Anonymous Reader writes: “In the past there have been critics saying that Linux would go the way of Unix and become fragmented. Luckily, there has been those in the community fighting to keep that fate from happening. For instance, we have the Linux Standard Base which gives specifics on where specific libraries and binaries should be kept making a more level platform for Linux. But recently I started to worry over something very minute; something that would seem so insignificant and overlooked that it could actually cause some problems.

Read the short article from NWSupplies.com.”

The Don Jones Newswires on Afr.com report that some Microsoft customers are angry at its new licensing agreements. “The chief information officer of one large European financial concern, who declined to be named for fear of raising Microsoft’s ire, said he was ’70 per cent sure’ his firm would start moving its more than 30,000 computer desktops to Linux-based software made by a company called Ximian Inc, instead of re-signing with Microsoft, even if the systems might crash more often.”

LinuxPlanet looks at Conectiva, one of the less well known of the four UnitedLinux partners, at least in the United States. “UnitedLinux will also help Conectiva with a serious recognition problem it’s been having. Many software vendors haven’t been bothering to test their products with Conectiva, so there are few cases of this distribution being listed as one of those certified to run a particular package properly. Without these certifications, there are many Brazilian and Latin American clients that remain out of Conectiva’s reach, specifically those who have headquarters in the United States or Europe and dictate their foreign offices’ software usage.”

–By Grant Gross –

The Simputer project — with a goal of supplying low-cost, Linux powered portable computers to people in developing nations — hasn’t generated a lot of attention lately after getting tons of press last summer. But the lack of noise doesn’t mean the project is dead — although the original release date was targeted for March, a company working on the Simputer is hoping to push a pre-production model out the door late this summer.
Encore Software Limited of Bangalore, India, is now accepting orders for Simputer evaluation kits. Shashank Garg, v.p. of product development, says the company has sent out about 60 of the kits, and has requests for another 200. Those backorders are expected to be filled in four to six weeks, Garg says.

“While several have gone to developers in India, a reasonable number have been shipped to developers abroad,” Garg says. “In fact, from the next lot, we will ship several more to
developers abroad. So there has been interest from all over the world.”

Encore is planning for the Simputer to support English, plus a handful of Indian languages. Garg says he’s expecting other developers to provider support for other languages.

The evaluation kits come in four models: monochrome with 32 MB RAM and 16 MB flash; color with 32 MB RAM and 16 MB flash; monochrome with 64 MB RAM and 32 MB flash; and color with 64 MB RAM and 32 MB flash.

Garg says the original March release date ended up being overly optimistic, and the Simputer team had some coding and design issues that pushed back the release.

While the project was original organized around the Simputer Trust non-profit, its .org site appears inactive, with a March release date still listed. Email to the contract person at that site bounced back, and the last news article about Simputer listed there is from January. But the Simputer mailing list remains active, and Garg says Encore, one of the original contributors to the project, is pushing toward its commercial release.

Encore is one of the early commercial licensees of the Simputer, but Garg says the company is open to partnerships with software providers and resellers. His company is also planning to provide customized embedded solutions to some clients.

Simputer made headlines last summer, when it was announced as a hardware alternative for people in developing nations. A ZDNet story in January reported the projected price to be around $200, but Garg now says the price should range from $250 to $400. The model mentioned in the ZD story only had 32MB of RAM, however.

The Simputer is slightly larger than a Palm handheld, making it conveniently portable and easy to share among a group of villagers, and it has features like a Smart Card reader that set it apart from some other handhelds. But that price may not be the extremely low-cost alternative that many news reports have made it out to be. Low-end, low-RAM Palms without wireless connectivity list for under $200, while low-end desktop systems at Walmart.com with LindowsOS preloaded (but no monitor) list for as low as $299.

“The cost is really a function of the volumes we can attain,” Garg says. “Another thing is that we have gone substantially beyond the initial spec, which has increased the cost
a bit.”

mangeli writes: “I started using linux two years ago with a downloaded copy (I later bought the boxed set) of Mandrake 7.0. After a week of that, and a week of 7.1, I decided to try out a distro called Slackware (http://www.slackware.com). I don’t know what made me do it, maybe it was the name, something about it appealed to me …
Whats that got to do with 8.1?” you must be asking yourself. Well, I wanted to let you know my history with this distro. The production servers I admin at work currently run Slackware 8.0 with a 2.4.14 kernel (I know, I need to upgrade the kernel) and while I have tried other distributions (Ok, one other distribution, gentoo) I keep coming back to Slackware.”

Full review at Tinyminds.org.”

In what may become a turning point in the evolution of Linux User
Groups, a LUG is organizing that promises to be a radical departure from
tradition, and redefines the role of the LUG in the Linux community at large.
The GBLUG’s organizational meeting is scheduled for for Wednesday night, June
26th at 7:30. It will be held at the North County Public Library, which is located at 1010 Eastway in Glen Burnie, across from the Harundale Plaza Shopping Center.

The Glen Burnie Linux User Group website (http://gblug.linuxorbit.com)
proclaims that ‘If Linux is to experience an explosion of popularity, then an
explosion of ‘grass-roots’ advocacy must precede it. This advocacy includes
community activities designed to aid in recruitment, fundraising and
establishing a local identity for Linux. Growing the Linux user base in the
LUG area should take precedence over all other objectives.”

This new, aggressive attitude is markedly different from the typical LUG,
which tends to focus almost exclusively on educating its membership in the
finer points of Linux usage, administration and programming. The Glen Burnie
LUG will operate more like a social club, with light, entertaining meetings
targeted at new or casual Linux users, and participation in community
activities designed to garner new members and increase Linux’s exposure.
According to the group’s founder, Jamie Harrison, the change in focus is
necessary “if Linux is to move from being a popular niche operating system to
being a popular desktop operating system.”

“We keep talking about what programmers and companies should do to make Linux
more of a desktop force. I’ve heard people say that because there’s not a
huge demand for the (Linux) software, the developers won’t allocate
resources, and then others say that until the software is developed, ther
won’t be any demand. It’s a ‘Catch-22,'” Harrison said.

“I say that Linux develops from the ground up. One person shows it to another
person, who shows it to another person, and so on. As more Windows users
become Linux users, the landscape changes. Software development companies
take notice, hardware distributors get on board, employers start to hear
about Linux from their workforce, and we see progress. But it all starts with
us.

“The way that most LUGs operate now, only the most avid ‘techno geeks’ could
possibly enjoy themselves, and as a result, a great opportunity to take Tux
to the masses is lost. I propose using the LUG organization as a vehicle for
the expansion of Linux usage among average computer users” Harrison said.

When asked about his expectations for the immediate future, Harrison was
realistic. “I suspect that, in the beginning, it will be slow, lonely going.
Many counties in America have only a few dozen Linux users total, and how
many of them are going to be willing to become Linux advocates? I don’t know.
But I’m in this for the long haul.

“One day we’ll get over the hump, and all of the sudden, instead of pushing
the revolution up the hill, we’ll find ourselves trying to keep up with it as
it rolls down. Who knows? Maybe as it rolls down that hill it’ll be crushing
Windows as it goes. That when it’ll really be fun.”

“Computer software could make Bruno Crespo’s job much easier — if only he had the cash. Crespo, the chief administrator of Callao, the port city that abuts Lima, has a long wish list: a new tax database, a computerized property registry and modernized desktop programs for 200 PCs, half of which run on Windows 95. But like all city governments in impoverished Peru, scarce revenues can barely provide for basic public services, let alone computer programs for municipal workers.” More at MSNBC.

The Register: “Palladium will essentially create a proprietary computing environment where Microsoft is the trusted gatekeeper, guard, watchstander, and ruler of all it surveys, thus turning the majority of computing users into unwilling corporate serfs and subjects of the Redmond Regime.”

“Red Hat has axed its “other” operating system eCos, which formerly belonged to Cygnus, and there’s an analysis of why at Rick Lehrbaum’s LinuxDevices site.

Scooter actually scooped this here for CNET, but as is the way with CNET scoops, it was buried in Paragraph 13, and so no one noticed.

CNET reported that Red Hat had laid off its eCos development team in England and cancelled the project” More at The Register.

From developer.kde.org:
“The following is the outline for our KDE 3.1 release schedule.
KDE 3.1 is the first feature release in the KDE 3.x series.”