An anonymous reader writes that the "NY Times reports that a group of companies, led by I.B.M. and Intel, plans to announce today that it is setting up a $10 million legal defense fund to help pay for the litigation costs of corporate users of the popular GNU/Linux operating system if they are sued. ZDnet also has a story on this." otisaardvark points out that "The fund is to be administered by OSDL (Open Source Development Labs) and so, amongst other things, could bankroll legal costs for Linus."

leonbrooks writes "Yes! Third year in a row! The penguinmeister has entered the building! Posting from lecture theatre LG28 at the University of Adelaide, we have confirmed that Linus Torvalds has once more blessed us with his presence. Solid proof that Australia truly is The Lucky Country. (-:" And an anonymous reader adds: "Linus will be here for a week at linux.conf.au but not presenting anything. If you want to see him, maybe you guys should come down to South Australia and register for linux.conf.au 2004."

hendridm writes "According to the Mandrake Linux web page, 'MandrakeMove is available for download - Everything for Office, Multimedia and Internet on a single live CD: the final version of MandrakeMove Download Edition is now publicly available for download. Make your Windows-friends discover how powerful and friendly Mandrake Linux is: this couldn't be easier than with MandrakeMove!' Go team." (We mentioned this version of Mandrake before; of course, if you download, you don't get a memory key with the deal ;))

MSBob writes "Seems that SCO is seriously hinting that their next victim is going to be Google. SCO said that they held what SCO described as "low level talks" with Google executives with regards to licensing SCO's alleged intellectual property within the Linux kernel. The full article is on Forbes.com." The Reuters story is on Yahoo!, too.

mache writes "Full NTFS write support for Knoppix is under discussion on Knoppix Ideas forum and it looks that Knopper will include Captive into Knoppix 3.4. The best part of Live CD with full NTFS write support is that it actually exists in LinuxDefender, a remastered Knoppix distribution made by Bitdefender, presented at LinuxConf 2003, the annual Romanian Linux Users Group (RLUG) conference."

David Precious writes "With just a little work, it's possible to get your Linux system to run DOS applications with very little trouble. Whether you need to run some legacy corporate application, or just want to play some of those old classic DOS games, it's easy to get going. To make it easy, I've produced a simple guide to explain it. Hopefully it'll be of use to some people."

kiwimate writes "Two Linux distributors (one each from China and Japan) are building a common Linux platform for Asian companies. Using Oracle software to create the product, which is dubbed "Asianux", they have declared they'll create a common kernel so that the two companies' offerings can interoperate with ease."

jnf writes "And so he said it is released, and then jumped on a plane to Australia. Linus announced the release of 2.6.1 a few minutes ago, fixes include AGPGART, a fork() bugfix, and misc changes to XFS, and those are just the patches applied since v2.6.1-rc3. Full changelog is avialable, kernel at the usual places, i held off posting this until kernel.org was updated." 2.6.0 is now in Debian unstable...

phorm asks: "While there are newer many distributions of linux that come bootable from CD, I've found that some are a bit difficult to customize and wonder how hard it would be to create my own. Currently we are looking at replacing some of our Windows desktops at work with Linux test-machines - and it would be nice to make the installation process as simple as possible. How hard would it be to create a bootable CD that would automagically install Linux onto the first detected hard-drive? How would you go about 'imaging' an existing machine to use as the base? I suppose that in many cases a tar-gzip of the entire OS would work, provided you could partition the drive correctly, recreate some important handles as in /proc, and run lilo/grub to install a boot loader. Does anyone here have experience with this? I know morphix/knoppix make nice bootable distros but what I really want is a basic Linux bootCD which installs a preconfigured version of the OS of my choice."

Int27h quotes The Age saying "Just before Christmas last year, Novell announced publicly that SCO had known for some time that it did not receive all rights and ownership to UNIX technologies, despite public statements to the contrary. Novell has made public correspondence between lawyers representing both Novell and SCO." Lots of links and commentary on what continues to be one of the strangest stories in the history of Linux.

m5shiv writes "The Inquirer is reporting on an allegedly leaked internal memo from IBM CIO Bob Greenberg discussing IBM's move to a Linux desktop: 'Our chairman has challenged the IT organization, and indeed all of IBM, to move to a Linux based desktop before the end of 2005. This means replacing productivity, web access and viewing tools with open standards based equivalents.' The enemy of my enemy is my friend?"

Anonymous Coward writes "Microsoft has launched a new ad campaign that purports to give 'objective third-party information' comparing Windows to Linux." See the ad campaign website for more, uh, facts.

inode_buddha writes "This article describes SCO's recent letters to its UNIX licensees, asking them to certify that they '...are not using Unix code in Linux.' It also notes another set of letters '...outlining additional evidence of copyright infringement to a subset of 1,500 global Linux users that SCO first contacted in May about copyright infringement.' There's also a decent breakdown of the company's balance sheet and some quotes from company officials. I hope to see one of those 'other' letters; could anyone post it? SCO better have asbestos underwear." Ask and receive: idiotnot adds "Here's the article from the Sydney Morning Herald. Here is a PDF Copy of the letter." "Yours truly"?

balor writes "January 5th 2004, Irish Free Software Organisation (IFSO) is launched. Since June 2003, members of the fsfe-ie mailing list have been collaborating on issues such as software patents, and the European Copyright Directive. With Ireland holding the presidency of the EU for the next six months, political lobbying in Ireland will be of increased importance. The fate of the software patentability directive is still undecided, and we now also have the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive to deal with. In the coming months, we also hope to work on spreading education and adoption of Free Software in Ireland. By no coincidence, today is also the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the GNU project."

diegocgteleline.es writes "Linux Kernel 2.4.24 has been released and is available on kernel.org. It seems there's a bug in the mremap(2) system call, where a local user can get root privileges.The new version has been released only with the most important bugs fixed - the rest of the changes have been postponed (those changes include the XFS filesystem)."

Ms Pacman writes "This article is the fifth and final installment of Barry Smith's series on Debian-based commercial distros in a Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) environment. In this in-depth article, the newly released Xandros Deluxe 2.0 is being reviewed and compared to all previous distros Barry Smith used and reviewed the past 2-3 months. Of special interest is the blurb about Xandros' customer support."

cosog writes "Robert Storey writes in a thorough review about Knoppix: 'Some people even take a Knoppix disk with them when they go shopping for a new computer, a clever way to ensure that the hardware will be Linux compatible before you purchase it.' His article discusses things like: booting, rescuing, installing on HDD, tips'n'tricks, etc... A nice read for everyone interested in Linux (and Knoppix in particular ;)."

scubacuda writes "Mark Webbink, Red Hat's general counsel, has written an informative article explaining free and open source software. Geared towards attorneys, he explains the various licenses and addresses several myths about OSS." One to bookmark.

tazzzzz writes "Ever wanted an easy-to-configure, whole-house, internet-accessible, Linux-based VOIP PBX with video, PVR, firewall/router, security system, MP3 player, file server, personal web server, home automation (lights, thermostat) controller? I just came across the Pluto which claims to do all of this (and more, of course!). It'll set you back $15,000 if you're living in a small bachelor pad, but you didn't need that car anyway, did you?"

Random BedHead Ed writes "LinuxPlanet has an interesting interview with Pamela Jones, the paralegal and blogger who created Groklaw. Groklaw has become an indespensible site for geeks who need even more SCO updates than even /. provides - and if the site's inclusion in the footnotes of one of IBM's court documents is any indication, it's been handy for people involved in the case as well. No wonder the site won Best News Site in O'Reilly's OSDir.com Editor's Choice Awards for 2003. It shows how useful and influental a well-run collaborative website can be."