joestar writes "Just announced: the latest major Mandrakelinux release - 10.1 Official - is ready for public download on a number of FTP mirrors and through Bitorrent. This new version is now also available on a convenient ISO-DVD image, and as an experimental mini-ISO-CD image (which needs a fast Internet access to complete the installation). This new version provides many new features and a better hardware support, including improved support of mobile and wireless technologies. Download is available here."

Secret Santa writes "Alex Salkever has written an inspiring and Linux-friendly piece about Martin Roesch -- how he went from writing open-source software to building a multimillion dollar company. Excerpt: 'Sourcefire is one of a growing number of small software players that have built new businesses around open-source code. Their business models contain various mixes of proprietary and open-source software components and span the software gamut, from other security companies such as Tripwire to database outfits such as MySQL and desktop-computing offerings like Xandros. Most are still small, with revenues well under $50 million.'"

Mirko Doelle writes "LinVDR is a very small Linux distribution turning your normal PC with a DVB video card into a rather cool personal video recorder (PVR). 'The Busybox based system requires less than 128 MB disk space and is shipped as compressed bootable CD image (31 MB) with an easy install program. Provided that you have a supported DVB card (Technotrend DVB Premium or Hauppauge Nexus) in your system, you'll get the software up and running running within 15 minutes or less. LinVDR uses the most recent development version of the Video Disk Recorder software VDR from Klaus Schmidinger. VDR is capable of recording more than one channel per time (as MPEG-2), timeshifting, cutting (with your remote control) and converting the MPEG-2 files into other formats. The 39 plugins delivered in LinVDR extend your PVR to be also a DVD player, DVD recorder, E-Mail reader, Voice mailbox and much more. Details on the software versions and plugins you can find at the project page. For download, visit the mirror list.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Ever mindful of minting phrases likely to spread virally through the Net, reports JDJ, Jonathan Schwartz's blogging gifts were used Friday to assert that "it's increasingly evident the OS wars are down to three - Microsoft Windows, Sun's Solaris, and Red Hat's Linux." The article comes up with a new angle on one of the most-talked about members of the tech-exec digerati, saying of Schwartz: "He's the Winston Churchill of technology - he mobilizes the English language at least once a week, and sends it into battle against Sun's rivals." But Churchill would never have tried to pull a fast one by disingenuously describing Linux as "Red Hat's Linux" - the community will upbraid him, for certain. Churchill Schmurchill, Schwartz is a technology mischief-maker not a technology statesmen."

dunric writes "ZDNet is reporting that sales of servers using Linux will reach a whopping $9.1 billion by 2008. Annual revenue for Linux servers is expected to grow by a healthy 22.8 percent, compared to just 3.8 percent for the overall server market. Additionally, Linux servers will account for nearly 26% of all server shipments."

thesun asks: "I'm a freelance writer and photographer and I'm wondering what Pro Photographers have done in regards to color matching and scanning under Linux, especially when going from slides to digital. I just can't get anything close to a good image when I scan a slide. They're blurry and the colors are so off that doing anything with my thousands of slides is proving to be prohibitively time-consuming. Are other Pros (or talented amateurs) having similar problems? Are there solutions out there I haven't found? (Sorry, I can't dump thousands into a piece of hardware---I'm looking for a way to make the most of my Epson Perfection 2400 with transparency adapter)."

An anonymous reader writes "The second in a three-part series on how to leverage Linux to get the most from your network, this tutorial shows how to set up a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server with Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) DHCP. Sample code and configuration files are provided throughout to aid understanding."

superfebs writes "Some day ago Samba4 reached a pretty serious test stage. Promises are beautiful: full SMB protocol implementation, Active Directory Domain Controller facility, and more; here's a full roadmap."

Abhishek writes "Technetra reports that the Linux Asia 2005 Conference would be held from February 9, 2005 to February 11, 2005 at New Delhi, India. The conference will be attended by Linux gurus from all over Asia (and the world) to speak about emergence of Linux as the official OS in some governmental centres and other topics including Open Source Softwares and how an average user can migrate to the FOSS world from Windows. More information about this (including the venue) can be found at Technetra."

brunotorres writes "I've made an slide-show, presenting the steps of Debian sarge (testing) installation. I put images of all relevant steps of the installation and a brief description of each one. It's nice to notice that debian-installer is much more straightforward and user friendly in sarge than it was in woody."

An anonymous reader writes "Gentoo Linux may soon begin showing up in consumer gadgets, thanks to a new project creating an embedded version of Gentoo Linux. The year-old project has achieved preliminary releases on x86, MIPS, PPC, and ARM. The releases include native core system binaries, along with toolchains for native or cross-platform compiling. Native compiling, eh... considering it's Gentoo, how long would X take to compile on an iPAQ? :-)"

bablooo writes "Red Hat announced today that its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Server would be available in 13 Indian Languages. In February 2005, the first 5 Indian language versions will be available - Bangla, Hindi, Punjabi, Gujrati and Tamil. By Feb 2006, it will be available in Marathi, Telegu, Kannada, Oriya, Malayalam and Urdu among others. You may want to look at a bit more details of what kind of work is going on in translating Linux to Bangla . This should enable more proliferation of Linux into local Govt. usage in India, which is a good thing"

robyannetta writes "Watch out VMware and Microsoft. Here comes Xen, an open-source virtualization for the Linux environment being pushed by Red Hat and Novell. Xen has also joined forces with leading Linux distributors, chip vendors and platform vendors to create a consortium that will more broadly enable open-source virtualization development and deployment." We've covered Xen before, but it's cool to see the momentum behind it growing, as more choice is a Good Thing.

An anonymous reader writes "MEPIS has partnered with Smartthink to produce SphinxOS 4.0, an OEM boxed version of SimplyMEPIS customized for the German speaking market. Many of the improvements contained in SphinxOS 4.0 will be included in ProMEPIS 2005, due in January, and SimplyMEPIS 2005, due in March."

An anonymous reader writes "Groklaw is reporting that Maureen O'Gara has applied to the judge to open all and any filings or transcipts that till now have been sealed by the Utah district court hearing the SCO Group's $5 billion suit against IBM. Groklaw's Pamela Jones notes that 'O'Gara believes the public can't understand the case, because of the sealing' and some of the Groklaw.net members seem to agree that, that since in the U.S. any citizen has a right to review court records in order to monitor the performance of a judge, that O'Gara's 'motion to intervene' will most likely succeed." An anonymous reader writes that Jones last night said of the request "that she is 'of two minds' about the filing: 'I'm crazy wild to read everything. But on the other hand, the court and the parties wouldn't seal things without a reason that seems good to them. I believe in privacy, personally, and I don't think the public has a "right" to know everything.' The legal filing to unseal everything has not yet become available via Pacer."

mandrake*rpgdx writes "Freya, a game programming environment for the Lua programming language, reaches 2.0 beta this week. Freya allows you to program cross platform games in the programming language Lua. It sports speeds 2x-10x faster than PyGame, and contains a built in map engine, pixel perfect collision detection, support for many graphics and sound formats including Ogg Vorbis and different MOD formats. Right now the beta release is looking for people to test the Linux version."

El Cubano writes "A recent posting to the debian-devel-announce mailing list announces that Sarge will release with GNOME 2.8. From the announcement: 'After requests and a detailed proposal from the GNOME team, we accepted an upload of GNOME 2.8 into sid, and, via the usual mechanisms, into sarge. We should mention that the release team was running out of objections to GNOME 2.8 in unstable that the GNOME team hasn't satisfactorily addressed; this, and the fact that they have demonstrated good reaction times of late are the main reasons why we're approving it despite the timing.'"

silent_knight writes "Early in October, the 2004 Interactive Fiction competition began. The results are now in! Be sure to check out some of this year's best entries: Luminous Horizon, Blue Chairs, All Things Devours, Magocracy, and Murder at the Aero Club. All entries (and interpreters) can be downloaded together for Windows and the Mac from the download page." As mentioned in the previous story, Linux support for these games is also easily available.

Christopher writes "SCO has actually sold its first Linux licenses in the UK. These licenses permit the use of SCO's intellectual property that is apparently present in Linux distributions, and in binary form only. To my understanding SCO hasn't won yet and these licenses don't grant you any freedoms you didn't already have, but SCO's vice president Chris Sontag says that 20 to 30 organisations worldwide have purchased these licenses."

Sunsetbeach writes "zdnet.co.uk reports in this article that 'The next version of Gentoo, 2005.0, will also include a graphical installer that will allow users to automatically install the same set-up of Gentoo on multiple machines, according to Gianelloni.' " The article distinguishes the upcoming live disk from the (available) Gentoo Live CD; the new one will contain a fully functioning system ala Knoppix. Update: 11/30 23:09 GMT by M : Gentoo now has a clarification posted; the next Gentoo release will not have a graphical installer, although it is planned for the future.