An anonymous reader asks: "LinuxDevices.com editor Henry Kingman has reviewed O'Reilly's new Pocket Linux Guide, a 191-page guide to Linux, asking whether a book that short can tell you what you need to know to get started working on a Linux system. Apparently this book cannot, to believe Kingman, who also dismisses O'Reilly's Linux in a Nutshell as 'dry.' Can anyone recommend a good book for smart but inexperienced Linux users, something that conveys a little of the magic of Linux without being too chatty, or too esoteric, or just too overwhelming?"

ImmO writes " The eXtreme Computing Research (XCR) group at Louisiana Tech University is pleased to announce the first public release of HA-OSCAR 1.0 beta. High Availability Open Source Cluster Application Resource (HA-OSCAR) is an open source project that aims toward non-stop services in the HPC environment through a combined power of High Availability and Performance Computing solutions. Our goal is to enhance a Beowulf cluster system for mission-critical applications and downtime-sensitive HPC infrastructures. To achieve high availability, component redundancy is adopted in HA-OSCAR cluster to eliminate single point of failures, especially at the head node. HA-OSCAR also incorporates a self-healing mechanism; failure detection & recovery, automatic failover and fail-back. The 1.0 beta release supports new high-availability capabilities for Linux Beowulf clusters based on OSCAR 3.0 It provides an installation wizard GUI and a web-based administration tool that allows a user to create and configure a multi-head Beowulf cluster. A default set of monitoring services are included to ensure that critical services, hardware components and important resources are always available at the control node. "

gruenz writes "Linux Planet writes in this article about a project inside Sun developing "an experimental 3D successor to Java Desktop that they believe will change the way we interact with computers." A demo is available from Sun. 'In the demonstration, Jonathan Schwartz, vice president of Sun's software group, increases the transparency of a window so that you can see through it, turns a window on its side so that it sits at the edge of a screen like a book on a book shelf, turns a window completely around and leaves a note on the back, and takes a database of CDs presented as physical CDs, that you flip through, reading the labels, just as you would with real CDs, until you locate the one you want.'" It's called Looking Glass, in case you've heard that name before.

leto writes "It seems some of the developers and volunteers of the (recently deceased) FreeS/WAN project have started a new company to develop and support the successor of the Linux IPsec code under the name of Openswan in a "Cygnus style" business model. They announced the new version at CeBIT which fully supports the new Linux 2.6 native IPsec stack. According to the Openswan website, it was started 'by a few of the developers who were growing frustrated with the politics surrounding the FreeS/WAN project.' There is a FAQ that explains how the various parts of IPsec on Linux work together. I guess that means US citizens can finally submit patches, and that distributions like RedHat/Fedora can now include it in their distribution. FreeS/WAN has always had the most features and most the most user-friendly configuration. It is good to see that will continue. And their mailing list finally seems to refuse spam too."

cbnet2004 writes "In what can be considered a win for Linux, Novell has announced NetWare will cease to exist as a standalone product by the end of the year. However, the CEO says: 'We are still committed to it and it is not going away. Our new Open Enterprise Server offering will have two components to it: SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and NetWare. NetWare is here for a long time to come.'" Read on for more bits from Novell's BrainShare conference, including a planned company-wide move to Linux.

An anonymous reader writes "You gotta love Marc Andreessen's 12 reasons why Open Source is set to boom: can anyone use fewer than 103 words and still adduce as many reasons as he does?"

SyniK writes "After buying a PS2 Network Adapter 2 days ago and trying some unofficial media players, turns out I'll be getting a second adapter because the PlayStation 2 Linux kit is now $99 - half of its former price. The kits, which include an internal 40 GB hard drive, a Network Adapter, a monitor cable, a USB keyboard and Linux on 2 DVD-ROMs, are now 'slightly limited edition' as they will not be replenished in the future."

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com has published the results of its annual Embedded Linux Market Survey probing developer preferences and industry trends. Over the last four years, the survey has become an important resource for industry analysts and decision makers. Among the revelations: the embedded Linux tools and OS provider market is wide open, with no single dominant vendor; developers care most about Cost/Freeness; ARM is overtaking x86 in embedded systems; developers prefer support fees to runtime license models; and, Linux dwarves all other embedded operating systems, projected for use in half of all embedded projects during the next two years."

MoFoQ writes "News.com reports that SCO is now targetting the Feds and their supercomputers (the Beowulf clusters, etc.). Looks like they bit off more than they can chew, even before winning a single case "

JayBonci writes "Not popcorn, popcon! (Short for popularity-contest) According to a recent message posted to debian-devel-announce, popcon numbers are being used to determine how things get arranged on the 13 CDs of the upcoming Debian stable release. Participation so far has been good, but the project could use more numbers from a broader user base. Please take a moment to install the package 'popularity-contest,' and help us make the distro better by allowing it to send us anonymous package usage statistics. You can see the results at Popularity Contest page."

Space_Soldier writes "According to News.com, YaST is going open source: 'For years, SUSE has considered its YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool) software for installing, configuring and managing Linux an advantage over its competitors and forbade them from incorporating it into the products they sold. But with the new plan, to be announced Monday at Novell's Brainshare conference, the company will release YAST under the GPL, sources familiar with the plan said.'" Several years ago, when I first used YaST, I found it to be superior to the rest of the all-in-one administation tools around at the time. It was generally regarded as a great program, save for the licensing. Today, that's no longer a concern.

ravydavygravy writes "Novell today released details of the next incarnation of its linux products, Suse 9.1, based on the 2.6 kernel. It will come in both 32 and 64-bit versions, and includes a LiveCD version, to help people convince their Windows-loving friends to make the switch. It'll ship with Gnome 2.4.2 and KDE 3.2.1, as well as demo versions of the text processing application Textmaker and the spreadsheet application Planmaker (from Softmaker - but do we really need another office suite?). Samba 3 will also feature in the default setup."

zensufi writes "CNET News has a story stating that Microsoft has announced plans for a program to help governments produce local language versions of key Microsoft applications, giving the software giant a hedge against a growing international threat from open-source software." The piece explains: 'The Local Language Program will provide local and regional governments with "language interface packs" that government and academic developers can use to produce localized versions of the Windows XP operating system and Office 2003 productivity package.'

neomage86 asks: "I recently had to set up a router for a small company, only five users at any given time, and the needed VPN capabilities are built in. So, instead of using a Cisco or other embedded router, I decided to just install Linux and IPTables on an old 200 MHz PII I had lying around. It's been working fine, and I'm thinking about doing something like this for a much larger network (3000+ users). Does anyone have suggestions on how much I will have to beef up the hardware to provide IP Masquerading for about 1000 users on a T3; provide network-layer filtering of the transmission; and route between 4-5 internal subnets?"

garananda asks: "In spite of being one of the very few sources for customized PC laptops pre-installed with various flavors of GNU/Linux, Qli Linux Computers is closed as of March 15th 2004 after serving the community for six years (thanks for all of your hard work). It is becoming easier to get Linux computers from some of the big vendors, but usually this means no hardware choices and no choice of preferred GNU/Linux distribution. Is any small company providing this service and succeeding (lots of hardware options for desktops, custom laptop options, multiple GNU/Linux distributions, and no mandatory 'Microsoft tax')? How do they do it? Given the low margins in the PC market and given the variance of component quality and component vendor reliability/prices, how would _you_ do it?" When one asks "How does one sell Linux", it's only fair to point out what you don't do. Beyond that, what are other recommendations do you have for putting Linux out there for consumers, in the hopes it will sell your hardware?

An anonymous reader writes "Roblimo looks at why so many Linux products fail in the marketplace, and decides it's not because Linux users want everything free, but because most products they're asked to buy are either poorly marketed or don't work well. He has some good advice for anyone trying to sell stuff to Linux users, except it really applies to *all* computer products, not just Linux." (NewsForge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.)

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine reports that the Mozilla Foundation is cracking down on those selling unofficial Mozilla-branded merchandise. This takes the form of an open letter addressed to retailers of goods that bear the Mozilla name or logos. The letter suggests that the Foundation are willing to work with those selling Mozilla wares, as long as they get a cut and the retailer isn't operating in the US, Canada or Mexico, where they would be competing with the Foundation's own Mozilla Store. Threats of legal action for non-compliance are issued, albeit with friendly overtones. This open letter is part of the Mozilla Foundation's campaign to better enforce its trademarks, an effort that began when the Foundation was launched in July. In a related move, the Foundation announced that the new Firefox artwork is not open-source and can only be used in official builds or those sanctioned by the Foundation - this has led to debates about whether Firefox is free enough to be included in the Debian Linux distribution."

Marcus Thiesen writes "Debian Installer Beta 3 was released two days ago and I wrote a small review concerning the installation part. The new debian installer is good way to set up your favorite distribution. Nontheless there are a few usability things and I thought that it might be a good idea to write a walkthrough from another point of view: Bob 'average' User."

jg21 writes "Following on from yesterday's Slashdot coverage of the idea to launch a games-based Linux distro, LinuxWorld Magazine has held a Gaming Round Table involving Chris DiBona, Ryan Gordon, Timothee Besset, Gavriel State, and Joe Valenzuela about where Linux currently stands and how it will one day become a premier gaming platform. 'It became perfectly clear to me that most of the technological issues are already solved, and that the others won't take too long to fix once the game publishers really get into the mix,' reports Dee-Ann LeBlanc, Gaming Industry Editor for LinuxWorld, who coordinated the round table. Well worth reading."

ThePretender writes "From the Infoworld article, 'Open Source Risk Management LLC (OSRM), a startup company that last month hired Pamela Jones, editor of the popular Groklaw.net Web site, as director of litigation risk research, plans to soon begin offering insurance policies to companies using open source software but fear that they may be sued, according to a company spokeswoman'. What's next - Developers having to pick up 'code malpractice' insurance? Egads." Might as well get some alien abduction insurance while you're at it.