More than 90 Australian companies have been asked to pay a licence fee for Linux software in a move apparently backed by Linus Torvalds. Letters demanding US$5000 for use of the Linux name were originally dismissed as a hoax. But according to the Sydney Morning Herald, Linus Torvalds is dead serious.

Got some spare time and an itch to try out the latest Haiku snapshot? Karl writes in with an easy install method for anyone wanting to try Haiku, using a BeOS Max Live CD.

You can turn your blue Linksys router into a Linux box with OpenWrt, an embedded Linux distribution for Linksys WRT54G and WRT54GS routers. This tiny distribution exceeds the default firmware functionality in many useful ways. Instead of having only a Web-controlled wireless access point, OpenWrt provides you with a fully interactive Linux system.

Apple has announced a worldwide warranty extension for 1st generation iMac G5s. "The iMac G5 Repair Extension Program for Video and Power Issues applies to first generation iMac G5 computers that have video or power-related issues as a result of a specific component failure."

FreeBSD developer Scott Long said on Thursday that the next version of the open source BSD-based operating system, planned for release in September, includes support for "a lot more" wireless cards and for wireless security standards such as the Wi-Fi Protected Access.

Smart cards take the functions you've come to expect in magnetic swipe cards to a whole new level: they can contain a large amount of data and even executable programs. The Java Card spec brings the power of the Java language to smart cards. This article shows you how to use the Java Card to build Kerberos-based security to a mobile application with Java Card applets.

Apple's legal department this week sent "aggressive" emails to several web sites that support and advocate its products solely because they linked to videos showing a hacked version of the company's Mac OS X operating system running on off-the-shelf PC hardware. In addition, Apple released a fix for the 64-bit bug. This update is also available through Software Update.

SUSE Linux 10.0 Beta 2 has been released. Changes since beta 1 include: OpenOffice.org is part of the distribution again (the Sun Java dependency is optional now), XEN3 support got added, Gnome was updated to 2.12 beta 2, Hotplug changed heavily, and KDE received work on multimedia system and the media handling. Download mirrors are here, screenshots here.

"Colony CD 3, the third milestone release of the Breezy Badger development branch, is now available. Our last milestone release was over a month ago, and there has been a lot of interest in testing Breezy, so we are pleased to provide this snapshot to the community for testing. It is available for download here." Screenshot gallery is here.

"Some of the readers of my previous review of the Echo2 framework expressed concern that I didn't write a complex enough application to give it a fair shot. Fair enough, I just finished writing a new web application using the Echo2 framework, complete with input validation and database access using Hibernate for object-relational mapping." Read on.

Cloudscape and Derby are relational database managers implemented in Java. Tomcat is the reference servlet container implemented in Java. This article is a cookbook, providing step-by-step recipes for integrating them in three common scenarios: the prototype integration, the casual integration, and the enterprise integration.

Todd Blanchard has just released ObjectiveCLIPS (), a new open source project for Cocoa development on Mac OS X. ObjectiveCLIPS combine Cocoa and Core Data together with CLIPS (the original NASA's artificial intelligence engine) and F-Script, a high-level scripting language for Cocoa. Now, Cocoa developers can design rule-based applications around their Core Data object models. The inference engine can reason about rules and apply them when needed. ObjectiveCLIPS is easily embeddable in applications.

Security vendors have reported several new variants of the worm infecting PCs running Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system. Groups of virus writers are competing to cause the most damage, according to one security company, although the worm appears less severe than some first feared.

Novell Inc. will open a Linux research and development center in Beijing by the end of this year, focusing on Linux on the desktop, international and localization issues and high-performance computing. Novell's expanded Chinese presence will apparently serve both as a development and support arm for Novell's current business, as well as an attempt to create new business opportunities within China.