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Today we're going to learn how to play Asterisk .gsm files with a special audio player, and how to construct a sturdy, reliable digital receptionist to answer and route all incoming calls.

Rising salaries in India will stifle current outsourcing initiatives, but not by a significant amount. Let’s take a look at what can be outsourced, and what employees should focus on in order to remain competitive in the IT world.

have been running various distributions of Linux for about 4 years. I started out with RedHat and later switched to SuSE. I was by and large satisfied with SuSE and used it till OpenSuSE 10.1. However, all the chatter about Ubuntu on the various Linux forums that I visit really piqued my interest and I wanted to try it. The main obstacle for me to try Ubuntu was that it was a Gnome centric distribution and I am used to KDE. Hence, I kept monitoring Kubuntu and as soon as I found out that they had a release based on the latest and greatest Ubuntu I decided that it was time for me to take the plunge.

The Association for Progressive Communications has established a new award to reward organisations or people who make it easier for others to start using free and open source software.

For such sharp rivals, the contests between Google and Microsoft have been laughably lopsided. Even as they jostle for users and software developers, Google has run away with the search traffic market while Microsoft has kept a lock on desktop software--like they're hardly even playing the same game. That's about to change, as Google readies a long-rumored push to assemble its E-mail, word processing, and spreadsheet apps into a Web-based suite that sounds more like Microsoft Office with each addition.

[Included for the general interest in Google's competition with Microsoft - dcparris]

The Unified Modelling Language (UML) has firmly established itself as the lingua franca of the object oriented development world. It offers the right levels of abstraction, independence from programming language implementation to make it pretty much ubiquitous.

Open source software is a given in most enterprise data centers, so it's not surprising to see the ranks of open source companies and projects swell. It's not just Linux anymore - community-developed software is offering alternatives for everything from databases to application servers to network management to disaster preparedness. How do you know which open source approach is right for you? We've pulled out a few start-ups that you might not be familiar with, but we think should be on your radar.

Sun Microsystems has unveiled a portal that will detail its efforts to make its Java programming language available as open source code. After the announcement, Bob Brewin, Sun’s chief technology officer for software, talked to Computerworld about the state of the company’s effort to make Java SE (Standard Edition) code available to the open source community.

Only the very brave can pick winners amongst the current crop of Web 2.0 start-ups, social networks and other sundry services. And whatever the outcome might be, it is safe to say that the popularity of open source database MySQL and programming language PHP will only increase.

LXer Feature: 28-Aug-2006

Neoscopio adheres closely to the principles of Free/Open Source Software by providing customized solutions and services based on available software projects. LXer's Don Parris interviews the Neoscopio team.

If you ask any Novell watcher to rate the software vendor's abilities, the chances are that observer will give the company a low grade for marketing. Novell has struggled with how to position its products for years and now hopes it's finally on the right track with a new focus for its SuSE Linux distribution.

[This is from early last week, but you might find something worthwhile in this. We'll try to get the upcoming edition in a timely manner. - dcparris]

Coverage from Gentoo's booth at the San Francisco Linux World Conference and Expo, a call for translators for Slovak and Greek languages, and some very important information about future upgrades to GCC and glibc, all in this week's Gentoo Weekly Newsletter. Also in this issue, developer of the week, two Gentoo events that will take you away from your comfort zone, and more.

Welcome to this year's 34rd issue of DistroWatch Weekly! The essence of this week's issue is a comment on the status of Linux distributions. Why are there so many of them? What motivates developers to create new ones? Wouldn't we be better off if there were only 10 - 20 major projects, instead of hundreds of one-man distros? We attempt to give some answers. Also in this issue: a long-term SUSE user explains why Kubuntu meets his needs better, openSUSE's Andreas Jaeger comments on the reasons behind removal of proprietary kernel modules from the popular operating system, and Gentoo's Donnie Berkholz argues that democracy is not always a good thing for the advancements of the largest source-based distribution. Updates on Fedora Core 6 and Mandriva Linux 2007, together with links to two resources comparing and rating several popular distributions conclude the news section. Happy reading!

Imagine if you will, a world where your ideas and perhaps, even your own creative works became part of the OS of tomorrow. Consider the obvious advantages to an operating system that actually morphed and adapted to the needs of the users instead of the other way around.

The new "Linux-enabled" Lenovo laptop launched this week at LinuxWorld will not actually come "pre-loaded" with Novell SUSE Linux, a high-ranking Lenovo official said today, contradicting some industry reports stating otherwise. Together with Novell and Intel, Lenovo formally unveiled the new PC at a press conference on Tuesday, following months of industry speculation about an impending Linux announcement from the mobile PC maker.

Reliance on open source code runs deep among Google's developers, and the company uses open source in its production systems, too. The software has been Google-ized--something new added to make it fit Google's way of doing things.

[I wrote a piece similar to this when Google presented at my local LUG some months ago. - Scott]

upstart is a replacement for the init daemon, the process spawned by the kernel that is responsible for starting, supervising and stopping all other processes on the system.

Trusted Computer Solutions Inc. (TCS), a supplier of multi-level security and cross-domain information sharing applications for government and industry, announced in partnership with IBM the launch of the TCS SecureOffice suite of cross-domain guards based on Linux.

Luis Villa is absolutely right in his castigation of our X update on Wednesday this week. As a team we made a series of errors, and the result was a desktop that was broken for thousands of users, for several hours. It has been a severe lesson in QA, something Luis knows plenty about.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: as the Summer Of Code draws to a close, a mass code import in the Physiks project, and other notable commits for several of the other affiliated projects.