In the News Archive

A group of underground programmers has posted code online they say will reopen a back door in Apple Computer's iTunes store, allowing Linux computer users to purchase music free of copy protection. The release comes just a day after Apple blocked a previous version of the program, called PyMusique.

The AP and BBC have short roundups of cool finds from CeBit: AP BBC. A silly diamond-studded mp3 player (who wants diamonds encrusted on their junk drawer obsolete tech?), GPS for motorcycles, a "palm vein" ID checker, a Bluetooth robotic camera, ultra-compact memory from IBM, an almost exact iPod Shuffle knock-off, a pen-sized text scanner, an eye-directed camera, and a cell phone with a HD inside.

It's called NeroLinux, and it's the Linux equivelant of the Nero suite. Screenshots to gaze upon. Unfortunately, it seems that it's using GTK+ 1.2.x instead of 2.x.

Carly Fiorina's undoing was her inability to capitalise on the 2002 HP-Compaq merger, seen as her bet-the-company move. HP is on shaky ground at the moment because its product portfolio has become too large and diversified to manage, and lacks organisation-wide synergy. The printing and imaging business account for a disproportionate share of the profits, while its enterprise divisions lag. The options that stand before HP's board range from organisational restructuring, to a complete split of the company. Which of the many strategies is eventually adopted depends on the identity that HP decides to create for itself.

FOSDEM 2005 will take place this Week-End in Brussels, Belgium.

Win4Lin delivers Windows 2000 and Windows XP on Linux; Win4Lin Pro becomes flagship product for running windows applications on Linux.

Aqua Data Studio 4.0, the popular multi-platform DB front-end, is released and it's adding many new features. Aqua Data Studio is free for personal usage. In other interesting multi-platform commercial releases, Lost Marble recently released Moho 5.0.7 (screenshot, running under my Novell Linux).

The Free Standards Group has decided to move away from a single, core LSB (Linux Standards Base) specification, and is instead going to break this down into different modules that can be combined to give a server or desktop LSB standard. Elsewhere, Bill Gates has sent an email to all Microsoft's corporate customers warning that those in search of technological interoperability shouldn't look towards open source software.

"I'm tired of the constant fear mongering around intellectual property and open source software and "enterprises being sued" and thought it time to offer a different opinion" says Stephen R. Walli, an ex-Microsoft employee who worked on open sourcing projects at Microsoft (FlexWiki and Wix).

This interesting interview with two top executives of Jaluna -- a company that has developed a sort of "VMware for embedded systems" that enables Linux to run alongside a real-time-control OS on gadgets like smartphones and set-top boxes -- delves into the French venture-funded startup's history, technology, market perspective, and vision of how Linux will dominate the embedded devices space.

A reader reports: I was trying to raise some money to start a Linux technical support website by selling Debian GNU/Linux and Fedora Core CD's on eBay and suddently after a month all my items were pulled and my account suspended. I received this message from ebay as reason: "As a matter of eBay policy, recordings on CD-R (including CD-RW and DVD-R) may not be listed on eBay, unless the seller is the copyright owner and states this in the item description. This policy also means that even lawful reproductions on CD-R are not permitted on eBay." This link was also provided.

Japan's biggest mobile phone carrier, expects to complete on Wednesday a $3 million investment in Linux software development company MontaVista Software, a DoCoMo spokeswoman said.

The folks over at Codeweavers have released Crossover Office 4.1. Having tried this one myself, I can tell you it seems a pretty major improvement, running several of my Windows apps formerly unusable under Linux.

The Free Software Foundation Europe has responded to Microsoft's failed appeal previously discussed here.