Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "I am sure that many other Slashdotters have noticed an increase in ARM-based netbooks over the past several months. For example, the Augen E-Go. It is a widely touted theory that it is impossible to install Linux on one of these notebooks, replacing the commonly installed Windows CE operating system. The sub-$100 netbooks carry decent specs, including 533MHz ARM processor; 128MB DDR RAM; and a 2GB Flash drive, as well as most expected netbook components (USB, Wi-Fi, etc.). I find it hard to believe that a computer with these specs is impossible to hack and install Linux to, but Google searches have been largely unsuccessful in finding proper information. Do any Slashdot readers have experience in installing ARM Linux distros to these cheap netbooks like this? If so, what distros do they recommend?" (In particular, I wonder if anyone can comment on Ubuntu on ARM.)

Charbax writes "Last April, Microsoft argued that it controlled the netbook OS market for devices sold in certain Microsoft-friendly US retail stores, while ABI Research claims that Linux actually has 32% of the worldwide netbook market, and that its market-share is growing. At the recent Netbook World Summit in Paris France, Aaron J. Seigo, Community leader at the KDE Foundation, and Arnaud Laprévote, CTO at Mandriva Linux, give us their estimation for next year's Linux market share (video) in the consumer laptop market. Their estimation is that Linux will dominate in ARM-powered laptops and that those may take over a significant share of the overall laptop market by their significantly cheaper prices (as low as $80), longer battery life (as long as 20-40 hours on a small battery using the Pixel Qi screens), as well as lower size and weight. Running some of the Chromium OS builds for ARM available shortly and having a full browser experience on those cheaper and better ARM-powered Linux laptops could make it a significant mass market success to shake up the Intel and Microsoft consumer PC/laptop monopoly in its boots."

christian.einfeldt writes "Linux netbooks have captured 32% of the global netbook market, says Jeff Orr, an analyst with consumer computer research firm ABI Research. The largest share of netbook sales is in the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, according to Orr. ABI's latest figures align with a statement by Dell executives in February of this year, to the effect that Linux netbooks comprised about 33% of Dell shipments of Dell Inspiron mini 9s netbooks. These data points cast doubt on claims by Microsoft that Windows XP has captured 98% of the netbook market (a figure Microsoft later revised to 93%). In an interview with DesktopLinux.com, Orr made clear that the 32% Linux netbook market share did not include either user-installed Linux or dual-boot systems, but was confined to just pre-installed Linux shipments."

nerdyH writes "After nearly two years, the PCLinuxOS project has achieved a major new release, PCLinuxOS 2009. The project is notable for maintaining a Linux hardware compatibility database, publishing a freely downloadable monthly Linux magazine, and selling hardware pre-installed with Linux. It boasts a pretty vibrant community, too, and is used by 3.2 percent of DesktopLinux readers, according to an ongoing reader survey there."

nerdyH writes "After nearly two years, the PCLinuxOS project has achieved a major new release, PCLinuxOS 2009. The project is notable for maintaining a Linux hardware compatibility database, publishing a freely downloadable monthly Linux magazine, and selling hardware pre-installed with Linux. It boasts a pretty vibrant community, too, and is used by 3.2 percent of DesktopLinux readers, according to an ongoing reader survey there."

nerdyH notes a DesktopLinux.com first look at the alpha of Intel's Moblin 2 toolkit for Linux distributors to create distributions for netbooks and other Atom-based kit. "A lot of notebooks and even netbooks these days run Windows, but also offer a minimalist Linux environment that boots in seconds. Now, with the Intel-sponsored Moblin project's alpha release of Moblin 2 Monday, it looks like insanely fast boots will become a standard feature of full-featured Linux desktops, too. Some of the quick-booting environments out there are enough to give anyone a lasting hatred of Linux. Like those free bicycles that liberal, well-intentioned municipalities release into the wild from time to time, hoping to get drivers out of their cars, fast-boot Linux is probably doing more to harm than help the cause. But pretty soon, even full-featured Linux will boot in seconds. That's because Intel's built some mighty whizzy read-ahead boot technology into Moblin 2."

An anonymous reader writes "In a recent Computerworld interview, Linus revealed that he's switched to Gnome — this despite launching a heavily critical broadside against Gnome just a few years ago. His reason? He thinks KDE 4 is a 'disaster.' Although it's improved recently, he'll find many who agree with this prognosis, and KDE 4 can be painful to use." There's quite a bit of interesting stuff in this interview, besides, regarding the current state of Linux development.

nerdyH writes "Novell's recent openSUSE 11.1 release includes a new end-user license agreement modeled after Fedora's EULA, says Community Manager Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier in this detailed interview. Zonker says distributions should apply the 'open source principle' and standardize trademark agreements and EULA, similar to how the OSI sought to reduce open source license proliferation a few years back. But with Fedora and openSUSE being so different, can one size really fit all? And, will open source licenses ever finally get translated into languages besides English? (Zonker says that translation into 7 languages was done for openSUSE 11.1.)"

nerdyH writes "As recently as 2007, Linux users waited six months for Flash 9 to arrive. Now, with Microsoft pushing its Silverlight alternative, Adobe is touting the universality of its Flash format, which has penetrated '98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops,' it claims. And, it today released Flash 10 for Linux concurrently with other platforms. Welcome to the future." Handily enough, Real Networks released this summer RealPlayer 11 for Linux, the first release for which they've included a .deb package, and offers nightly builds of their Helix player, for which Linux is one of the supported platforms.

nerdyH writes "As recently as 2007, Linux users waited six months for Flash 9 to arrive. Now, with Microsoft pushing its Silverlight alternative, Adobe is touting the universality of its Flash format, which has penetrated '98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops,' it claims. And, it today released Flash 10 for Linux concurrently with other platforms. Welcome to the future." Handily enough, Real Networks released this summer RealPlayer 11 for Linux, the first release for which they've included a .deb package, and offers nightly builds of their Helix player, for which Linux is one of the supported platforms.

nerdyH writes "Following Xandros's acquisition of Linspire, some feared for the future of Freespire, the free version of Linspire. However, Xandros today announced a new version of Freespire that will return the popular free Linux distro to its Debian-based roots."

nerdyH writes "The Debian project's maintainer, Luke Claes, announced in an email Saturday that he will freeze the 'testing' or 'Lenny' tree, in preparation for a new stable release of Debian Linux in ... September! The freeze means that open source software developers have only a couple more days to package any applications that they want to be included in the next release of Debian — and by extension, in the inner sanctum source lists of distributions such as Ubuntu that are based on it. After the freeze starts next week, Debian maintainers will turn their attention to 364 release-critical bugs, and half-a-dozen high-priority goals. Given the work to be done, is September really feasible? Lenny always was a little slow getting back to his right place ..."

Esther Schindler sends a note about two journalists for very different publications (herself one of them) urging IBM to open-source, not all of OS/2 — they've consistently refused to do that — but instead one of its most powerful features: SOM, the System Object Model. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes at desktoplinux.com, "IBM, I'm told by developers who should know, still has all of SOM's source code and it all belongs to IBM. It's because IBM doesn't have all the code for OS/2 and some of it belongs to Microsoft that IBM open-sourcing OS/2 has proven to be a futile hope." And Esther Schindler takes the developer angle in a blog post at CIO.com: "Could the open-source community use a library packaging technology that enables languages to share class libraries regardless of the language an application was written in? I dare say it could, especially since the code to accomplish that goal was written (and shelved) more than ten years ago. All it takes to make that code available is to ask IBM to release SOM and DSOM as open-source." What are the business issues that would convince IBM to assent?

angryfirelord notes a DesktopLinux article on Lenovo's promise to deliver ThinkPads with pre-installed Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 in the week of January 14. Quoting: "Lenovo will release pre-installed SLED 10 on its Intel Centrino processor-powered ThinkPad T61 and R61 14-inch-wide notebooks. In February, Lenovo's pre-integrated Novell Linux offering will expand to include some Penryn-based ThinkPads. The starting price for this system will be $949, $20 less than the same laptop with Vista Home Premium."

sjvn writes "The official word will be out any minute now, but in the meantime DesktopLinux has learned that Dell will be releasing Ubuntu 7.10 on a laptop and desktop with immediate availability. And, as an extra added bonus, they're tossing in legal DVD-playback capability. In a word: Neat."

An anonymous reader writes "Desktop Linux has a recent commentary on the inevitable growth of Linux on the cheaper end of the desktop market. According to the article, the availability of under-$500 usable hardware, combined with a free operating system, free desktop office products, and free or cheap 'software as a service' online applications, opens a new market in which Microsoft cannot compete. 'Microsoft will fight this trend tooth and nail. It will cut prices to the point where it'll be bleeding ink on some of its product lines. And Windows XP is going to stick around much longer than Microsoft ever wanted it to. Still, it won't be enough.'"

DeviceGuru writes "While the Linux Foundation's third annual desktop Linux survey doesn't officially end until November 30th, the number of daily respondents have shrunk to a trickle and the Foundation is working on analyzing the results. They now have up an early look at the raw data. For starters, almost 20,000 self-selected users filled out this year's survey compared to fewer than 10,000 in 2006's survey. Not surprisingly, the Ubuntu family of Linuxes is the most popular among organizations, at 54.1 percent. This was followed by the Red Hat family — RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Fedora/CentOS) — with 50.2 percent. The Novell SUSE group — SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) and openSUSE — came in third, with 35.2 percent."

DeviceGuru writes "While the Linux Foundation's third annual desktop Linux survey doesn't officially end until November 30th, the number of daily respondents have shrunk to a trickle and the Foundation is working on analyzing the results. They now have up an early look at the raw data. For starters, almost 20,000 self-selected users filled out this year's survey compared to fewer than 10,000 in 2006's survey. Not surprisingly, the Ubuntu family of Linuxes is the most popular among organizations, at 54.1 percent. This was followed by the Red Hat family — RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Fedora/CentOS) — with 50.2 percent. The Novell SUSE group — SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) and openSUSE — came in third, with 35.2 percent."

Dev Null writes "The Linux device driver project has hit something of a snag: they have lots of developers, but few devices to work on, so they're looking for input concerning which devices aren't well-supported in Linux. If any of you know of devices that could use better support, you can help out by listing them on the project's wiki."

Tatey writes "Hewlett-Packard, one of the world's largest PC manufacturers, has announced it will start selling Linux-based PCs aimed at the consumer market ... in Australia. For the time being it appears the HP Linux models will only be available down under, with prices starting at $AU600 (just under $500 USD). 'This PC is a low-end business PC. It comes powered by any of a variety of AMD processors. These range from the 1.60 GHz AMD Sempron 3000+ processor to the speedy 2.8 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 5600+ processor. The dx2250 can hold up to 2GB of RAM. For storage, it maxes out with a 250 GB hard drive. It comes with a variety of optical drive options, ranging from ordinary CDs to a DVD+/-RW LightScribe, Double Layer/Dual Format drive. At this time, it is not clear exactly what options HP will be offering with the RHEL-based system. Previously, HP had offered this desktop computer with a choice of Vista Business, XP, and FreeDOS. In the latter case, this was almost always replaced by users with a Linux distribution.'"

kripkenstein writes "We have just heard that the SCO fiasco is finally going to end for Linux. But Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at DesktopLinux.com points out that the favorable result for Linux may cause unpleasant consequences for rival open-source operating system OpenSolaris: 'At one time, Sun was an SCO supporter ... Sun's Jonathan Schwartz — then Sun VP of software and today Sun's president and CEO — said in 2003 that Sun had bought "rights equivalent to ownership" to Unix. SCO agreed. In 2005, SCO CEO Darl McBride said that SCO had no problem with Sun open-sourcing Unix code in what would become OpenSolaris. "We have seen what Sun plans to do with OpenSolaris and we have no problem with it," McBride said. "What they're doing protects our Unix intellectual property rights." Sun now has a little problem, which might become a giant one: SCO never had any Unix IP to sell. Therefore, it seems likely that Solaris and OpenSolaris contains Novell's Unix IP.'"

WolfWings writes "Apparently Dell has decided that Ubuntu-based computers are ineligible for their famed CompleteCare service, or any form of hardware warranty what-so-ever. The news has only recently hit Dell's own IdeaStorm website, via a forum post describing an interaction with the company's customer service. Says the customer, 'I am looking for protection from bricks. The laws of physics do not differ from one OS to the other...do they?' After so recently decided to support Linux on their machines, including limited technical support, Dell seems to be squandering any possible good-will with this decision to leave purchasers of these machines high and dry for hardware warranty coverage." Update: 06/05 23:40 GMT by KD : many readers let us know that Dell has said that the omission of extended warranty and CompleteCare options from the configurator for Ubuntu systems was an "ordering system glitch." It should be fixed by now according to DesktopLinux.com.

boklm writes "Mandriva announced it will have a version of its Mandriva Linux 2007 pre-installed on Intel's new low-end laptop for students in developing countries, the Classmate PC. This laptop comes with 256MB of RAM, 1 or 2GB of flash memory, 802.11b/g WiFi, 10/100Mbps ethernet, 2 USB ports, a 7-inch LCD display and 4 hours battery. Produced in Brazil, shipping is expected to begin in the second quarter of this year, and will be available to Mexico, India, and developing countries."

xsspd2004 wrote with a link to a Desktop Linux post about the newest version of OpenOffice.org. Bug fixes and the usual changes can be found in the project's release notes. The developers are using the turn of phrase 'a real alternative to Office 2007', hoping to win over some folks not too thrilled with the commercial software's new look. "Overall, version 2.2 should appear better to users thanks to its support for kerning, a technique that improves the appearance of text written in proportional fonts; kerning is now enabled by default. OpenOffice's PDF (Portable Document Format) export function has also been enhanced with the addition of the optional creation of bookmarks feature, and with support for user-definable export of form fields. A quick look at the release notes also reveals that many minor bugs have been repaired in this new version. Most of these appear to relate to the Calc spreadsheet and Base database programs."

Nate writes "Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has teamed up with Linspire to share technologies between the two distros. When Freespire 2.0 arrives in April, it will use Ubuntu as its base, moving off of the current Debian. Ubuntu users will get access to proprietary software (DVD players, media codecs) via Linspire's newly opened Click 'N Run. Check out the press release and the obligatory FAQ."

derrida writes "The OSDL's Desktop Linux Working Group has published its first year-end report on the state of the overall desktop Linux ecosystem. The report provides insight into the year's key accomplishments in functionality, standards, applications, distributions, market penetration, and more. Of great interest is the Market Growth part. Quoting from there: 'Most observers believe that much of the growth will take place outside of the United States. "It will be in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries," said Gerry Riveros, Red Hat, "because of the price and because they aren't locked in yet."'"

An anonymous reader writes "What happens when the editor of a popular Linux website attempts to install a Debian Etch desktop on an old ThinkPad? How does it turn out? Surprisingly well! The article comprises an entertaining account of the entire process, complete with lots of informative screenshots, from downloading the net-install to tangling with Wi-Fi and modem PCMCIA cards as the last step — and everything in between. A great primer for Debian newbies... Go Debian!"

eldavojohn writes "An announcement came Sunday that the first ten prototypes of the Linux-powered OLPC XO-1 had been completed in China. From the article, 'Quanta, the Chinese computer maker that won the international bidding for the project earlier this year, will assemble 900 OLPC machines that will be used for destructive testing and distribution to our development partners.' Let's hope that these first prototypes do not warrant any design changes and that the testing goes well so that countries that expressed interest (Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Argentina, and Thailand) can start distributing them soon."

An anonymous reader writes "Today OSDL and freedesktop.org announced the release of Portland 1.0, a set of common interfaces for GNOME and KDE. From the article: 'Specifically, these tools make installing and uninstalling menus, icons, and icon-resources easier for developers. They also can obtain the system's settings on how to handle different file types, and program access to email, the root account, preferred applications, and the screensaver. There's nothing new in this kind of functionality. What is new is that developers can use these regardless of which desktop environment -- KDE or GNOME -- they're targeting.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has released Beta 2 of its upcoming Firefox 2 browser for developer review. It is being made available for testing purposes only. The release contains a number of new features, as well as some enhancements to look and feel. DesktopLinux.com has posted a list of the changes along with a few quick screen grabs. Apparently, the download can be found on Mozilla's ftp site."

An anonymous reader writes "After five years of charging an annual fee for their CNR (click and run) service, Linspire has dropped the annual fee, making the CNR service free. This combined with their previous announcement of open sourcing the CNR client, and the Freespire project, is all very big news. This means Freespire users can now have a free distro, using a free CNR service."

An anonymous reader writes "For years, the holy grail of the Linux desktop has been to get a major computer vendor to commit to preloading a Linux desktop. It's finally happened! Lenovo has made a deal with Novell to preload SUSE Linux 10 on its ThinkPad T60p mobile workstation. Ironically, in June, Lenovo was in hot-water with Linux fans because an executive had said that the company would no longer support Linux on its ThinkPad line. But the company did a quick about-turn. Who knows, maybe Mr. Dell will finally get the message, too?"

An anonymous reader writes "For years, the holy grail of the Linux desktop has been to get a major computer vendor to commit to preloading a Linux desktop. It's finally happened! Lenovo has made a deal with Novell to preload SUSE Linux 10 on its ThinkPad T60p mobile workstation. Ironically, in June, Lenovo was in hot-water with Linux fans because an executive had said that the company would no longer support Linux on its ThinkPad line. But the company did a quick about-turn. Who knows, maybe Mr. Dell will finally get the message, too?"

An anonymous reader writes "For years, the holy grail of the Linux desktop has been to get a major computer vendor to commit to preloading a Linux desktop. It's finally happened! Lenovo has made a deal with Novell to preload SUSE Linux 10 on its ThinkPad T60p mobile workstation. Ironically, in June, Lenovo was in hot-water with Linux fans because an executive had said that the company would no longer support Linux on its ThinkPad line. But the company did a quick about-turn. Who knows, maybe Mr. Dell will finally get the message, too?"

An anonymous reader writes "For years, the holy grail of the Linux desktop has been to get a major computer vendor to commit to preloading a Linux desktop. It's finally happened! Lenovo has made a deal with Novell to preload SUSE Linux 10 on its ThinkPad T60p mobile workstation. Ironically, in June, Lenovo was in hot-water with Linux fans because an executive had said that the company would no longer support Linux on its ThinkPad line. But the company did a quick about-turn. Who knows, maybe Mr. Dell will finally get the message, too?"

An anonymous reader writes "DesktopLinux.com takes an early look at Freespire Linux in a recent article. Linspire will be releasing their first version of Freespire, the first community Linux distribution to include many third-party proprietary codecs, drivers, and software. From the article: 'While I still have my doubts about the long-term wisdom of using proprietary software and drivers with Linux, I must say that if you feel you need to use such programs, Freespire makes it much easier than any other Linux distribution. And, when is all said and done, that's really what Freespire is all about -- making Linux as easy as possible for users.'"

An anonymous reader writes "DesktopLinux.com takes an early look at Freespire Linux in a recent article. Linspire will be releasing their first version of Freespire, the first community Linux distribution to include many third-party proprietary codecs, drivers, and software. From the article: 'While I still have my doubts about the long-term wisdom of using proprietary software and drivers with Linux, I must say that if you feel you need to use such programs, Freespire makes it much easier than any other Linux distribution. And, when is all said and done, that's really what Freespire is all about -- making Linux as easy as possible for users.'"

An anonymous reader writes "DesktopLinux.com is reporting that four countries have together ordered 4 million low-cost, Linux-based laptops from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The countries of Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand have each placed the 1 million unit orders."

Slashback tonight brings some clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories including, justice for a stolen sidekick victim, free WebTV test a hit, SUSE 10.1 release postponed, Microsoft loses Office patent appeal, and PayPal fixes their phishing hole -- Read on for details.

Justice for stolen Sidekick victim. chroma writes "Remember the stolen Sidekick from a few days back? When the girl uploaded photos of herself to T-Mobile's service and bragged on IM about having the stolen PDA? Well, after creating a webpage that gathered 400,000 links in less than two weeks, and much runaround from the NYPD, justice has finally been served: the perpetrator has been arrested and the PDA returned. Further information is also available from The New York Times."

Free WebTV test a hit. An anonymous reader writes "Disney has said that their recent ABC free WebTV was a real hit with viewers and advertisers alike. Shows posted on the site received more than 11 million hits in the first month alone. From the article: 'An online exit survey posted the first week of the two-month trial showed that 87 percent of respondents could recall the advertisers that sponsored the episodes they watched. That compares with typical ad recall of about 40 percent for commercials viewed on television, industry sources said.'"

SUSE 10.1 release postponed. An anonymous reader writes "According to a confidential memo, the next release of both the server and desktop versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 will be delayed. The delay is apparently to allow Novell 'to address final issues with our new package management, registration, and update system and also fix the remaining blocker defects.' From the article: 'SUSE has a new update and package management system, which has not worked well in its initial release in the free, community OpenSUSE 10.1 release. Unfortunately, even after a recent set of fixes was released, SUSE's update and new program installation system is still giving many users trouble.'"

Microsoft loses Office patent appeal. xwipeoutx writes to tell us ITNews.com is reporting that Microsoft has lost their appeal in US Federal court over a judgement handed down saying they violated a patent by Guatemalan inventor Carlos Armando Amado. The original judgement stipulated that Micosoft was to pay Amado $6.1 million for violating a patent covering a means to link spreadsheets and databases.

Paypal fixes their phishing hole. Juha-Matti Laurio writes "News.com is providing new information to the previous PayPal XSS hole and reporting that the hole is now fixed." From the article: "By exploiting the flaw, attackers were able to redirect people from a PayPal Web page to an online trap located in South Korea, a representative for the service said. The page actually has a real PayPal URL, but hosts malicious code that presents a message warning members that their account had been compromised. It then redirects them to a 'phishing' Web site."

Slashback tonight brings some clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories including, justice for a stolen sidekick victim, free WebTV test a hit, SUSE 10.1 release postponed, Microsoft loses Office patent appeal, and PayPal fixes their phishing hole -- Read on for details.

Justice for stolen Sidekick victim. chroma writes "Remember the stolen Sidekick from a few days back? When the girl uploaded photos of herself to T-Mobile's service and bragged on IM about having the stolen PDA? Well, after creating a webpage that gathered 400,000 links in less than two weeks, and much runaround from the NYPD, justice has finally been served: the perpetrator has been arrested and the PDA returned. Further information is also available from The New York Times."

Free WebTV test a hit. An anonymous reader writes "Disney has said that their recent ABC free WebTV was a real hit with viewers and advertisers alike. Shows posted on the site received more than 11 million hits in the first month alone. From the article: 'An online exit survey posted the first week of the two-month trial showed that 87 percent of respondents could recall the advertisers that sponsored the episodes they watched. That compares with typical ad recall of about 40 percent for commercials viewed on television, industry sources said.'"

SUSE 10.1 release postponed. An anonymous reader writes "According to a confidential memo, the next release of both the server and desktop versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 will be delayed. The delay is apparently to allow Novell 'to address final issues with our new package management, registration, and update system and also fix the remaining blocker defects.' From the article: 'SUSE has a new update and package management system, which has not worked well in its initial release in the free, community OpenSUSE 10.1 release. Unfortunately, even after a recent set of fixes was released, SUSE's update and new program installation system is still giving many users trouble.'"

Microsoft loses Office patent appeal. xwipeoutx writes to tell us ITNews.com is reporting that Microsoft has lost their appeal in US Federal court over a judgement handed down saying they violated a patent by Guatemalan inventor Carlos Armando Amado. The original judgement stipulated that Micosoft was to pay Amado $6.1 million for violating a patent covering a means to link spreadsheets and databases.

Paypal fixes their phishing hole. Juha-Matti Laurio writes "News.com is providing new information to the previous PayPal XSS hole and reporting that the hole is now fixed." From the article: "By exploiting the flaw, attackers were able to redirect people from a PayPal Web page to an online trap located in South Korea, a representative for the service said. The page actually has a real PayPal URL, but hosts malicious code that presents a message warning members that their account had been compromised. It then redirects them to a 'phishing' Web site."

Slashback tonight brings some clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories including, justice for a stolen sidekick victim, free WebTV test a hit, SUSE 10.1 release postponed, Microsoft loses Office patent appeal, and PayPal fixes their phishing hole -- Read on for details.

Justice for stolen Sidekick victim. chroma writes "Remember the stolen Sidekick from a few days back? When the girl uploaded photos of herself to T-Mobile's service and bragged on IM about having the stolen PDA? Well, after creating a webpage that gathered 400,000 links in less than two weeks, and much runaround from the NYPD, justice has finally been served: the perpetrator has been arrested and the PDA returned. Further information is also available from The New York Times."

Free WebTV test a hit. An anonymous reader writes "Disney has said that their recent ABC free WebTV was a real hit with viewers and advertisers alike. Shows posted on the site received more than 11 million hits in the first month alone. From the article: 'An online exit survey posted the first week of the two-month trial showed that 87 percent of respondents could recall the advertisers that sponsored the episodes they watched. That compares with typical ad recall of about 40 percent for commercials viewed on television, industry sources said.'"

SUSE 10.1 release postponed. An anonymous reader writes "According to a confidential memo, the next release of both the server and desktop versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 will be delayed. The delay is apparently to allow Novell 'to address final issues with our new package management, registration, and update system and also fix the remaining blocker defects.' From the article: 'SUSE has a new update and package management system, which has not worked well in its initial release in the free, community OpenSUSE 10.1 release. Unfortunately, even after a recent set of fixes was released, SUSE's update and new program installation system is still giving many users trouble.'"

Microsoft loses Office patent appeal. xwipeoutx writes to tell us ITNews.com is reporting that Microsoft has lost their appeal in US Federal court over a judgement handed down saying they violated a patent by Guatemalan inventor Carlos Armando Amado. The original judgement stipulated that Micosoft was to pay Amado $6.1 million for violating a patent covering a means to link spreadsheets and databases.

Paypal fixes their phishing hole. Juha-Matti Laurio writes "News.com is providing new information to the previous PayPal XSS hole and reporting that the hole is now fixed." From the article: "By exploiting the flaw, attackers were able to redirect people from a PayPal Web page to an online trap located in South Korea, a representative for the service said. The page actually has a real PayPal URL, but hosts malicious code that presents a message warning members that their account had been compromised. It then redirects them to a 'phishing' Web site."

An anonymous reader writes "Chances are that you think Linspire lets you run Windows applications, that you have to run it as root, and that it's really not quite a proper Linux. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. At LinuxWorld in Boston this week, CEO Kevin Carmony explained what Linspire Linux is, and isn't all about. Carmony said that people are still getting these things wrong. Yes, in the beginning, Linspire had the goal of letting Linux users run Windows applications with WINE, but it dropped that theme years ago. As for requiring you to run as root, that was, Carmony said, only the case with an early alpha release that was never put in the public's hands. As for not being a real Linux, that's nonsense, too."

An anonymous reader writes "Google released the first public beta of its Google Pages service Wednesday, allowing users who signed up for the service in January and February to begin creating personal websites using an easy-to-use, browser-based tool. The service gives each user 100 MB of free storage space on Google's servers. To use the Google Page Creator tool, users must have an existing Google account. However, only those who signed up early (in January and February) to use Google Pages have access to the current beta. No new signups are being accepted at this time, Google said. The company is expected to open Page Creator to more widespread use over the next few weeks."

Slashdot tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including some favorable results from the University of Wisconsin's Mac OS X Challenge, skeptics investigate cold fusion claims, more on DoD web filtering, AT&T cuts 10,000 jobs after BellSouth merger, more child-proofing efforts for MySpace, Why Windows Vista Will Suck: a rebuttal, Harvard Professor punished for reporting bugs, Assemblyman Biondi backpedals on NJ anonymous posting bill, and a followup on Chinese TLDs -- Read on for details.

University of Wisconsin's Mac OS X Challenge. HABITcky writes "The University of Wisconsin Security Challenge has ended after 38 hours, intermittent DoS attacks, 4000 ssh login attempts, a bandwidth spike of 30 Mbps, and 6 million logged ipfw events. During this time there were 'no successful access attempts, nor any claims of a successful attempt.' You may remember this challenge was proposed in response to the 'woefully misleading' ZDnet article, Mac OS X hacked under 30 minutes, which was previously discussed here on Slashdot."

Skeptics investigate cold fusion.smooth wombat writes "As a follow-up to a previous Slashdot posting, Purdue University is investigating the claims of Rusi Taleyarkhan who claimed in 2004 to have created nuclear fusion at room temperature. The investigation came about from complaints from colleagues who suspect something is amiss. Taleyarkhan, who used to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has, since working at Perdue, removed the equipment the co-workers were using to try and replicate the results, claimed results for experimental runs were positive for fusion despite the co-workers never seeing the raw data and opposed the publication of results which contradicted his findings."

More on DoD web filtering. timetrap writes "I work in a mobile combat communications unit, while I'm not in the sandbox right now, I can attest to the DoD policy on blocking web access. First of all when you are down range don't expect to even get DSL speeds from a satellite, we usually roll with about 256kbs for the data side of our trunk. So blocking sites is very important, otherwise 4 or 5 people could start streaming audio and pretty much knock down any legitimate use of the network. We filter websites with smartfilter and yes the military system admins in the IPO office will unblock any web site that isn't blocked by local policy (no pr0n, no streaming audio, no civilian web mail: both the hot and the g varieties, and no chat programs; although irc is used by the DoD) This is no Orwellian conspiracy, but quick and easy system administration; apply smartfilter: check! If you want to check the current smartfilter blocked sites goto: securecomputing and submit some sites to check." Slashdot's own Jamie took a look at Smartfilter back in '99 as a part of the Censorware project and it still remains a mysterious black box to this day. While some would advocate full disclosure using censorware still appears to be merely passing the buck.

AT&T cuts 10,000 jobs after BellSouth merger. mytrip writes to tell us that immediately following their $67 billion acquisition of BellSouth, AT&T plans on cutting about 10,000 jobs.

More child-proofing efforts for MySpace. conq writes "BusinessWeek has an interview with Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthalin in which he describes measures MySpace and other similar sites should take to protect children. From the article: 'We're going to be suggesting some very specific measures that MySpace can take based on our conversations with MySpace as well as with other law enforcement authorities at the state and local levels. We've received hundreds of complaints from parents who are concerned about these issues, and we want to be sure that the measures we propose are technologically feasible and financially viable.'"

Why Windows Vista will Suck: a rebuttal. shrapnull writes "Hot on the heels of Extreme Tech's 'Why Windows Vista Won't Suck', Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has an alternate position posted on DesktopLinux, and sent to subscribers of Novell's 'Suse Linux Cool Solutions' newsletter."

Harvard researcher punished for reporting bugs. Guillermito writes "A story previously discussed came to a sad conclusion two weeks ago. The bottom line is this means that it is forbidden to use reverse engineering tools to find bugs in a software. You also have to prove that you own a valid license for each version of the tested software. To publish a proof of concept that contains a few dozens of copyrighted bytes is also forbidden. It's a nice precedent for any company selling a defective product."

Assemblyman Biondi backpedals on NJ anonymous posting bill. Quadraginta writes "Earlier, denizens of Slashdot reacted to a story about a bill to be introduced to the New Jersey legislature that would require hosts of forums, bulletin boards and the like to keep track of the real identity of anonymous posters. Seems like there was a strong reaction all over. Assemblyman Biondi now appears to be backpedalling furiously. From a letter quoted after the link: 'I am getting inundated with responses which I will review and use to better educate myself on the implications of this bill. If, after reviewing all of the correspondence and the opinion of OLS, it turns out that the bill is, in fact, unworkable, I will certainly reconsider and withdraw it.'"

A followup on Chinese TLDs. nqz writes "In this story on ComputerWorld, ICANN and the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) both dispute a previous story discussing China's new top-level domains containing Chinese characters."

An anonymous reader writes "Michael Dell explains his company's Linux desktop strategy in an interview at DesktopLinux.com. He says that it's not practical for Dell (the company) to support numerous distributions due to their incompatibilities, but that he doesn't want alienate large segements of the Linux community by selecting a favorite Linux distro to standardize on (Ubuntu appears to be his favorite, at the moment, by the way.) What he'd really like to see, is for the popular Linux distros to converge on a common core platform, according to the article."

Brian McCoy writes "In this article, Steven Vaughn-Nichols proclaims "Last Thursday, when I wrote about Dell's new Linux desktop, was one of the most frustrating days of my professional life. My eWEEK colleague John Spooner and I tried our best to get Dell to confess that they really had released an honest-to-God Linux desktop.""

Brian McCoy writes "In this article, Steven Vaughn-Nichols proclaims "Last Thursday, when I wrote about Dell's new Linux desktop, was one of the most frustrating days of my professional life. My eWEEK colleague John Spooner and I tried our best to get Dell to confess that they really had released an honest-to-God Linux desktop.""

I_am_Rambi writes "Dell is starting to sell PCs with RHEL WS. The trio of workstations come with either a P4, or Xeons (Dual capable). Prices range from $759 to $1263 (after rebates). Linux Desktops has more information." From the article: "Dell spokesperson Jeremy Bolen said the company basically defines a workstation as a heavy-duty desktop or notebook that is certified to work with various ISVs applications, including those for computer-aided design, video editing, modeling software for the gas and oil industry and other similar applications. Bolen argues that companies will purchase workstations for those specific jobs versus buying them as desktops for so-called knowledge workers, who spend time emailing, word processing and creating PowerPoint presentations. "

An anonymous reader writes "As a result of over 14,000 votes since the beginning of January, Adobe Photoshop, Autocad, Dreamweaver, iTunes, and Macromedia Flash are currently the top 5 'most wanted' Windows/MacOS-only applications in Novell's online survey. From comments made by the survey participants, Novell has also listed suggested substitutes for each of the five. What do readers think of these suggestions?"

skaet writes "DesktopLinux.com reports that Google is working together with CodeWeavers to bring their photo editing and sharing program Picasa, formerly only available on Windows, over to Linux. From the article: 'The program is now in a limited beta test. If this program is successful, other Google applications will be following it to the Linux desktop, sources say. The Linux Picasa implementation includes the full feature set of the Windows Picasa 2.x software. It is not, strictly speaking, a port of Picasa to Linux. Instead, Linux Picasa combines Windows Picasa code and Wine technology to run Windows Picasa on Linux. This, however, will be transparent to Linux users, when they download, install, and run the free program on their systems.'"