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Late last month, hardware vendor HP announced plans to offer desktop computers in Australia with Red Hat Linux, OpenOffice.org, and Firefox installed. Now the company has confirmed that it is expanding this program to other parts of the world. Moreover, sources close to the company tell Ars Technica that expanded Linux offerings will also be coming to the US. Our source says that it is a "real possibility" that HP will counter Dell's limited embrace of Linux "sooner rather than later," so long as pilot programs proceed as planned.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #58 for the week September 16th - September 22th, 2007. In this issue we cover the Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 beta release, new MOTU members, new Launchpad release, Software Freedom Day organized by the Ubuntu Nicaragua Team, and, as always, much much more!

Issue 9 looks at Open Source Publishing, using o3 magazine as a case study. This issue looks at creating documents with Scribus, collaborative document editing with OpenOffice, creating graphics for publication with the GIMP and creating newsletters with OpenOffice.

Again, I'm acting as messenger of the Release Team. It has just been decided that the Beta 3 will be out one week latet than originally planned. This is mainly due to some changes in how plasma work that we'd like to see in the new Beta. Highlights of that will be a working panel implementation. In other news, Robert Knight is working on kickoff, which will probably also be part of the next Beta.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that the United States as a nation needs to 'financially incentivize the adoption of Electronic Health Record technology'. While the intentions are good, what this seems to translate into is a rush in the next few years to get EHR software installed at all costs. If this is done in an uncontrolled fashion with proprietary EHR software the long term consequences will be disastrous and expensive.

Explore a new feature in Version 7 of WebSphere Developer for System z: z/OS Database Application Generator. z/OS Database Application Generator automatically generates CICS COBOL programs that can access DB2.

Contrary to yesterday's report, the lawsuit against Monsoon Multimedia for violating the GNU General Public License (GPL) in its distribution of BusyBox may not be headed for a quick settlement. Nor will the settlement necessarily be out-of-court. Yesterday, Monsoon issued a news release that announced that the company was in "settlement negotiations with BusyBox." Graham Radstone, Monsoon chairman and chief operating officer, said, "Since we intend to and always intended to comply with all open source software license requirements, we are confident that the matter will be quickly resolved."

Linux Mint is fast becoming the best alternative for your desktop computing. With many Linux Distributions on the market to choose from Linux Mint feel they have a great operating system that is ready to tackle the Linux marketplace. I have done a short tour of the new Linux Mint 3.1 Celena. Screenshots and Flash video make up this article.

Mathieu Desnoyers posted an updated version of his Linux Kernel Markers patchset explaining, "following Christoph Hellwig's suggestion, aiming at a Linux Kernel Markers inclusion for 2.6.24, I made a simplified version of the Linux Kernel Markers. There are no more dependencies on any other patchset." He continued, "the modification only involved turning the immediate values into static variables and adapting the documentation accordingly. It will have a little more data cache impact when disabled than the version based on the immediate values, but it is far less complex."

We have several DDR3 related articles in the works, but in this article we will be looking just at the DDR3 system memory performance in the RAMspeed synthetic benchmark under Linux. The DDR3 memory we'll be using is the OCZ DDR3-1333 2GB Gold Kit with a part number of OCZ3G13332GK.

Consider this from Brian Jones, a Microsoft manager who has worked on OOXML for six years. In July, Jones was asked on his blog whether Microsoft would actually commit to conform to an officially standardised OOXML. His response: “It’s hard for Microsoft to commit to what comes out of Ecma [the European standards group that has already OK’d OOXML] in the coming years, because we don’t know what direction they will take the formats." Now that’s cynical.

Playing Al Gores 'An inconvenient truth' adds to the problem it is trying to solve, because the hardware burns 25 to 30 percent more energy than it actually needs to. Why? DRM. Who pays for all that? You, the consumer. Microsoft - and all its DRM buddies - continue to claim up to this very day that DRM won't affect the consumer too much. However, behind closed doors the bird is singing quite another song.

The One Laptop per Child project has announced a new scheme in the US and Canada to accelerate the machine's slow uptake. In other news from the organisation, learning programmes are set to begin in various African locations in October.

FaunOS offers a full KDE desktop system with a comprehensive set of applications as either a live DVD or a live USB flash drive. The USB format is the distro's primary focus. FaunOS is based upon Arch Linux, and ships with Arch's package management system. The more I tested FaunOS, the more impressed I was

GNU/Linux offers a bewildering variety of flavors -- or distributions, as they're called. To a newcomer's eye, many of these seem virtually identical to each other. Yet, the more you learn about a distribution and the community that surrounds it, the more different they become. Here, in alphabetical order, is a list of the seven distributions that have most affected GNU/Linux as a whole:

I have read about Asterisk and wanted to test it out as I will be managing/troubleshooting it at work anytime soon, so I thought of getting my hands dirty and getting some basic experience on it.

"Lots of scheduler updates in the past few days, done by many people," noted Ingo Molnar, going on todescribe the more significant updates."Most importantly, the SMP latency problems reported and debugged by Mike Galbraith should be fixed for good now." Ingo noted that the current code base was looking stable and was likely to be merged into the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel,"so please give it a good workout and let us know if there's anything bad going on.

What's the best desktop Linux? For me, it's SimplyMEPIS 6.5, soon to be replaced by 7.0. But this is both a dumb question and a dumb answer. The real question is: What's the best desktop operating system for you?

there's new a dpkg version in experimental: 1.14.7~newshlib, which contains my work to enhance dpkg-shlibdeps with symbol-based dependencies. The work is finished and thus we decided to upload it to experimental to have some broader testing before releasing it into unstable.

There has been a lot of talk lately about WPF/Silverlight. I have also been learning and writing WPF articles, but what I thought might make an interesting article would be to compare and contrast WPF/Flash. I feel I have the right to do this, as I have worked with both technologies, and although I am not selling myself as an expert in either, I feel confident enough to write this article, I thought it would just make some interesting reading for others that just dont know how WPF or Flash work. For example if you're a Flash developer and dont know what WPF is, I am hoping this article will help you, and vise versa.

[We've all had a bit of a set to recently over Silverlight/Moonlight. Here's an article that compares WPF/Silverlight with Flash. - tracyanne]