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During a visit to a major university last week, The VAR Guy listened as an integrator slammed Asterisk as a “toy.” The open source VoIP platform, he asserted, lacked a service and support network for big enterprise and university deployments. Apparently, the folks at Digium (located a few hundred miles away…) somehow overheard the conversation. The Asterisk market leader has launched a new warranty program that could give skeptical partners and customers more faith in open source-based IP telephony. Here are the details.

When you have shelled out for a swanky mouse like the Logitech VX Nano, you want to make the most out of your investment, which means making its programmable buttons work. However, many Linux distributions recognize most mice as generic pointing devices, so none of the fancy extra buttons work right out of the box. The btnx utility can help you to turn your mouse into the versatile tool it is meant to be.

Orange and Access have become the latest companies to join the LiMo Foundation, a consortium aimed at promoting mobile Linux. The companies announced their LiMo memberships here on Monday at the Mobile World Congress. Both companies come bearing gifts. The European operator Orange plans to launch a "fully open, Linux-powered handset" in partnership with Access and fellow LiMo member Samsung Electronics. Japanese Linux company Access brings with it an established developer network that was acquired when it bought PalmSource and its Palm OS (which became Garnet) in 2005.

I’d like to configure my Debian box to backup two remote servers using rsnapshot software. It should make incremental snapshots of local and remote filesystems for any number of machines on 2nd hard disk located at /disk1 ( /dev/sdb2). How do I make backups?

From the Propeller Head Dept. Call me a propeller head, but I recently found myself chuckling at a collection of Linux compile and configuration messages on a German site.

[An older article, but I haven't seen it before. It made be laugh quite a bit :-) - Sander]

Over the last few months, open source has gained momentum at Stanford University in the form of the Stanford Open Source Lab. Inspired by groups like the Free Software Foundation, Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab, Drupal, Openflows Community Technology Lab, and MIT’s Open Course Ware, a few people at Stanford decided to band together and dedicate their time and energies to the development of free/open/libre learning and knowledge resources.

Great news for the English-speaking IT Crowd: the German makers of c’t magazine, Hannover-based Heise Verlagsgesellschaft just opened their great news portal heise online in the UK as well. Jonathan Bennett, who is editor-in-chief of the new English-speaking sites, wrote a first editorial and greeting message for the readers, headlined “Born at the right time“. And indeed, it seems so. Thanks for providing us with high-quality articles, and I wish you all a good and successful start.

Sun Microsystems announced today that they are buying Innotek. You can read the announcement here. In case you don't immediately recognize the name Innotek, they are the makers of the VirtualBox virtualization software that many of us have come to know and love. It's a great alternative to VMWare and they have an Open Source edition as well.

SAM Linux Desktop, an Xfce-fronted distribution based on PCLinuxOS, aims to be a complete and modern desktop operating system. Though it has problems that need to be worked out before it will match the competition, it offers an easy install, a 3-D desktop environment, and a flurry of programs to suit your needs.

Vimicro Corporation, a leading fabless semiconductor company that designs advanced mixed-signal multimedia products and solutions, today announced the launch of its most recent open mobile platform, Vinno-III-Linux, based on the Linux operating system, and the addition of two new Vimicro Mobile Multimedia Processors, the VC0848 and VC0878, to the company's product line when attending Mobile World Congress 2008 in Barcelona, Spain.

At CeBIT LinuxPark, Linpus Technologies will be demonstrating its brand new Linux operating system, Linpus Linux Lite, designed to empower the next billion PC customers. Linpus Linux Lite has a unique dual-mode user interface making it the quickest and easiest way to start enjoying the opportunity of information. It also works on extremely low cost hardware bringing the dream of buying a PC much closer for many people.

This document describes how to set up the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) Open Source Edition v5.0 on Debian Etch. The resulting system provides a full featured collaboration-suite with many features that I cannot list all here - please have a look at the feature list. It also comes with a nice (themeable) AJAX web interface for administration and user access.

A while ago, I wrote a comment on Brian Jones' OOXML blog, asking 'Why doesn't Microsoft try to save its clients money, instead of making sure their clients waste more money like which is the result of trying to get OOXML standardized at ISO?" I also used the form on his page to ask him to comment on my entry about two weeks ago, but till today, no reaction. Probably the people I'd like an answer from don't read LXer, but I thought I might try posting it anyway. The 'Full story' link links to my original comment of Dec 14th 2007. Sad to see there's no answer.

In the time between the previous community news and the last, there have been a number of new and interesting cool features added to Compiz-Fusion. The changes have taken place due to our community and our very own onestone who has added a slew of KDE 4 composite features to Compiz. Some highlights this week are: KDE 4 Window decorator plasma integration, Show Mouse and Area-Based maginification through the mag plugin, Wiimote integration and True blending of wallpapers and cubecaps.

PCLinuxOS Magazine, February 2008 (Issue 18) is available to download.

If you are a Netflix member with and HD DVD player you may have received notice. But if you are still on the fence on choosing sides in the format war, take note: Netflix is now exclusively Bluray.

People often note the surprising number of Macs at Linux events. The question is why? The short answer is Macs are pretty. So now the question is why can't Dell or System76 rival Apple's design.

You knew Ubuntu was stable. You also knew it could handle quite a bit of work. However, the bloggers at the NetNewser have tested Ubuntu beyond almost all measures, on a relatively common PC. Go here for a glimpse of how productivity, stability, and eye candy all come together in an insane experience.

I’ve been running Vector Linux 5.9 Standard since it was released about six weeks ago. I’ve mostly been satisfied with it. I ran into a problem, though, when I first tried to install the Culmus fonts, a popular font set for the Hebrew character set.

When Firefox 2.12 came out on Feb. 7, it brought with it fixes for three critical security holes and seven that were not quite so serious. According to the security advisories, many of these problems were also fixed in the Thunderbird 2.12 e-mail client. Unfortunately, there is no Thunderbird 2.12. The Mozilla Foundation's press release focused on the Firefox 2.12 security fixes. The Foundation also reported, though, in its MFSA (Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory), that these same bugs had been fixed in the fictitious Thunderbird 2.12.