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In this final report from the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), held last week at Google's offices in Mountain View, Calif., we'll look at plans for the Ubuntu and Kubuntu desktops, the future of PowerPC, and how Ubuntu is working with local community teams.

The OpenVZ project, which maintains open source kernel patches aimed at enabling a single Linux system to host multiple "virtual server" environments, has added a virtual Ethernet device feature, along with a feature said to let admins migrate virtual servers between physical hosts without disrupting users or eating storage, among other touted advantages.

Microsoft and novell made big IT news on Nov. 2 by announcing a historic burying of the hatchet, the likes of which we haven't seen since Sun and Microsoft promised to work together on big interoperability stuff.

Having recently reviewed JavaScript Phrasebook by Christian Wenz for the Linux Tutorial site and Wesley Chun's Core Python Programming for Linux Magazine (due out in next month's issue), I was excited to get the opportunity to review the brand-new Python Phrasebook. Apparently Brad Dayley was also excited about writing this book as he states in the Introduction: 'I was excited when my editor asked me to write a phrasebook on the Python language. The phrasebook is one of the smallest books I have ever written; however, it was one of the hardest.'

This is the next article in our occasional series on new, more formal (mathematically-based) approaches to system development. The first article looked at Bayesian analysis and formal methods (which are only "new" to the general development space, of course).

Astronomers at New York City's Hayden Planetarium and Rose Center for Earth and Space think space exploration should be easily accessible to anyone. To make that possible, they offer an interactive atlas of the universe that anyone can download for free.

Samuel J. Palmisano, chairman, president and CEO of IBM, said Tuesday that technology service, the fastest growing segment in the technology industry, will be a top priority for his company in China, which is one of IBM's most dynamic markets. IBM achieved year-on-year growth of 27 percent in China in the third quarter, compared with a corporate average of 5 percent.

ParallelKnoppix is a modified Knoppix live CD designed for use in creating HPC clusters. You can start up PK on multiple nodes to run a cluster, and customize PK to add or remove applications.

The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) has announced plans to host an Open Source Health Care summit as part of their upcoming 2007 conference, SCALE 5x. The focus of this event will be on the use of open-source software in the health care industry. The goal of this event is to foster an awareness of the availability of open-source options to medical organizations, private practices, and hospitals. The Open-Source Health Care Summit will be held on February 9, 2007 at the Los Angeles Airport Westin Hotel.

I'm remiss in blogging on the transition in Massachusetts as Louis Gutierrez leaves his position as State CIO (Gutierrez announced that he would resign a month ago), and as Mitt Romney wraps up his single term as governor and looks forward, he hopes, to bigger political games than our small state can offer.

In the past several years, I have encountered a variety of public utilities and municipalities that have fewer than 10 technical staff members. Each of these clients spoke with me about making the transition to the right enterprise GIS for their size organization. Typically, I prefer to drive requirements discussions away from technology and toward the functionality that the client needs to improve his business. However, most of my clients are decision makers who nearly always hold preconceived opinions about which would be the right technology to solve their particular problems.

Freescale is sampling an inexpensive PowerQUICC II network processor (NPU) with integrated hardware security engine (HSE), dual gigabit Ethernet interfaces, and USB 2.0. The MPC8313E targets residential gateways, 802.11n access points, piracy-protected media servers, line cards, intelligent NICs, and network storage devices, and an ultra-low power derivative will support printers.

This does not bode well for Linux gamers, and it's a weird coincidence that we hear about this a few days after announcing Wine on the site. It seems that Linux-using World of Warcraft players are getting banned left and right.

Everybody loves Ajax. Javaists, Rubyists, Pythonistas; even Microsofties get to play with Ajax in the form of Atlas. Book publishers love Ajax too, judging by the stack of new titles coming hot off the presses.

BixData is a system, application, and network monitoring tool which allows you to easily monitor nearly every aspect of your servers. The newly released version 2.6 is the only application that has the ability to control both Xen and VMware virtual machines. You can control both VM Hosts (the computer that's running the VM software) and VM Guests (the virtual machines running on the hosts).

Richard Stallman, the president and founder of The Free software Foundation, has praised Sun Microsystems for distributing its proprietary Java platform under the GNU General Public Licence

Olive is a GNU/Linux Live distribution. It offers quite a good deal of new technologies, hardly witnessed ever before, as well as some of the more common pieces of software. It's size is approx. 110MiB, yet it allows a lot of software to be used. Olive's whole point is to display how easy to use Linux may be, yet without losing any of the features required for heavy-duty work. It's also supposed to show various unusual new technologies, not widely known or accepted.

SUSE Linux 10.1 Kick Start is part of SAMS new Shortcut Series. To bring you up to speed, here's a quote from the source: "Short Cuts are short, concise, PDF documents designed specifically for busy technical professionals like you. Each Short Cut is tightly focused on a specific technology or technical problem. This may be a cutting-edge new technology that shows great promise, or it may be an existing technology that has reached the "tipping point" and is about to take off." Visit the Shortcut Home Page for more information on this series.

Some months ago I started collecting the pieces I needed to build my own 64-bit computer. I'm not a complete stranger to building machines, I've put together a dozen or so during the past twenty years, but it's been quite a while since I started one from scratch, and my experience with this machine was more instructive than it was meant to be. Nevertheless, at long last Studio Dave has gone 64-bit crazy. Well, not really crazy, but certainly more than mildly enthusiastic.

A new name has joined SimplyMEPIS as one of the first Ubuntu-derived Linux distributions: Linux Mint, which features a 2.6.17 kernel and the GNOME 2.16.1 desktop. Ubuntu, itself based on Debian Linux code, has only been in production use since October of 2004.