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Just when Microsoft wants you to forget about alternatives to Vista, along comes the Debian based project that allows you to not only install Linux on a Windows system, but do it right under its nose.

Welcome to this year's 5th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! The first test build of the newly revamped Fedora Project's version 7 is scheduled for release on Tuesday. This will mark the start of a new and long development period that many popular distributions launch around this time and don't complete until the promised new features are implemented and most known bugs squashed several months later. In the meantime, Linspire has announced an expanded CNR software installation service for popular distributions, Mandriva has launched a new live CD with the Metisse 3D desktop, a Debian developer has investigated the usability of Debian Etch, and the PC-BSD team has answered questions about their recently released version 1.3. In the review section we'll take a quick look at Foresight Linux 1.0, the project's first stable release after nearly two years of development. Happy reading!

Can you run a radio station entirely on free software? Thanks to Campcaster, broadcasters all over the world can answer that question with a yes. The open source radio station system plays a key role in enabling independent and community-owned media to compete with better-funded government and corporate outlets in emerging democracies.

Adobe Systems Inc. on Jan. 29 announced that it has released the full PDF (Portable Document Format) 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Association for Information and Image Management. AIIM, in turn, will start working on making PDF an ISO standard.

Philippine open source company GEN Automation Technologies started the year 2007 by operating under its new business name IPSYSTEMS Incorporated. “We are excited to announce our new company name,” said Ms. Patricia B. Celis, Vice-President. “If our clients were to compare the change to a software product, it would be similar to thinking of IPSYSTEMS as the better, more updated version of GEN Automation, loaded with new features and with better client support.”

After working on press releases for the So Cal Linux Expo for literally months, you run a bit dry sometimes.

The MEPIS project has released the fourth beta release of version 6.0 of its KDE- and Ubuntu-based SimplyMEPIS-32 and SimplyMEPIS-64 Linux distributions. Beta 4 introduces the 2.6.17-20 kernel, WiFi support improvements, and the ability to run MEPIS live from a USB key.

Following the recent deal between Microsoft and Novell, prominent industry figures and numerous members of the open source community have expressed criticism and concerns. As the controversy has unfolded, the debate has become increasingly antagonistic and confrontational. From dubious intellectual property claims to accusations of appeasement, corporate executives have succeeded in obscuring the facts and reducing the entire debate into a cheap PR conflict.

Open-source database firm EnterpriseDB is setting up in the UK with the aim of attracting Oracle-deserting users.

On Friday 14 January 2007, members of the KDE PIM developer group came together for the fifth year in a row in Osnabrück, Germany to review the state of the project. Important topics including Akonadi, KDE PIM maintenance and enterprise usage. A record number of attendees were welcomed into the Intevation office and made at home by Bernhard Reiter, Jan-Oliver Wagner and the rest of the team.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: KGoldRunner begins the transition to a scalable graphics interface. okular gains support for DjVu metadata, and investigates the use of threaded text extraction in order to prevent interface freezes. Continued improvement in the font KControl configuration module. More 3d and contemporary effects in the kwin_composite branch. Multiple, discriminatory language spellchecking develops in Sonnet. Improved support for BMP and ZIP files in Strigi. Import of user documentation for Mailody. Optimisations in the Dolphin filemanager. An important stage in the replacement of kdesktop elements with krunner is completed. KTorrent makes exploratory moves towards a KDE 4 port. KSirc, an IRC client, is removed from KDE SVN.

As previously announced, submissions of proposals for papers, presentations, discussion sessions and tutorials for DebConf7 will be accepted until Wednesday 31 January. If you're interested in doing a DebConf talk but haven't submitted one yet, it's time to do so now.

If there is mass take-up of free and open source software in any country over the next few years, that country is likely to be China. On the FOSS front, China is quietly making progress. The country already has its own distribution, Red Flag Linux. A recent GNU/Linux user convention in Beijing underlined the fact that while there are still many problems within the industry, growth of 28 per cent is forecast between 2006 and 2010.

In 2003, Unilever entered the Iranian market by establishing on-shore operations, two factories and setting-up its regional head quarters in Tehran. However, one of the biggest tasks for the company was to setup a comprehensive IT infrastructure in place, since the company could not use any technology developed or imported from the USA with a specific American content, due to the US embargo on exports to Iran.

The Higgins Trust Framework Project is the recipient of IBM code that may allow users to hide their personal information on the Internet. Identity Mixer, the donated software, permits consumers to enter anonymous digital credentials from a bank or government agency to buy a product or enter a Web site that asks for a birth date.

The Jungo Connectivity Software Newsletter keeps you updated with information on embedded USB software stacks and wide range of USB testing tools.

Since our Nouveau: A First Look article last month, new developments continue to come out of the Nouveau camp. Among the changes in the past month is glxgears now working on NVIDIA NV4x hardware, the pledge drive now being completed, and the Fedora Project announcing its intent for including Nouveau in the upcoming Fedora 7 release.

Andrew Tanenbaum is a huge figure in the field of computer science; developers who work in the area of operating systems tend to have at least one of his books on their shelf. Linus Torvalds also occupies a prominent position. But when these two people are discussed together, the topic is almost always the famous debate between the two which happened early in the history of Linux. Mr. Tanenbaum called Linux "obsolete," and made it clear that he would not have been proud to have Mr. Torvalds as a student; Linus made some choice comments of his own in return.

This tutorial shows how you can back up Linux and Windows systems with BackupPC. BackupPC acts as a server and is installed on a Linux system, and from there it can connect to all Linux and Windows systems in your local network to back them up and restore them without interfering with the user's work on that system. On the clients minimal to no configuration is needed. BackupPC supports full and incremental backups, and it comes with a neat web frontend for the administrator and normal user so that backups and recoveries can be managed through a web browser. It should be noted, however, that BackupPC does file-based backups, not bit-wise backups like Ghost4Linux, for example, so it is not made for disk/partition imaging.

KDevelop 3.4 has been released, bringing many new features to KDE's Integrated Development Environment. The first major release in over a year closes more than 500 bugs. There is an impressive list of additional features including improved Qt 4 support, new debugging abilities, more attractive default user interface layout and improvements for C++, Ruby and PHP support. Packages are available for Kubuntu and openSUSE with unofficial builds for several others on the download page.