Argentina was in the news recently with a proposed law that would mandate the use of Free Software in government. This article gets more behind the story and takes a look at Diego Saravia, the professor who developed a boot-from-CD Linux distribution he calls "Utoto" and was the key to the recent proposed law.

Linux Standard Base is in the final stages of the LSB written specification for Linux. LSB v0.9 written specification, after the 30 day Request For Comments from the public, will be submitted to the Free Standards Group for adoption. The LSB is built on pieces of existing standards that are widely used by the industry and supported by the development community. Its goal is to develop and promote a set of standards that will increase compatibility among Linux distributions and enable software applications to run on any compliant Linux system.

"Some people I know define insanity as when one does the same thing over and over while expecting different results. I find this principle applying in two areas. First, Microsoft and their propaganda, disinformation, FUD and bundling appear to be doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. The results of those activities in the past have cost them disputes with the Justice Department. That seems a little strange to me. One thinking about that might question their collective sanity. Secondly, I see the same talk backs on the same Websites and digests over and over.

This article is basically written for Rsync, a very fast, flexible and robust backup utility. We will look at how you can utilize and configure this program to take the daily backup from your production servers.

What is Rsync?

Openness is normal, healthy, and natural. It is also eminently fair, just, and unbiased. Open source is

on the side of cosmic justice. That is why openness will win and a closed Microsof

will lose, says Tom Nadeau.

The Economist has turned an unhappy eye on Microsoft in this piece, noting that open source

software isn't something that exists merely to thwart Redmond as much as it is a natural result

of the Internet "which means that it is here to stay." Those looking for a concise, lucid account

of what open source is all about might want to check this out.

"I was disappointed and dismayed to read Dennis Powell's recent piece on GNOME (Wanna Invest in a Bridge...?"). Unfortunately, he presents a very different picture of what the GNOME community in general, and Ximian in particular, are trying to do. I'd like to address and bring clarity to some of the issues surrounding GNOME and Ximian in Dennis column, especially as they regard the control of GNOME, the role of my and other companies," says Miguel de Icaza, CTO, Ximian.

One key difference between Linux and the Unixes that have come before it is its very real potential as a desktop operating system for everybody, and SuSE is a good example of a distribution doing the work to make that happen. So what to make of the fact that something like PCMCIA seems to work "out of the box" while XFree86 4, despite all its enhancements, continues to present daunting configuration challenges? Dennis Powell explains.

Casio is releasing a small (2.1 lb.) Crusoe-based laptop, Fiva MPC-206E notebook, that runs a curious hybrid of Windows ME (for the bulk of the time) and a "partial version" of Linux (for MP3 "tunes or read certain files"). It can be converted to an all-Linux machine. Tunning these applications on Linux cuts boot-up time and can incrementally extend battery life. And this new notebook from Casio is forcing Windows and Linux operating systems to live together.

Acucorp, Inc. has announced plans to deliver extend 5 with ACUCOBOL -GT on Linux for IBM S/390 in the second quarter of 2001. Extend 5 allows software developers to leverage their investments in COBOL applications by transforming these applications into modern systems. Currently available on over 600 platforms, it includes products and services for enabling Internet deployment, graphical COBOL development, data access, distributed computing, and increased programmer productivity.