OStatic

In its Quixotic effort to never admit defeat, the SCO Group has (again) filed reorganization plans in Bankruptcy Court. It has been a drawn out procedure that first raised the ire of the open source world, and later the courts, as appeals were filed and reorganization plans were rejected and resubmitted.

The SCO Group is giving it another shot, this time proposing it can rise from its ashes by selling some of its assets in a public auction. The money made from these sales will contribute to the operating budget and fund the OpenServer product line and mobile business development. A press release issued earlier says that there are several investment groups interested in a sell off, but even so, they'll still have to wait to hear what the Court says.

Not content to dominate search and online advertising, two operating systems, and cross-platform browser, Google is now getting into the programming language business as well. Yesterday Google announced Go a brand-new systems programming language. Why does Google need Go? According to the FAQ on the site, Google saw a gap in the existing systems programming languages, and the company decided it was worth trying again with a new language that has taken ideas from other systems programming languages as well as scripting languages like Python and JavaScript.

Unix at 40: Hanging on despite strong Linux, Windows challenges. The middle-aged OS is not expected to die any time soon, just slowly fade away.

The Android-Cyanogen kerfuffle. The opening shot was a cease-and-desist letter issued by Google against a developer producing a modified Android ROM with proprietary Google applications.

10 years of Linux accomplishments. Here are the major milestones that it has reached.

50 open source apps for small biz/home office. Datamation surveys the landscape of free offerings, and turns up some gems.

Ubuntu 9.10 netbook remix is looking great. Check out these screenshots from the latest build, which show a markedly improved interface.

After 5 months of work, there's a new version of the Amarok music app. The playlist can now be customized to only show the information you care about, matching the way you use Amarok.

Unix turns 40: The past, present and future of a revolutionary OS. The future of the operating system is clouded, but its legacy will endure.

Intel buys Wind River: the end of the Wintel duopoly? Wind River is a leader in embedded devices, and will become part of Intel's strategy to grow its presence outside the traditional PC.

ARM: Android needs more work before it will sing on netbooks. Moblin and Windows Embedded CE may be in ARM's future, executive says.

U.K. considers emulating data.gov. The government is considering launching an open source data website, similar to the data.gov site launched by the U.S. government in May.

I've never had any deep-seated issues when it came to flashing the BIOS on any of my systems. It's generally something I don't worry about unless it's clearly necessary, because it traditionally meant hunting down floppies that worked or figuring out whether the motherboard in question could flash from CD or USB. My motherboards of late have included handy (proprietary, but still undoubtedly handy) flashing utilities that took the whole media search out of the equation. Problem is, I can only use these handy utilities on Windows, and only one computer in the house fits that description.

All right, there is one emotionally scarring BIOS update in my past. When I built the MythTV box, the motherboard had a sensor that was confident my processor was hitting the 180 degree Celsius mark, and was subsequently shutting down. Of course, the sensor was misreading the temperature, a known issue with this motherboard, and a BIOS flash would put it right. The problem was the motherboard could only flash via floppy, and the one working floppy drive in the house was in another computer. The chassis for the MythTV box didn't have a floppy bay at all, so I ended up holding a floppy drive over the open case while the BIOS flashed.

The likelihood of these sorts of situations happening in the future for those using Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems (including Mac OS X) has just been minimized. The Coreboot project has released the 0.9.0 version of flashrom, which it says is faster than many vendor flash utilities, scriptable, and requires no physical access to the machine in question (no floppy drive, no keyboard, and no monitor? No problem!).

While not a completely new concept, the Debian team introduced what it called a couple of new architectures over the weekend. Except the new architectures aren't really new, per se -- i386 and amd64 are already supported in Debian. They're already supported in the Debian Linux kernel. The new additions are FreeBSD kernels compiled for the aforementioned architectures.

Though much of the fanfare in the Ubuntu camp seems to center on the desktop version, its Server Edition has been steadily attracting interest -- and new users. Thanks to the requests of these users and Ubuntu partners, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has announced it is offering its first official training course dedicated solely to the Ubuntu Server Edition.

There's another new twist, however. While this course will be offered at various partner training centers in June, it will also be offered through a virtual classroom.

GNOME 2.26's 5 best features. It has solid Exchange/Outlook mail compatibility, improved CD/DVD burning, better support for multiple monitors, and more.

Is Ballmer conceding victory to Linux netbooks? He acknowledges that buyers are extra sensitive to prices now.

French police switch from Windows to Linux. Department cuts costs by 70 percent.

Sun deal could make IBM unbeatable in Unix server market. It would give IBM nearly two-thirds share of the Unix systems business.

Red Hat's JBoss Developer Studio 2.0 - Portfolio Edition is now available. It adds Enterprise Application, Portal, SOA and Data Services Platforms.

It's been a long, drawn out, brutal battle on the IT frontlines. Skirmishes can happen anywhere, at random -- in the server room, the board room, the cafeteria, or even, tragically, in civilian populated areas like pubs, restaurants, homes and big box electronics stores. The Mac and Windows battlefront consumes the resources of many foot soldiers, but the biggest, bloodiest conflicts involve the elite, highly trained IT commandos, who must be diplomats as well as fighters, and integrate a number of platforms across a single network.

Overly dramatic? Perhaps, but depending on your work environment and how quirky your mixed network is to configure, maybe not by much. There are several utilities available to promote diplomacy and peaceful interaction between machines in a mixed network. Likewise Software offers its open source Likewise integration applications to keep the peace -- and preserve platform equality and rights -- in a mixed network setting.

The OS Wars are frustrating and costly, but can be resolved with less heartache and far fewer casualties than other conflicts. This is why Likewise is promoting platform peace through t-shirt sales, with the proceeds going to charities supporting the civilian and military casualties of real wars.

SCO chief testifies: Linux is a copy of Unix.....Who is the open source big dog--Red Hat or Sun?.....A new report says more orginizations are jumping on open source, but price is not the only driver.....Are IP liabilities a hidden trap when deploying open source software?.....Should you consider Zimbra for your open source mail server?.....