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The Danish Competition Authority has conducted a market analysis of office software so as to give governmental agencies recommendations for public purchases. The results are a definite "live and let live" between the competing standards ODF and OOXML.

Computers get faster and smaller every year, but in the case of servers – the building blocks for many modern businesses – the tasks we expect them to perform have increased to match. We so rely on these servers that we increasingly need to monitor what they do, how they do it and when they hit problems. An under appreciated aspect of modern server designs is that they now incorporate facilities to monitor themselves and report problems: a small computer built into a bigger server to monitor it used to be reserved for very expensive systems, but now even the cheapest 1U Dell server comes with this kind of monitoring and control.

Sony surprised the eBook market last week when it announced it was adopting the open ePub standard. Could this move pressure Amazon to follow suit or is it too big to care.

Asterisk is one of the best telephony solutions which is free to use. There are others such as yate that provide same type of solutions and even more custom ones. Due to the easy of implementation Asterisk has become more popular than anything else. Asterisk is very easy to use and lots of open source and closed source panels provide a GUI for it.

A couple of months ago, Free Software Magazine went through what you’d call a “rough patch” in terms of hosting: 3FN, which hosted FSM, was effectively shut down by the FTC in the United States. Many companies had their backup servers on 3FN’s networks — and therefore lost everything. We were lucky enough to have a full backup over in Europe. So, we quickly moved everything to CariNet. What’s the aftermath of this adventure? Read about this cautionary tale at Free Software Magazine

Microsoft's earned the respect of certain sections of the open-source community for its engineering work around open-source and Linux. Specifically, its support for MySQL, PHP and JBoss on Windows and its involvement with Eclipse and Apache have been welcomed by developers and various community leaders in and around these technologies and projects. Yet, there remain many more skeptical and even suspicious of Microsoft and its motives, especially when it comes to statements and legal actions on patents.

Writing honestly about Linux distributions is not a way to become popular or make friends. When a given distribution, any distribution, has problems and a reporter writes about it there are always fans who will circle the wagons and/or go on the attack. I am very used to that by now. It's no surprise at all that has happened with a few CentOS loyalists. What is surprising is that it is continuing more than two weeks after I last wrote about the subject.

Some heavy lifting has been done to move Chrome to the 64-bit world. It's Linux-only for now, though, and don't expect doubled performance over 32-bit versions.

WorksWithU reported a couple weeks ago on new features in Ubuntu 9.10, like kernel mode setting and GRUB 2, that are likely to please geeks. But Ubunti 9.10 (codenamed Karmic Koala) will also sport changes aimed at traditional users.

This week I revisited a distribution I first wrote about back in 2007, Pardus Linux. It’s developed by the Turkish National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptography, it has its own package management system called PISI (Packages Installed Successfully, as Intended), and it’s not based on any other Linux distribution, which makes quite a change these days. I was eager to see how it had developed since our last encounter.

The Linux Foundation has published an update to last year's study on Linux kernel development. The updated study reports that for each kernel release there has been a 10 percent increase in the number of contributing developers, resulting in a 42 percent increase in patch acceptance.

Mozilla has taken a position on the European Union's proposed settlement with Microsoft about browser integration in Windows 7. Both Mozilla Foundation's Mitchell Baker and Mozilla's general counsel feel that Microsoft is benefiting all too well from the settlement.

openSUSE is defaulting to the KDE desktop, according to an announcement on the opensuse-project mailing list by Micahel Löffler. From openSUSE 11.2 onwards, the installation process from DVD will offer a choice between KDE and GNOME, with KDE pre-selected. Users accepting the default installation settings will therefore get a KDE desktop.

[It always defaulted to KDE up until Novell took it over. - Scott]

All in all, I think Free Software users know from practical experience how to question and why to question; we also have learned about freedom in a way that most people don't get to--as a practical reality, an experience, not just a slogan.

Suppose you have a directory full of files with filenames such as oldfile, my-new-file, some_document. Suppose you would like to rename these files to File1, File2, file3.

Remember the olden days of hertzes and bytes? Now it's giga-everything. Paul Ferrill takes advantage of low hardware prices to build a super-duper high-power Linux workstation for cheap. How cheap? $1000? $500?

Cybersecurity is an increasingly frequent topic in the news, and this week brought word of the indictment of some of the most notorious hackers in the world. With so many breaches in the news, you might understandably be wondering how safe your own financial information is, and whether anyone is doing anything to protect you.

At the turn of this decade Miguel de Icaza was the unblemished hero of the free software movement and chief architect and co-creator, with Federica Mena, of the GNOME project, which had come into being as the free software response to KDE. Now de Icaza is regarded with suspicion because of his support for Mono. What happened to bring about this change?

The PySide LPGL Python binding for Qt is new and the Python::OpenCL wrapper now runs with AMD's ATI Stream SDK.

Ubuntu stands out as the most popular Linux distribution but which other versions make up the top ten?