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Microsoft announced that Asian Linux distributor Turbolinux is the latest Linux company to join its Ecma Open XML-Open Document Format Translator Project. Unlike the earlier Microsoft/Linux partnerships—Novell, Xandros and Linspire—there's no patent agreement or any other technical partnerships. This project seeks to create tools to build a "technical bridge" between Microsoft's Open XML Formats and ODF (Open Document Format).

Together, Isaac Garcia and Arnulf Hsu have launched several successful businesses, including two that were eventually purchased by CNET. Garcia and Hsu were firmly in the Microsoft development camp, but recently they noticed what they call the increasing maturity of open source software. They decided to launch their latest endeavor, CentralDesktop.com (CD), using an open source platform.

Microsoft has promised "big dog" products and R&D spend next year, to defend its partner turf and go head-to-head against competitors new and old. Woof! Opening the company's annual Worldwide Partner Conference chief operating officer Kevin Turner adopted a combative tone during a morning session that acknowledged Microsoft partners are being bombarded by new alternatives in technology and platform choice, with on demand software and open source making Microsoft look dated.

Thanks to Colin and Evan’s efforts we now have daily images of a freedom-focused flavour of Ubuntu, "Gobuntu". This is a call for developers who are interested in pushing the limits of content and code freedom - including firmware, content, and authoring infrastructure, to join the team and help identify places where we must separate out pieces that don’t belong in Gobuntu from the standard Ubuntu builds.

Microsoft Corp. is enlisting Linux distributor TurboLinux Inc. to help tailor work being done to translate documents between Open XML and ODF file formats for Japanese and Chinese users. TurboLinux has joined the Microsoft-funded but community-led Open XML-ODF (Open Document Format) translator project and will help ensure that documents based on Open XML can communicate smoothly with ODF-based documents in Office suites that use Japanese and Chinese characters.

[A Groklaw poster insightfully notices that Microsoft has now enlisted all the original United Linux members, except for Mandriva. Coincidence? -- Sander]

What is the future of Linux and open source? What is the contribution of Indian community to the development of Linux kernel? There could be millions of such questions wandering in your mind. So, if you have questions for Linus Torvalds, feel free to ask. Just send in your question at efynm1@efyindia.com. The deadline to submit questions is 13 July 2007.

The CentOS Development team is pleased to announce the availability of the CentOS 5 i386 Live CD. This CD is based on our CentOS-5.0 i386 distribution. This CD has a non writable /usr directory, which means it is not able to have software installed on it after boot up. That means that the purposes of this CD are to see if CentOS will boot/work on your hardware, to test some of the features of CentOS as a workstation, and to use as a Rescue CD.

Fortune magazine has an interesting article stressing the Chinese market's importance to Microsoft's long term strategy, and touching on Linux's involvement in the Chinese market. So has Microsoft truly conquered China? I don't believe so.

I run a master and slave Kerberos servers, which requires setting up kprop to run regularly on the master server in order to transfer any changes to the slave server. I didn't like the standard script, because I only want to know about it in the event of failure. So I wrote this slightly improved script, which does just that.

rPath today announced it is launching a Certified Software Appliance Architect training curriculum, which will give participants the skills needed to build, deploy and maintain software appliances. The curriculum will employ a hands-on, lab-driven approach and focus on application packaging, software appliance design, image construction, lifecycle management, and virtualization technologies.

Ingo Molnar's Completely Fair Scheduler has been merged into the Linux kernel for inclusion in the upcoming 2.6.23 release.

A request for opinion/experience today: does anyone have experience of running (local) Jabber servers under Linux? (Debian, ideally). I've been experimenting with setting up a Jabber server to run within our LAN. I would also very much like for it to hook into our LDAP/Kerberos setup.

Mandriva Korea (MetaNav) begins operations in order to offer Mandriva Linux solutions to organizations and people all over South Korea and the East Asia area. Mandriva, the global Linux distributor, selected MetaNav to become its official local representative in this fast growing technological environment in Asia. Mandriva and MetaNav reached an agreement to work together and co-develop open source products and services closely adapted to the East Asian market.

Canonical has announced the release of Storm, a open source object-relational mapping (ORM) tool for Python that can support simultaneous communication with multiple databases.

The final talk on Saturday at Akademy 2007 was from Patrick Harvie, a Member of the Scottish Parliament for the Green Party. While not a technical wizard like most of the other talks of the day, Patrick was able to describe to us the attitudes to free software from the Government he is elected to keep an eye on, and how the work of KDE developers applies to more than just software.

Is this the world's first Linux canine edition?

"Siag, it sucks less!" This is the slogan for Siag Office. This and the self-effacing name for the Siag Office Word Processor, Pathetic Writer, might leave you thinking that this office suite is a mere plaything, a university student's cobbled-together programming assignment. But don't be fooled by first impressions. Siag Office is a lightweight suite of applications which might be just the right set of office tools for you, especially if you have older hardware.

Following the release of the 2.6.22 kernel [story], Andrew Morton [interview] posted a list of a wide range of patches that are in his -mm kernel, summarizing for each his plans as to whether or not they will be pushed upstream for inclusion in the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel.

I am reaching out to you as a part of a membership drive. Jeff Pulver asked me to lead a relaunch project to preserve FWD's status as a key destination for the people pioneering the new communications landscape. The existing FWD services will remain free, but we are implementing a membership model to fund new services and make FWD self-sustaining.

CentOS, the popular community Linux distribution based upon Red Hat Enterprise Linux, has been at version 5.0 since April of this year, but joining the CentOS 5.0 fleet today is the LiveCD. The CentOS 5.0 LiveCD is based upon CentOS 5.0 i386 and can work out to be a modest Linux workstation or recovery distribution. Included with this new Linux LiveCD is OpenOffice.org 2.0.4, GNOME 2.16, GAIM 2.0.0, and Thunderbird 1.5. While this isn't a great Linux desktop distribution, if you're after a workstation or recovery-oriented distribution, the CentOS 5.0 LiveCD looks great.