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FlightGear is a multiplatform, GPLed flight simulator. It is sophisticated, realistic, and extensible. You can choose to fly more than 100 different aircraft, ranging from a Sopwith Camel to a UFO, you can take off and land from thousands of airports, and you can fly over virtually any terrain in the world. After 10 years of development, it has suddenly become a very hot item. How hot? You may have seen it used recently on prime time TV and not realized it. It was used in an episode of Fox TV's legal drama Justice to prove pilot error in the fatal crash of a private plane.

It looks like the education space could be the first, real place where Linux could grab beachhead in the desktop PC market. Take a look at Indiana, for example..

Free of the hustle of the daily work life, Nat Friedman meditated in a Californian Buddhist monastery, clearing his mind of worldly clutter. For 10 days, he opened his consciousness to new ideas, new ways of thinking and new realms of possibility. No code. No e-mails. No meetings. No deadlines or work orders. Just simple serenity.

Having been raised on DOS and the early generations of Windows, I rediscovered that sense of excitement in a pure computing experience when I first tried other Linux versions over the years. However, they required a steep learning curve and caused too much frustration with setup and obscure command-line options. Not so with Ubuntu Linux.

There's been coverage galore of the benefits of the new interface sported by Office 2007, but there are plenty of good reasons not to make the switch to the latest version of Microsoft's best-selling product suite. Here's five of the most compelling.

Novell to support Open XML format to advance document interoperability

The Linux Warehouse has partnered with Scalix to provide the email and group calendaring developer's products in South Africa. The Scalix Collaboration Platform is a Linux-based alternative to Microsoft Exchange.

Support from software partners along with training and technical services promotion will help more customers take advantage of advanced workgroup and networking services on SUSE Linux Enterprise.

You'd think the Sysadmin of the Year winner would get an armful of roses and pour happy tears onto a red-carpeted stage as an overage crooner sings, "Here he comes, Mister Sysadmin of the Year," but this is a different kind of contest. For one thing, there was no swimsuit contest -- although if there had been, winner Michael Beck says he would have worn "orange and black surf shorts."

After just over a year of development, Iona Technologies is to release a couple of polished versions of its Celtix open source enterprise service bus, and announced that it has transferred development from the ObjectWeb consortium to the better-known Apache.

Red Hat today announced that European Open Source deployment specialist, Sirius Corporation, has become a Red Hat Advanced Partner. By partnering with Sirius Corporation, Red Hat is further extending its outreach to organisations looking to implement integrated, enterprise-class Open Source solutions. Sirius Corporation brings with it a reputation as a top-tier Open Source implementation specialist, responsible for some of the largest and most complex deployments of Open Source technologies in the UK.

SCO Group shares plummeted by nearly 40 per cent to $1.20 on Friday after a judge upheld an earlier ruling throwing out most of the company's legal case against IBM. SCO claims to own key elements of the intellectual property used in the Unix operating system, and alleges that its code has ended up illegally in Linux distributions.

Wind River on Dec. 15 will ship a new version of its Eclipse-based development toolsuite that will, for the first time, be available as a set of plugins, greatly increasing deployment flexibility. Workbench 2.6 also features new test and analysis tools, a sophisticated patch manager for Linux, and online documentation.

Novell will roll out the big guns for the first face-to-face debate with the free software movement over the merits of the recent Microsoft-Novell deal. In Cape Town Novell country manager Stafford Masie will meet outspoken critic Derek Keats and other free software advocates at the CITI Foss Foum on Thursday.

Jalal Haji-Gholam-Ali who is a member of Sharif Technical University’s Advanced ICT Scientific Board and consultant of the ICT Ministry in launching the Persian Linux Project, reiterated, “Launching the Pilot Study phase of Persian Linux Project has be commissioned to TCI’s Research Center.”

South African FOSS initiatives feature prominently in a new free book of Foss case studies in the developing world released this week by the UNDP. The 100-plus pages provide fascinating insight into how free software is making its mark on the world.

AsciiDoc is a handy program that can produce formatted HTML documents and manpages from plain text files. With it, you can produce general purpose documents or specialized output such as mathematical formulae and musical notation.

Next April, the Ubuntu Foundation will complete three years and six releases of its GNU/Linux distribution. It will also be the point at which the project begins to acquire a distinctly commercial hue.

After years of putting in energy and money to get independent software vendors to support the Power platforms running Linux applications created by these ISVs, IBM says that it has broken through the 2,500 applications barrier with Linux on Power. That is a tripling of the installed base of Linux on Power applications in the past two years.

Here is another great reason to own a MythTV PVR; you can turn it into a Slingbox so you can stream your TV over the internet to any other internet enabled video player such as a laptop, PC, or PMP.