoted, calling all you kernel coders a herd of cats."

An anonymous reader writes "According to LinuxDevices.com, Taiwanese motherboard maker FIC will unveil a Linux-based portable media player (PMP) at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. FIC's 'Vassili' includes a 3.6-inch color LCD screen and a 20GB hard drive, and supports files in MPEG 1-4, MP3, WMA, WAV, ASF, AVI, and JPEG format. Speaking of Linux-based PMPs, Archos will also showcase its lastest PMP, the Pocket Media Assistant PMA400 at CES, and other Linux-based PMPs have recently been announced by iRiver, Veritouch, and Zupera."

kwpulliam writes "Tom's Hardware has an interesting writeup, discussing the difficulties in bringing games to Linux, and the dilemmas faced by the graphics card developers."

tyman writes "Michael Rolig has created a Debian-based linux package for your Tablet PC. The support for various tablet features is limited by the features on the tablet Rolig owns, such as the "half-working" pen button features. One important missing feature is the screen-swivel buttons common with most tablets. However this is a good start for the development of linux for Tablet PCs."

SeaFox writes "The Debian group has released an update to the 'Woody' distribution of the popular Linux/GNU OS. From the site: 'This is the fourth update of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (codename woody) which mainly adds security updates to the stable release, along with a few corrections to serious problems. Those who frequently update from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.' But the question on everyone's mind is probably when the current Testing branch, featuring much more up-to-date packages, will be named the new stable release."

chronicon writes "Knowing Knoppix is a beginner-friendly, 134 page freely downloadable book (released under the GNU Free Documentation License in PDF format) designed to familiarize new users with the Knoppix LiveCD distribution, GNU/Linux in general, and (as listed first on the description) Windows disaster recovery using Knoppix."

Pier Luigi Fiorini writes "The Mockup project is a desktop operating system based on GNU/Linux. It has recently released new source code and published both screenshots and mockups. Read the announcement to know where are the source code tarballs and how to compile them. Mockup uses a new lightweight and modern graphical user interface that supports both pixel and vector based graphics. The GUI is based on bleeding edge technologies like Qt 4.0 beta, Elektra, HAL and DBUS. Elektra is a new backend for text configuration files. Instead of each program to have its own text configuration files, with a variety of formats, Elektra tries to provide a universal, hierarchical, fast and consistent namespace and infrastructure to access configuration parameters through a key-value pair mechanism. This way any software can read/save its configuration/state using a consistent API."

Halcyon-X writes "Microsoft is hosting a discussion on Windows and Linux between its two top Linux consultants. Martin Taylor and Bill Hilf talk about the various OSS licenses, focus on the open source development model, competing implementations of administration tools, TCO, and risk assessment. Also available in offline formats, doc (which looks fine in OpenOffice.org) and wma as well."

linuxbeta writes "An update to Vidalinux Desktop OS has been released. This release sports many new updates including the 2.6.9 kernel, improvements in many different areas including reiser4 support, wireless drivers, scalability, performance, and support for NPTL. Also included is the Fedora Core 3 Anaconda installer, Udev and hald for hardware autodetection, GNOME 2.8, KDE-3.3.1, and the OSX styled kicker Gdesklets 0.3.1." An interesting combination of Gentoo Linux with Red Hat's Anaconda installer; OSDir.com has a screenshot tour.

avibrazil writes "A new Linux Font HOWTO was published with way more practical info for modern systems. The still-useful parts of the two former Font HOWTOs from TLDP were unified in this new one, to be a definitive one-stop-shop for Linux font solutions."

Bruce Perens writes "The Gyration Media Center Remote is a radio keyboard and mouse with 100-foot range. The mouse uses an accelerometer rather than a mouse wheel, and thus has the unique feature that you can make mouse gestures in the air. The mouse should be perfect for a public speaker who wants to move around during a speech, without giving up control of his laptop. It would also make a nifty remote for a Linux PVR user, since it has VCR controls and channel and volume buttons. But does it work with Linux?" Bruce Perens tried it out and says the answer is a qualified Yes.

Demolition writes "The latest release of the iPod-Linux Installer has been reviewed on Accelerate Your Mac!, a popular Mac performance/modification site. As mentioned in previous Slashdot articles, the iPodLinux Project is an open source venture devoted to porting Linux to Apple's iPod. In a nutshell, the reviewer finds that the iPodLinux Project has progressed a long way from its early proof-of-concept days."

Di0medies asks: "I work for a some-what small non-profit organization that uses a windows-based network. We currently have 6 servers supporting about 25 local domain users and about 25 remote users and we're planning on migrating from Server 2000 to Server 2003 in a month or so. Being a non-profit, we're always a little tight on cash and considering Microsoft charges ungodly amounts of money for server software, migrating portions of the network to Linux leaves more cash available for other IT goodies (like a new high-capacity file server!) and also adds more stability and security to the network. All of this depends on how well a Linux server will work on a Windows network. Does anyone have any suggestions regarding Linux integration? Can Windows and Linux be made to play well together? Is there anything out there to add limited Active Directory support to Linux?"

IgorMrBean writes "Just before xmas, Novell has released their public beta of Open Enterprise Server. Novell had promise this a couple months ago, and the product seems to work well for beta... Kernel choice for OES : Linux 2.6 kernel - From SuSE Enterprise Server 9, and Netware 6.5 kernel. Also, many improvements for Netware 6.5SP3, including BASH support, PHP5 and more. Download details here (pdf)."

Quiberon writes "A distribution of Knoppix loaded with games has a bootable CD with 700 MB of open-source games, 3d support for NVIDIA, ATI, and Intel Extreme, gamepad support for XWindows. uni-kl is University of Kaiserlautern, the first on the list for distributing SuSE fixes - they are good. Every kid should have one for Christmas morning."

An anonymous reader writes "Offering it as 'something to play with over the holidays,' Linus Torvalds released the official 2.6.10 Linux kernel, which he named the 'Woozy Numbat.' KernelTrap offers the full details, noting that there have been minimal changes since the last release candidate, 2.6.10-rc3. Linus commented that with 2.6.10 released, now he could 'get into the Glögg for real' (a hot mulled wine with spices, red wine, port and brandy). As always, the latest Linux kernel can be downloaded from a kernel.org mirror." (Here are some recipes, too.)

prostoalex writes "LinuxDevCenter interviews RMS. Interesting that Stallman supports the free software projects ported to proprietary operating systems: 'Porting free applications to nonfree operating systems is often useful. This allows users of those operating systems to try out using a few free programs and see that they can be good to use, that free software won't bite them. This can help people overcome worries about trying a free operating system such as GNU/Linux. Many users really do follow this path.'"

Allnighterking writes "The Honeypot project Honeynet.org has released their study on the expected lifetime of an unpatched default Linux install. If some of you remember AvanteGarde recently did a study of its own with several versions of Windows products and found that the average lifetime was about four minutes. Internet Week has an article on the study and the PDF with the full details of the study is available on Honeynet.org. Needless to say, from my viewpoint this is a good reason to limit Windows installations in IT that any PHB and/or Smiling Man can understand. Have them put into a spreadsheet and see what this kind of security means to their bottom line."

eobanb writes "I finally wrote a somewhat in-depth review of Terra Soft's Yellow Dog Linux 4.0. It's basically a PowerPC port of Fedora Core 2. The good? Pretty modern software, and setup is a snap. The bad? RPM sucks as always, and there are a few too many things that are broken out of the box. Linux PPC; it's a niche-within-a-niche, as I heard one Slashdot comment call it, but it may well be worthwhile if you're annoyed by x86 hardware."