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As a result of the training for OpenOffice.org conducted by Metamorphosis Foundation and USAID’s MDW project for employees of the Macedonia’s local self-government units, municipality of Makedonska Kamenica started to actively use OpenOffice.org on all computers in the municipality.

An ambitious open project is calling on amateur cartographers to hit the streets, map the world and free maps from commercial interests.

First, Google Inc. introduced free software that could replace some Microsoft Corp. products. Now it has rolled out a free mobile e-mail service for the same consumer market that Research In Motion Ltd. recently set its sights on.

Happy New Year of the Pig and welcome to this year's 8th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Those users who enjoy beta testing Linux distribution had an exciting week as new development builds from Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, openSUSE and Ubuntu all appeared on public mirrors. In the meantime, the Fedora project announced a delay in the release of Fedora 7 - now scheduled for late May. In other news, Ubuntu has clarified its position on the issue of proprietary video drivers, Daniel Robbins is about to formally return to the project he founded some seven years ago, SabayonLinux loses two key developers, and CentOS announces plans for the all-new CentOS 5. The feature story takes a brief look at two distributions which recently bumped their version numbers while in the middle of development - SaxenOS and SimplyMEPIS. Happy reading!

LXer Feature: 19-Feb-2007

Microsoft's recent letter argues for choice of formats, not office suites. Yet, their argument undermines the foundation of interoperability that a single standard can offer. In other words, their argument is so backwards, it makes this old hillbilly's head spin.

Novell ZENworks Patch Management Alleviates Patch and Update Burdens and Ensures Smooth Operations

Meet C.Umashankar IAS, Managing Director of Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu Ltd (www.elcot.com) . He is a guest lecturer at IIM-B (the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore) for the e-governance training program targeted at senior Government officers, and a post-graduate diploma program titled `Reinventing government'. Also, he lectures at the National Productivity Council, New Delhi, on transformation of administration using e-governance.

The polls are closed and the results are in for the 2006 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards. Among the winners are Ubuntu, Firefox, MySQL and OpenOffice.org. The Members Choice Awards allow members of the Linux community to choose their favorite products in a variety of categories including Linux Distribution of the Year, Office Suite of the Year and Web Browser of the Year. The total number of categories this year was 21.

The complete list of the winners is as follows (percentage of votes received in parentheses):

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: The Dolphin file manager is moved into kdebase. Continued work in Umbrello courtesy of the Student Mentoring program. Graphical element representations start to be introduced in Kalzium. More new country maps in KGeography. KSpaceDuel begins the porting process to a scalable graphics interface, with further SVG intergration work in KMines, KWin4, KNetWalk, KBlackBox and KMahjongg. KolourPaint gains the ability to interface with image scanning hardware. Improved handling of the XPS document format in okular. Lilypond export functionality in KTabEdit. More work in the KDE Fonts Manager. The KNewStuff2 framework reaches new milestones in its reworking for KDE 4.

The popularity of OpenOffice, the open source productivity suite, will be key to the financial success of Novell, said company president and CEO, Ron Hovsepian, who hopes to be a 'custodian' between the open source community and the commercial world.

IBM is hijacking the debate over document standards to promote its desktop suites while refusing to look at the merits of each standard, according to Microsoft's general manager of interoperability and standards Tom Robertson. Big Blue is one of the main backers of the Open Document Format (ODF), while Microsoft supports Open XML. "IBM does not want Open XML to be standardised. It does not want an alternative to be out there," Robertson told vnunet.com in an interview.

Sony has been telling us for a while now that the PlayStation 3 is more than a game console, it is a computer. They tried this with the PS2 as well, when they released the Linux Kit for PS2, though that didn't make much of a splash. This time around, however, they built the PS3 with Linux in mind, and from the looks of things so far, Linux (any distribution) is going to have a lot to do on the PS3.

Open source projects have had a significant impact in areas such as operating systems (Linux), databases (MySQL), web applications (Apache), and development tools (Eclipse). However, they have been slower in reaching other areas where open standards and community involvement can make an equally positive impact. Given the new focus on automation for enterprise network infrastructures, network inventory and configuration management is one such area ripe for hosting a vibrant open source community.

We are two weeks and part of a day into the nomination period for candidates for the position of the Debian Project Leader...

The dilemma facing SIP and open source is that customers must build a network to serve multiple objectives -- only some of which are addressed by open standards. While the number of companies installing all-SIP or all-open source networks continues to grow, it's clear that some vendors secretly frown on the use of open

The first £50 OLPC laptops could ship to children in emerging economies within months. PC Advisor speaks to the people behind the project to see how they made the impossible possible.

The Institute of Informatics and Communication, University of Delhi South Campus, has announced its second annual inter-collegiate open source technical festival, Envisage '07 to be held on 24-25th February 2007.

InterMedia Marketing Solutions Wins Inaugural Open Source Challenge With OrecX's Recording Platform At Linux World InterMedi@ Marketing Solutions (InterMedi@) a leading direct marketer and information technology resource company was awarded the prestigious Open Source Challenge Award last night at Linux World.

In October, Oracle sent Red Hat’s stock plummeting on the announcement that it would offer cut-rate support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, under the “Unbreakable Linux” brand. Could Larry Ellison now be planning a repeat with “Unbreakable MySQL”? In an interview with Computer Business Review, MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos says the possibility that Oracle might offer support for its own branded version of the open source MySQL database is very real, but he downplays the potential threat. In fact, he adds, “I hope they do that”.

Comment If the fuss currently being made about Dubbya's attempt to save energy by making the US go to Daylight Saving Time a fortnight early reminds me of anything, it's the hype we had to endure eight years ago about the Millennium Bug.