Anonymous Coward writes "The Inquirer is reporting that a claim by Gartner that Linux desktops are used for pirated copies of windows has been dismissed by the Open Source Industry Association (OSIA). OSIA told The Sydney Morning Herald that 'if Gartner's conclusion that pre-installing Linux encouraged people to steal copies of Windows were correct.... It would be possible to state that pre-installing Windows encourages people to pirate application software.'"

An anonymous reader asks: "Data Forensics has been discussed in the past. I am entering the field soon and aside from rifling through Slashdot and Google and reading some technical data on the software that I am going to be using I haven't had much time to learn everything about the position (I will be officially trained when I move over to the role). I am wondering, though, if Linux has played a strong role in the courtroom when it comes to validating evidence that has been used in a lawsuit case. Those in the field who are reading this, have you used open-source software to prove facts to the court? I don't mean using dd to make an image of a disk but rather a suite of tools whose purpose is to analyze data, indicate relationships, create hash tables, et cetera. That being said, if that software is not available (the programmer side of me asks), is there enough interest in the community to create a package that rivals and is as accountable and recognizable as commercial products?"

rgovostes asks: "I've been looking around for a (hopefully low-cost) Linux-based handheld device with WiFi capabilities for some network testing and security evaluation. I need to be able to ping, list nearby WiFi signals, and run Ettercap. I'd also like it to be Mac OS X compatible without much work. I found handhelds.org (Coralized), which has some information, but I'm not very handheld-savvy, so it isn't too helpful to me. Am I asking for something unrealistic or is something like this possible? Any advice on the matter would be appreciated."

Eloquence writes "Much of the debate about GNU/Linux and open source is dominated by rhetoric rather than facts. David Wheeler has just released a new version of his "paper" (which, at 440,000 characters, is more of an e-book now) 'Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!'. According to David, this paper 'examines market share, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership. It also has sections on non-quantitative issues, unnecessary fears, OSS/FS on the desktop, usage reports, other sites providing related information, and ends with some conclusions.' May come in handy when talking to your boss about Linux."

KrisWithAK writes "According to a press release, Red Hat is acquiring parts of the Netscape Enterprise Suite including the directory server and certificate management system. I am definitely looking forward to more open source competition with OpenLDAP!"

LostCluster writes "CNET is reporting results from a Gartner Group report that claims 40% of desktop machines sold with Linux on them are being used to run pirate copies of Windows! The report goes on to say that this stat reaches as high in 80% in 'emerging markets', the same places that the stripped down lite version of Windows is being aimed at. Gartner's making a bold prediction that the number of machines sold as Linux desktops may eclipse the number of machines actually running Linux."

riggwelter writes "FootNotes reports the availability of GNOME 2.8.0 packages for SUSE Linux. For the first time, a new GNOME desktop release is available for SUSE within a couple of weeks of the source release."

Jaime writes "The CRUX PPC port reached version 2.0 yesterday. The announcement has been done during the SND Forum in Frankfurt, Germany. This is a new nice piece of software that has a PPC port."

Florian Becker writes "A new Wiki with hardware information for newbies and developer has opened. The site can be found at linux-driver.org." The site is designed to collect driver information about as many pieces of Linux-friendly hardware as possible, "like specifications, developer specifications, installation and the actual state for Linux driver and support. The new page reached the 500 contents in just one week." Update: 09/29 16:08 GMT by T : Jeremy of linuxquestions.org writes "Just wanted to point out that LinuxQuestions.org has a user-created Linux Hardware Compatibility List that already has over 1,500 items." Thanks!

kbahey writes "The Information and Communication Technology for Development in the Arab World (Arab Dev) has teamed up with Egypt's LUG to provide training for school children in upper Egypt with training on FOSS and GNU/Linux. As you may recall, a while back Slashdot interviewed Egypt's LUG. Here are the questions and here are the answers."

MonkeyDev writes "Yahoo is reporting that Munich is ready to move forward with plans to 'abandon Microsoft Windows in favor of upstart rival Linux. The council is expected to take a calculated risk and vote through the move, despite concerns about possible software patent infringements in the face of coming European Union legislation that caused months of delay.' Not everyone is excited about it. A software developer at MySQL claims 'Linux violates 283 U.S. software patents.' How does the Linux community respond to these claims?" (Florian Mueller, the MySQL developer mentioned, isn't opposed to Munich using Linux, though -- just the opposite.) Update: 09/29 02:22 GMT by T : Marten Mickos of MySQL AB writes with a correction: "Florian Müller is an independent software developer and entrepreneur. He is ALSO an advisor to MySQL AB but he does not work for the company. He is presently engaged in coordinating opposition against software patents in EU, and thereby doing all of us within free software and open source a great favour."

Paul Lamere writes " This story on ZD-Net and this recent story on Slashdot describes the recent open sourcing of IBM's voice recognition software. This release, unfortunately, doesn't include any source for the actual speech recognition engine. Olaf Schmidt, a developer on the KDE Accessibility Project , is quoted as saying 'There is no speech-recognition system available for Linux, which is a big gap.' In an attempt to close this gap, we have just released Sphinx-4, a state-of-the-art, speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system written entirely in the Java programming language. It was created by researchers and engineers from Sun, CMU, MERL, HP, MIT and UCSC. Despite (or because of) being written in the Java programming language, Sphinx-4 performs as well as similar systems written in C. Here are the release notes and some performance data."

toarney writes "This is a few days old, but I just noticed that OpenZaurus 3.5.1 was released on 9/19/04. It is the first release based on the OpenEmbedded build system. You can get it in Opie or GPE Palmtop Environment flavors. Now if I could just get that 'magic bullet' program to compile on my Zaurus."

Avidwriter writes "Lycoris has developed into a decent desktop Linux distro but hasn't really had anything to offer on the server end. Now it's taking over the old e-smith server project, one of those that always got plenty of love but never seemed to really find a home as it bounced from one corporate sponsor to another. Will this work out? An analyst quoted in the NewsForge story about the buy has doubts, but says it might be okay."

JimLynch writes "Pardon me while I pimp one of my own stories. We've got a review of Ubuntu Linux up on ExtremeTech. Check it out. Overall we had quite a positive experience with it, we think it's going to be a good distro as it matures. If you're looking for an easy-to-install debian distro, give it a download." Update: 09/27 23:25 GMT by T : Eugenia writes with another review from USALug, and a 6-page comprehensive Ubuntu preview at OSNews, writing "Gnome's & Ubuntu's release manager Jeff Waugh also had an interesting interview detailing lots of interesting tidbits. The final version of Ubuntu is expected mid-October."

nakhla writes "Even though we always hear stories of companies migrating from Windows to Linux, eWeek is running a story describing several companies that have migrated from Linux to Windows. Among their reasons are inadequate support options, application compatibility issues, stability problems, and the added cost of troubleshooting."

xiando writes "Developers aim at making Krita a user-friendly image manipulation program where users with no computer experience or slim experience with other light-duty image programs like Paint Shop Pro should feel right at home. LinuxReviews has a 5.5 MB preview video by developer Bart Coppens available, showing how the app looks and feels. Check it out or download the source preview packages by Daniel Molkentin to try it yourself. Developers hope to make Krita a part of the KDE office suite KOffice 1.4, scheduled spring 2005."

raffe writes "Solaris Kernel Developer Eric Schrock is bloging more about the Solaris vs. Linux issue and linux kernel moneky Greg is answering on his blog. Eric's first part is is also still up and Greg's answer " Another reader also submitted reviews of the Linux desktop vs. Solaris 9. User reviews are welcome; please note that ITMJ is part of OSTG like Slashdot.

xiando writes "3D-Desktop is a window pager for Linux. It works with any window manager and the screenshots look very impressive. The idea is to allow you to look at all your virtual desktops in different 3D views."

Thanks to Garage Games for their submission of "Dark Horizons: Lore is available for all Linux distributions. Dark Horizons is a breakneck-speed first-person shooter based in a universe where the unfolding history of a war-torn Earth is revealed before the player's eyes."