Munich is struggling with its planned migration from proprietary software to open-source applications, according to news stories in the German press that paint an increasingly gloomy picture of what had originally been widely described as a shining success story for Linux.

This article is the second in a series of whitepapers on using the new Linux 2.6 kernel by William von Hagen of TimeSys. von Hagen's whitepapers place special emphasis on the primary issues in migrating existing drivers, applications, and embedded Linux deployments to a Linux distribution based on the 2.6 kernel.

As part of its initiative to put Linux on the desktop, IBM Corp. wants to migrate Microsoft Corp.'s Office suite to Linux. Microsoft said it's not involved and suggests that IBM might do it by emulation.

The Mono Project has released a small bug-fix release of Mono, 0.30.1. They have also a new document that describes some common tricks to improve the performance of your Mono or .NET application. These are a summary of techniques that we employed to tune our own C# compiler.

VMware's CEO, Diane Greene, gives an interesting interview to IT-Director regarding the recently acquired company.

Novell Inc. and adopted prodigy SUSE Linux struck a one-two punch at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo here in late January with declarations by top executives that Novell will be a major player in the Linux world and is committed to responsibly shepherding the operating system and Novell’s other open-source projects.

Data binding in its traditional sense means associating some underlying data with one or more user interface elements. The data provides the information to display. The user interface elements render the information in the appropriate format.

When some people hear the words "home automation," they think about the Jetsons or multi-million-dollar concept homes of the future. Others think home automation is just a geek fantasy that wouldn't add any real value to their lives. Read the article at MacDevCenter.

Microsoft's Research organization is preparing to publicly release in a few weeks the client application for its Aura research project, a researcher told attendees of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Research Sociologist Marc Smith, demonstrating Aura during his keynote presentation, explained that the project uses mobile devices to interact with physical objects to retrieve information about them from the Internet as well as to automatically capture and annotate data from them.

Market researcher IDC expects to announce within weeks that Linux' PC market share in 2003 hit 3.2%, overtaking Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh software (as reported a few weeks ago it has fallen at 1.8%, for the first time). And the researcher expects Linux to capture 6% of this market by 2007. That's still tiny compared with Microsoft's 94% share. Desktop Linux hasn't had any appreciable effect on Microsoft's finances yet, but it could do damage if Linux manages to grab a 10% share of the market, say analysts. IDC estimates that desktop Windows' share will shrink slightly, to 92% in 2007 as Linux' share doubles. The first big question though is how all this will have an effect to Apple's business.

ReactOS 0.2 was released recently and this time it sports a new GUI. This short review with screenshots, shows some of the new improvements in this release. A huge improvement is that this release of ReactOS has some Win32 compatibility being able to run Solitaire and Winamp.

The second release candidate of the 5.2.1 is now available (mirrors). It includes fixes to mksnap_ffs, SysV Shared Memory, devfs, IPSec, GEOM, the ata driver and many others. This is probably users' last chance for bugfinding as the final release is expected to be less than a week away.

The research firm warns that the ASN.1 vulnerability made public this week could prove worse than the vulnerability that made MS Blaster possible.

Sun may have been the last major server maker to embrace Linux, but Chief Executive Scott McNealy argues that the company will benefit more than its competitors from the open-source software. Update: A day after Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy said open-source software is his company's friend, a prominent advocate of the collaborative programming philosophy, Eric S. Raymond, has called upon the server maker to open the code of Java.