A lawyer acting for Linus Torvalds has contacted Linux vendors in Australia and asked them to sign a legal document relinquishing any legal claim to the word "Linux" and demanding they purchase a licence for its use from the Torvalds-created Linux Mark Institute, which administers the Linux trademark. The effort is part of an 18-month struggle to get 'Linux' registered as an Australian trademark.

So, how does the news of Apple and DRM change, or not change, your purchasing habits regarding x86 Macs? Let us know by participating in our following poll:

It has been a big day for Sun Microsystems today, who, after announcing their largest deal ever, now report that General Electric has selected Sun's Java System Identity Manager, "the provisioning component of the Sun Java Enterprise System, across all GE business units and 450,000 users on a global scale."

Head of all things Windows at Microsoft, Jim Allchin provides a heads up on the operating system formerly known as Longhorn: "Most of the stuff that we would expect that tech enthusiasts and consumers will be interested in will happen at Beta 2. Beta 1 is not what I would call deeply interesting unless you are a real bithead".

The release of the IBM PC proved revolutionary for the then tiny microcomputer industry, and for IBM itself. Read about the birth of the IBM PC 5150 at Braeburn.

The advent of JUnit has been a boon to developers. Unfortunately, many think it's enough to learn the JUnit API and write a few tests in order to have a well-tested application. This idea is worse than not testing at all because it leads to a false sense of code health. Learning JUnit is the easiest part of testing. Writing good tests is the hard part. This article presents some common JUnit antipatterns and shows how to resolve them.

Two BeOS tutorials have been released. The first one explains which settings to use with WonderBrush when working on icons. It is available in English, Dutch and German. The second one is a complete set of instructions on how to get the unique im_kit working. This one is available in English and Dutch.

Along with the release of the new Windows Vista beta, developers are being treated to technologies to create applications for the new operating system. Microsoft last week gave developers access to the WinFX Runtime Components Beta 1 and the WinFX SDK. FlexBeta has a video of Vista beta 1.

Want to assess security vulnerabilities on your Linux system without lengthy installation and configuration efforts? We introduce four packages -- Auditor, Whoppix, Knoppix-STD, and PHLAK -- that bring you that ability through the magic of LiveCD.

Sun and General Motors have announced that GM will be building its entire SOA system on JES, which will be the largest single Java deployment ever. This marks both a victory for Sun's new licensing policies, as well as makes Sun's recent acquisition of SeeBeyond pay off. The new agreement will deploy Java's full line of identity management services and development tools, running on Solaris 10.

There seems to be a new important security patch out for Linux every month, lots of "do not use this program" warnings, too many articles and books with too little useful information, high-priced consultants, and plenty of talk about compromised systems. It is almost enough to send someone back to Windows. Can the average Linux user or system administrator keep his or her system secure and still have time to do other things? Bob Toxen is happy to say yes and here is how to do it.

Don't be jealous of programmers using new languages, such as Python or C#! C++ gives you many ways to iterate through data you've stored in containers, supports for-each, and has helpful devices called lambda functions. Jeff Cogswell shows you how you can fly through your containers with ease.

This is a step-by-step instruction about how to set up a web-, mail- and ftp server with SuSE 9.3. It comes with 47 screenshots so that even Linux beginners can install such a server without any problems. Of course, it's of use to experienced system administrators as well.

After part I, there is now a part II of "Installing and Configuring PC-BSD". In part II, the author explains how to install more fonts and how to configure printing and scanning.