The US President’s website, http://www.whitehouse.gov, was transferred from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration on January 20th, but the transition was not entirely smooth. The website launched with the words, “Insert something meaningful here,” still on the page, and a long series of broken links. Hopefully the rest of the transition has been going better. Wired News has the story.

dmalloc for OPN writes “OPN has thought a lot about the current development of community sites for
the open source community. While we believe that sites like sourceforge and
the like do a good job in their category, there are not enough
project-related news sites.

So, who is OPN? Well, we are just an IRC network, that hosts a lot of channels which have to do with open source development.Such as #debian, #php or #e (for enlightenment).

We have decided that it is time to gather information, ideas and reminders
from the open source community as to how they would like to have a site
developed, that actually tells them, all in one place, what is going on with
people in the community and the projects they work on.

So we’re approaching the community, trying to gather as many contacts as
possible and start discussing this idea we had during one long frenzied
night of IRC brainstorming. Users who think they can help us out with
ideas, development time, written content, information about the open source
community and the like are asked to please participate and sign up to our
mailing list at http://lists.openprojects.net. That same host runs an nntp
server gatewayed to the mailing list archives, in the newsgroup
opn.discussion. If you feel you qualify as a volunteer right away, you can sign up at our volunteer database using
http://lists.openprojects.net/db/

Spreading the word is not easy and wording this right is even harder, so I
will not try to make this sound any better than it is. I will let you decide whether this is worth your time or not, hopefully it is and I will see you soon on the mailing list or in IRC, asking me many questions. The server is irc.openprojects.net, the
channel is #content.

oh yeah… I am dmalloc on IRC, hopefully I will see you all soon.”

– By Grant Gross –

A Gartner Group report saying IBM’s investment in Linux could have negative impacts on the operating system put the computer press in a bit of a snit this week. A
report at VNUnet suggested IBM is poised to gain a “stranglehold” over
Linux.

The VNUnet report quotes George Weiss, research director for server and operating systems at Gartner: “The biggest problem IBM has is that it appears to the Linux
community that it is trying to take over the Linux momentum and grab what this OS has to offer.”

Following up on the story, Upside.com advised current Linux companies to get
their poop in a group so that IBM doesn’t dominate the market.

IBM and Gnome

IBM’s everywhere! The director of the IBM Linux Technology Center said late last week that the Gnome desktop will “legitimize Linux as a viable desktop.” Big Blue certainly
seems sold.

Meanwhile, the folks at Gnome’s commercial side had good news this week. Ximian, formerly called Helix Code, found $15 million to continue its efforts, courtesy of Charles River
Ventures and Battery Ventures. Gnome guru and Ximian CTO Miguel de Icaza told NewsForge that the next steps are to make Gnome easier to use for those of us who
aren’t expert Unix sysadmins.

Score another one for the good guys

Another company does the right thing. The DivX people, makers of video compression software, announced this week they’re taking the project Open Source. The DivX people tell
NewsForge: Open-Sourcing the project will help make DivX the video
compression standard.

Speaking of Open Source technologies that Hollywood might not fully appreciate, the
distributors of the DeCSS DVD-playing code got help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation recently. The EFF filed briefs saying the DeCSS code does, in
fact, have legal uses, like allowing your Linux system to play “Fight Club.” Just because you can do something nefarious with a program doesn’t make it bad, right?
It’s like the old saying, guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

What are they smoking?

A guest columnist at ZDNet advocated Bill Gates for president this week, calling
him “persistent and capable” and someone who’s demonstrated “ruthless competitiveness when dealing with adversaries.” In other words, someone who knows how
to screw over his neighbor. That’s nice — you know, in the grand scheme of things, I’d rather have a guy who gets it on with his intern.

Linux for business

InfoWorld reported that version 2.4 of the Linux kernel should help the operating system break into more businesses. The new version boasts
“wider hardware support, superior scalability,and reliability improvements,” so says InfoWorld.

New in NewsForge this week

First Linux laptop maker Tuxtops suspended laptop sales, then news editor
Tina Gasperson got the inside scoop on what the company may be doing next.
Could custom configurations for laptops be in the company’s future?

We also tried to find out what controversial Linux company LinuxOne is up to
these days. They’re talking merger with another company but keeping a very low profile.

Guest writer Tim Hanson reviewed StarOffice and comes to the conclusion
that it’s getting a bad rap from many users.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments

posted on our discussion

page.

Rasterman’s newest project is ‘EVAS,’ as revealed at Linux.conf.au. Linuxtoday.com.au has a summary of this project which merges OpenGL with normal X11, and how it’ll change the way you use X.

Michel Morelli writes “Veramente, a ZioBudda.net collaborator, write this tutorial about how to install and use Epson Stylus Color 680 USB under Linux.”

Thermos writes “Clyde Williamson takes a look at FREE, an open source ‘voting booth’ application, interviews the creator, Jason Kitcat, and discusses the basic problems of having election software created using proprietary technology. Check out the article here.”

Because of the recent power problems in California, many are turning to Solar Power to reduce the problems caused by power grid fluctuations, and to make money selling power back to Californian Utilities.

Freshmeat’s Nathan Hurst explains what goes into the decision-making process at this Open Source software repository. If you don’t do any coding, you may not know that many scripts and applications are rejected… and you may not have heard of ‘troll software.’

In an AskSlashdot posted today, the question of contacting responsible administrators of large Internet companies comes up. This can be a very important question to be addressed, especially if you’ve recently been attacked by a user of the service.

“REDSonic announces its presence at the Linux World Conference & Expo, New York, which is one of the most exciting and largest events for developers and users of the Linux Operating System.” You can read more on LinuxPR.