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In an online interview on LinuxInterviews.com, Justin Steinman, Director of Marketing for Linux & Open Platform Solutions for Novell declared that "negotiations on the Microsoft agreement started in Spring 2006." Find out what Novell's point of view is on the buzz the recent agreement they signed with Microsoft started on the Internet. Justin Steinman explains what this deal means for Linux and Novell and how does this affect the competition between Novell and Microsoft. Novell sais there's no link between Oracle and their recent announcement.

Depending on who is commenting, the recently announced agreement between Microsoft and Novell is either the ultimate victory or the beginning of the end for Linux. If there is anything that is clear about this new arrangement, it's that nobody really understands what it means yet. Perhaps, in the end, it means less than most people hope or fear.

Toshiba America Electronic Components (TAEC) is sampling its second-generation processors for mid-range and low-end digital TVs having single-chip designs. The TC90407XBG and TC90407XFG chips feature 64-bit MIPS-based host processors and dual DSPs, along with on-chip function blocks aimed at supporting the North American ATSC standard, and come with Linux support.

IBM's BlueGene/L system is still king of the supercomputing heap, according to the 28th list of the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers unveiled at the Supercomputing 2006 show in Tampa, Fla. today. The annual "TOP500" list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany.

This isn't exactly FOSS-related, but I think it's an interesting peek at the real Big Iron--TC

One of the first POS (point-of-sale) equipment vendors to adopt Linux will now become one of the first to offer solid-state storage. Wincor Nixdorf's new X-Series, due in January, will be offered with an Msystems mModule uDOC embedded flash disk.

Mayix XLiveCD 2006.2, a Gentoo-derived Linux distribution, was released last weekend by its Guatamala-based project team. Mayix, which is produced only in Spanish, includes the so-called "stage 4" binary Gentoo packages and sports a 2.6.17 Linux kernel, X.Org 7.1, and a GNOME 2.14 default desktop.

Web spiders are software agents that traverse the Internet gathering, filtering, and potentially aggregating information for a user. This article shows you how to build spiders and scrapers for Linux to crawl a Web site and gather information, stock data, in this case. Using common scripting languages and their collection of Web modules, you can easily develop Web spiders.

AstLinux also runs on mini-ITX computers and ordinary PC hardware, so you can scale your hardware according to your needs. Because you're starting from a minimalistic installation, you have the pleasant option of adding features as you need them, rather than pruning away cruft. You might look at something like the Soekris net4801 and laugh. "Haha!" you say, "I have more computing power in my wristwatch!" Which may be true. If so, it means AstLinux can be ported to your wristwatch for the all-time great conversation piece. But don't underestimate these little boards. They are tough as nails and tolerate conditions that kill off ordinary PC hardware.

According to Forrester Research, open source databases can lower an enterprise's database total cost of ownership (TCO) by fifty percent. This finding and others were presented in an online seminar delivered on Oct. 12, 2006 titled "Realizing the Value of Open Source Databases: How Sony Online Entertainment Replaced Oracle with EnterpriseDB."

IBM PLACESadmin helps developers to create, modify, and manage indoor, location-based Web applications through a simple-to-use, Internet-based Web interface. The term PLACES stands for Point-of-interest, Locations, and Assest Catalog for Enterprise Services.

The "Slug" has gained much-improved Linux support, thanks to a new Debian installer that targets the device. The first release candidate of the debian-installer for Debian's forthcoming "Etch" distribution was released yesterday, offering nearly complete support to the Linksys $99 NSLU2 NAS gadget.

Sun Microsystems move on Monday to make Java open source code under the General Public License will not deter an Apache Software Foundation project that promised an open source Java implementation on its own. The Harmony project, started May 18, 2005, moved out of its incubation phase and into full-fledged project status at the end of October. Moving out of incubation is a sign within the Apache Software Foundation that an open source project is organized and has a critical mass of contributors. It's expecting to produce its 1.0 implementation of Java Standard Edition in mid-2007.

Casual Ubuntu users may have registered surprise when they first booted the distribution's Edgy Eft release this past October. Back at the beginning of the Edgy development cycle, much was made of the formation of a new, dedicated Art Team to develop a fresh look for the backgrounds and splash screens of the startup process. But when Edgy hit the shelves, the artwork was scarcely different from that of its predecessor, Dapper Drake.

On November 2, 2006 the embargo for Intel's Core 2 Extreme Quad QX6700 was lifted which resulted in a slurry of reviews covering this flagship desktop processor. However, this morning happens to be an important date for Supercomputing 2006 and it serves as yet another milestone for Intel Corporation. This morning Intel will be introducing the Xeon 5300 series, or perhaps better known by its codename of Clovertown. At Phoronix we have had these processors in-house for over a week now and today are able to share our thoughts on these quad-core server/workstation processors as we test them under GNU/Linux.

A new preliminary version of the Slackware-based STUX GNU/Linux live CD, version 0.9.2, was released Monday, featuring a 2.6.17 kernel and the KDE desktop environment. STUX is touted as a live CD distro that can automatically load and save main configuration and personal files on a writable partition.

Open Shakespeare is a UK-based project to publish a fully open edition of Shakespeare's works. It's not trying to be another "Shakespeare on the Web," just providing an HTMLized copy of the plays and works. Its goal is to produce a reusable package of free and open material, including the main source texts, encodings in various open formats including XML and PDF, ancillary material, a Python API, and other documentation and tools.

As we prepared to open a new Freedom Technology Center in a rehabilitated site in New Jersey, I came to learn that Verizon was capable of offering fiber service at our location. Officially, they only claim to support those using Microsoft Windows and Mac OS/X with their service. In fact, with a little foreknowledge, you can have installed, activated, and use your FiOS service with an entirely free operating system such as GNU/Linux.

The city of Vienna has migrated more than 100 servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, principally deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and AS on HP hardware.

The free Java community reacted positively, but cautiously, to the news that Sun Microsystems has released the code for Sun Java under the GNU General Public License. While community leaders showed appreciation of the news by cooperating in the announcement, developers in the free Java community reacted more tentatively, and at least some projects seem likely to continue development of their own implementations of Java.

Red Hat, a leading provider of open source, will introduce its newly integrated JBoss solutions to its Middle Eastern partners and detail the company's plan for partner activities in the region at the Gitex 2006. At the event will be held at the Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre from November 18 to 22.