The penguin begins the march south, Feb 27, 2008

There's a still nearly 11 months to go before the penguin sets up camp on the Apple Isle but the wheels are slowly being cranked into motion by the Tasmanian Linux Users Group as they prepare to host the 2009 Australian national Linux conference.

Seven years ago, Strathcona Baptist Girls Grammar School, which is situated in a suburb of Melbourne, took a step that made it stand out from other educational institutions.

In a few short weeks, it will be time for national standards bodies to decide whether the Microsoft Office Open XML specification will be accepted as an ISO standard or not.

It's normal to build up a mental picture of a person based on what you know about them, especially if you plan to meet that person. At times, the image is not too far removed from reality. At others, the mental image and reality could not be more different.

Melbourne's Stewart Smith heads the 2008-09 team of office-bearers who have taken over at Linux Australia; the 26-year-old Smith is a senior software engineer at MySQL.

The next Australian national Linux conference will be held in Hobart, the first time the Tasmanian capital has been given the honour of playing host.

Reverse-engineering open source drivers for hardware devices will only reduce the pressure on manufacturers to provide such drivers, Dirk Hohndel told an audience at the Australian national Linux conference today.

Oracle's push into the Linux space is gaining momentum with the company even taking the trouble to fly someone down from Singapore to present a talk today at the Australian national Linux conference.

With Sun Microsystems announcing earlier this month that it had acquired the most popular open source database company, MySQL, there has been speculation aplenty, some of it grossly misinformed, on just how much change this will mean for staff at the small Swedish company.

Should free and open source software projects set a release schedule that adheres to the old geek adage: release when it's ready? Or should time-based releases become the norm?

The BBC and Linux - when you see the two words juxtaposed together, one tends to be surprised. Simply because all the recent coverage of the Beeb has been about the iPlayer fiasco - how the biggest public broadcaster came out with a player that could cater to just one platform.

The next release of Debian GNU/Linux, Lenny, is expected to take place before the end of 2008, senior developer Martin Krafft told a miniconference on the distribution at the Australian national Linux conference today.

In August 2003, a little more than three months after the SCO Group had filed a lawsuit against IBM, seeking damages for alleged breach of contract, I had an email exchange with Blake Stowell, who was then the public relations manager of the former company.

When Kim Hawtin, like many other young Australians, went to London in 2000 to work. he never knew that he would be introduced to one of the abiding interests of his life while there. Then in his late 20s, he had gone over to the mother country after graduation. While there he got involved with Consume.net, a group aiming to build up community wireless networks.

begun. Yes, we are hearing that hackneyed old saw again - this will be the year of the Linux desktop. Some so-called pundits say it directly, some in an indirect manner but they aren't holding back

Five days ago, three members of the free and open source software community finally heaved a sigh of relief and wiped the sweat from their brows after winning a battle they had waged for years.

There are 35 days left before Australia's national Linux conference gets underway in Melbourne on January 28 but tickets have already sold out.

Three cheers for the developers and management of the K Desktop Environment. They have taken a principled stand on the divisive issue of OOXML, the Microsoft Office Open XML document format. And for this the KDE folk deserve a round of applause.

In nearly 10 years of experimenting with, and, later, using Linux, I have never been presented with a situation where someone actually asked me to preside over their initial foray into the use of the open source operating system on a regular basis.

It is not uncommon for those who write about Linux or other FOSS software to be inundated with feedback from users. At times that feedback is a bit unbalanced, a trifle raw and, occasionally, plain silly.