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A national centre to promote the development of open source software will be officially launched next week. The National Open Centre (NOC) holds its official launch at the Houses of Parliament on 26 February.

Thumbs up to Dell for the launch of its IdeaStorm website, which asks customers what new products and/or services they'd like Dell to launch, then gets them to vote on the best ones.

[Site busy at moment - Service Temporarily Unavailable - Please try again later. Apache/2.2.2 (Fedora) Server at http://www.dellideastorm.com Port 80 - Hey Dell uses Fedora? - AS]

CollabNet joined nine other open source and Linux vendors last week at the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York to form the Open Solutions Alliance, a group dedicated to driving adoption of open source business systems.

It's been a very busy week in the LinuxQuestions Screenshots department. This week we installed and grabbed some cool screenshots of the following distributions: Edubuntu 7.04 Alpha 4, Xubuntu 7.04 Alpha 4, Ubuntu 7.04 Alpha 4, Kubuntu 7.04 Alpha 4, openSUSE 10.3 Alpha 1, PCLinuxOS 2007 Test 2, SAM Desktop 2007 Test 2, sidux 2007-01 Preview 3, X-Evian 2.0 prebeta, Knoppel 0.8, DesktopBSD 1.0, KateOS 3.2 LIVE Beta, FreeSBIE 2.0.1 and Mandriva 2007.1 Beta 1. Enjoy!

With an introduction of a new Firefox extension in PHP, Terry Chay comments in his blog about the nitty-gritty that he had experienced working on it. He first explains the purpose that this extension allows PHP scripts to send debugging or profiling information to Firefox’s Firebug without having to write the page itself. He says the standard way of debugging in PHP involves echoing code to the screen. The fact that PHP is a scripting language makes this an way of debugging on the Web. But this may lead to some breaks in your site. This is especially relevant when you are debugging a well formed XML or JSON response, he says.

Organisations considering a change of productivity suites may do well to follow the example of Queensland University of Technology (QUT), which has taken a cautious approach to Microsoft Office 2007 and instead focused on sprucing up its back-end messaging environment.

In another sign of the approach apocalypse, Red Hat is apparently preparing to announce a deal to work with Microsoft on interoperability.

Suse Linux on Intel hardware is the server platform of choice for the New Zealand Inland Revenue Department as it embarks on a major, compliance-driven electronic document management project. The department is still investigating its options, but has already specified Linux running on an Intel platform as its preferred platform for the project, ahead of Sun Sparc for Solaris.

A group of 10 companies have formed an alliance to improve open source enterprise applications. The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) believes the market for open source business products is still in its infancy. It will work on defining and promoting best practise and frameworks to improve interoperability between applications.

In this article, Koenning discovers what life could be like if technology job titles matched the actual work performed. From the CEO to the janitor, this covers the spectrum of ridiculous but rather real job titles...

The Desktop User Guide is here to help you accomplish specific tasks with the desktop applications. It is written for individuals who are unfamiliar with the default Fedora Desktop and who may be running their first Linux desktop.

IDG's East Coast Linux gathering is now officially called the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit (LWOSS) and the inaugural 2007 version was held February 14 and 15 in the conference area of the Marriott Marquis hotel in Manhattan, not in a huge convention center. Despite the longer name, it was such a cute little conference that I kept wanting to pat it on its head. But sometimes smaller is better, and in many ways this 600-person LWOSS was more fun and more informative then its larger Boston and New York predecessors.

It is important to understand that operating systems kernels are a side show of open source movement. Scripting languages and applications (especially scripting languages) are the key components of the movement.

Without a doubt, the topic wasn't on the official list of conference tracks at LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit 2007. But among IT managers and developers who braved icy winds and snow to trek to the two-day show in New York City, talk was in the air over whether software emerging from the open source tradition is really any better than other software.

Issue number 77 of the Fedora Weekly News.

This article discusses similarities and differences that will be visible to application programmers and analysts on the Solaris OS and Linux.

For the consumer desktop/laptop market, Linux has been a non-starter. Sure, you can find many many different flavours of Linux available online, but you can't go to the local Big Box store and get a PC loaded with Linux on it. For that matter, it's not enven in stock these days at Best Buy. Instead, you find versions running on embedded devices such as my friend Tivo and various other gadgets, but it's all carefully hidden away from the end user.

When something goes wrong with your Linux-based system, you can try to diagnose it yourself with the many troubleshooting tools bundled with the operating system. Knowing about these tools, and how to effectively use them, can help you overcome many of the common problems on your system. Here's a list of some of the weapons in your arsenal against Linux problems.

This tutorial will show you how to set up a serial console on a Linux system, and connect to it via a null modem cable. This is quite useful if your Linux server is in a headless configuration (no keyboard or monitor), as it allows you to easily get a console on the system if there are any problems with it (especially network problems, when SSH is not available). In the end, the GRUB menu will appear over the serial link, as will the bootup messages (output when booting the system). I am using Debian Etch on the server and Ubuntu Edgy on my client, although this should work on any Linux distribution.

Red Hat Inc's CEO has said the company is encouraging customers to adopt Microsoft Corp's offer of support vouchers for Novell's Inc's rival Linux operating system in order to get the issue over with.