Key to Linux Desktop Apps May Be in Portland
The so-called Portland Project that the Open Source Development Labs and freedesktop.org have been working to give Linux desktops a unified Gnome-KDE graphical interface has been released.

OSDL says the common interfaces will make it easier to develop Linux desktop apps. Anticipating the creation of a rich Linux infrastructure, OSDL reckons ISVs will be able to port their applications to Linux regardless of the environment.

The Portland widgetry includes command-line tools to help ISVs install and integrate their software in major Linux desktops.

Portland 1.0 is included in Debian, Fedora and OpenSUSE. Red Flag and Xandros will include it in their next release. Trolltech's Qt 4.2, the primary KDE application framework, is also providing it.

It is expected to be in the Linux Standard Base.

See http://portland.freedesktop.org

Gadhafi Reportedly Bellies Up for MIT Laptop
Libya is going to buy enough laptops to supply its 1.2 million schoolchildren by June of 2008 from One Desktop Per Child (ODPC), according to the New York Times.

The $250 million deal will put a server in every school and provide satellite-based Internet connection and other infrastructure.

ODPC has also reached tentative agreements with Argentine, Brazil, Nigeria and Thailand.
Quanta's mass production of the Red Hat Linux-based machine is now set for next June. ODPC says it's just gotten it's first sample B-Test motherboards, the first major revision of the system's electronics. It is still working on its wireless Linux driver. There are six keyboards so far: Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, Nigerian and American English.

The laptop is currently under fire from such as Free Software creator Richard Stallman for using proprietary components.

Meanwhile, Microsoft says a million copies of its XP Starter Edition have been supplied to the Third World. There are now 35 language versions of the thing and it's being sold in 139 countries.

32-Bit SUSE Beats 64-Bit
Neal Nelson & Associates, the computer performance consultancy, says it has results in hand that show that the 32-bit version of Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 has a possible 37% throughput advantage over the 64-bit version of the stuff. The tests were run on a box outfitted with two 64-bit Opteron chips. The tests reportedly ran as many as 512 emulated users processing credit card transactions accepted through Apache2 .cgi web pages.

HP PIs Plead Not Guilty
The three private investigators charged in the HP mess pleaded not guilty at their arraignment Tuesday to the same four felony counts that HP's ousted chairman Patricia Dunn and ethics officer Kevin Hunsaker face.

The three were let go on their own recognizance and told to return for a preliminary hearing on November 17. The three include Ron DeLia, who has been on HP's payroll for years, Matthew Depante, whose outfit Action Research Group (ARG) did the pretexting for DeLia and ARG subcontractor Bryan Wagner, who destroyed his computer ahead of the California attorney general's investigation. Wagner was told to report his whereabouts to the court daily.

There's talk that the California attorney general may offer these three a plea bargain to testify against Dunn, Hunsaker and other HP staff. Naturally they will also challenge the idea that pretexting is illegal - even in California.

Sun Collaborates with Laszlo Systems
Sun says it's going to collaborate with Laszlo Systems, the original developer of OpenLaszlo, an AJAX-style open source rich Internet development platform, so that OpenLaszlo applications run on Java ME devices. OpenLaszlo is supposed to support instantaneous no-download deployments. Sun and Laszlo are contributing resources to a new OpenLaszlo project code named Orbit expecting to release the first demonstrable Orbit app running on Java ME later this year.

IBM Moves Global Procurement to China
IBM is moving global procurement from bucolic Somers in upstate New York to Shenzhen, China in the name of efficiency and to capitalize on emerging market opportunities. It notes that this is the first time one of its corporate-wide organizations has been located outside the US and it claims it means IBM is shifting from being multinational to a "new model - a globally integrated enterprise."

The company's chief procurement officer John Paterson is in Asia now building up internal procurement skills and reshaping the company's supply base in the region, particularly software and services.

IBM's procurement out of Asia has previously focused on hardware. The company says it needs a new set of relationships. It already sources about 30% of its $40 billion procurement spend from the Orient.

IBM has had a procurement center in Shenzhen for the last decade and it is one of its largest procurement organizations outside America.

Pickings Too Slim To Justify Investing: Sevin Rosen
Sevin Rosen, the early stage Ur-venture capital operation that in its heyday backed Compaq, Lotus and SGI, has pulled the plug on its tenth and latest fund drive and is sending back the money because the investment environment stinks.

In a letter sent to investors last Friday, the company complained that there's "too much money" around, that there's "too many deals funded in almost every conceivable space," - and here's the punch line - that there's a "terribly weak exit environment."

Worse, it figures it's gonna be like this for the next five years.

Sevin Rosen reportedly had commitments for $200 million-$300 million, was about to top the fund off and was supposed to start putting it into new companies in the next few weeks.

Sevin Rosen general partner Steve Dow told the New York Times, which broke the story, that the traditional VC model is broken and that Sevin is going to go off and have a think trying to dream up a new approach. Meanwhile, it will continue to invest the money it raised previously and manage its current crop of investments.

Concurrent To Sell PERC VMs
Concurrent is going to sell PERC Ultra, the popular real-time embedded Java virtual machine from Aonix along with its real-time SUSE- and Red Hat-based operating systems.

MySQL Converted to RSS Feeds
NotePage, a Massachusetts communications software house, says its new PHP script, SQL2RSS, will convert MySQL databases to RSS feeds. It says the publisher has complete control over the content syndicated.

Accelerated Cluster Makes Top500
ClearSpeed Technology, the floating point co-processor acceleration house, has produced the first accelerated cluster to make the Top500, number five actually, a beast built out of 655 Sun X4600 server, each fitted with eight dual-core Opterons. ClearSpeed's boards boosted overall performance 24% to 47.38 TeraFLOPS while reportedly adding only 1% to overall power consumption. The system is the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Tsubame supercomputer.

--Copyright Client/Server News