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On the 12th of this month Google released version 4 of the Google Earth software with support for Linux. It can now be downloaded from here: http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html

Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, SUSE, and Linspire are making headway in the desktop market, but if you want to try something really different, you can find other, less-well-known alternative operating systems. While these OSes may not be the most stable, or have the greatest hardware support, they offer some unique ideas.

An hour or so ago Sun Microsystems made good on an earlier pledge to issue further "non-assertion covenants" (NACs) in support of open standards. That's a good thing, and more vendors should do the same thing.

On upgrading my webserver recently (from RHEL3 to Debian stable, fwiw), I discovered an issue with renamed/old versions of index.html in the new version of Apache (2.0.54).

Setting up enterprise groupware is usually associated with huge costs, both in money and staffing, and immense complexity, requiring professionals to keep everything running smoothly. The benefits are worth the costs, though, even for smaller organizations. If done correctly, your staff will be up-to-date and able to quickly and easily share essential information. With Open-Xchange Server, you can get those benefits from an open source application.

It's now been more than a week since Microsoft announced that its licensing discussions with Adobe had fallen apart after four months of negotiations. We don't know a great deal more now that Adobe has released a statement, but what we do know is bad for open standards.

Tiger Communications, XOU Solutions & Anam Mobile Join Growing List of Telecom Companies Adopting Open Source Database

Sun Microsystems has appointed a new Sun Fellow, Tim Marsland (pictured). The award signifies a rare event at Sun, with only twelve other individuals having had the honor throughout the company's history.

A few months ago, VMware released a free version of its desktop virtualization software, VMware Player. It's a great application for running a second operating system on your desktop; the only problem is you can't create new virtual images using VMware Player. With a little work, however, you can use VMware Player to create guest operating systems.

Here, to kick off our new Groklaw feature of book reviews, is Carla Schroder's review of "The Debian System, Concepts and Techniques," by Martin Krafft. No Starch published it (you can buy it as a book or as a PDF from them), and of course Amazon has it, and the author's page provides a link to a list of places around the world where the book is available.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. announced that it received YES Certification from Novell Inc. for its Opteron, Athlon 64 processor-based systems and Turion 64 mobile technology.

A month after its release at Interop 2006, Project Lasso, a viable open source alternative to Microsoft's more proprietary Windows event collection infrastructure, is experiencing growing support from the global log management and intelligence community, including an official repository on SourceForge and support for EMC Celerra File Servers.

Apple Computer Inc. extended the courtesy of meeting with me one day after my column on the closing of the OS X x86 kernel source code was published online.

To sum up Apple's objections, they felt I had given a year-old story a fresh coat of paint and sensationalized it for an audience that wasn't affected by it. Yet no story is more timely, or more broadly relevant, than this one.

Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said Thursday he will transition out of a day-to-day role at the company he co-founded to spend more time on global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Mark Lord reported a problem with the upcoming 2.6.17 kernel being unable to access www.everymac.com. He detailed a series of tests that isolated the problem down to a recent changeset titled, "set default max buffers from memory pool size", which goes on to explain, [...]

Open source middleware juggernaut JBoss, now part of Linux distributor Red Hat, is hosting its second annual--and perhaps final--JBoss World customer and partner event in Las Vegas, coinciding with the 10-millionth download of its JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS). Having secured its position in the middleware space and been acquired by financially secure Red Hat, now JBoss is pumped to move out from the middle into the systems management space and to establish, through the Seam project, itself as the framework for Web 2.0 applications.

This is a bug fix release for the 1.0.x branch. The major fix is transformation compatibility for all Oracle version 8-10 drivers as well as Visual Fox Pro.

IBM introduced a fully integrated and scalable data warehouse solution for Linux that combines software, server, and storage resources to maximize business intelligence and information management performance for enterprises.

Thousands of developer hours behind Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) could make it close to impossible for the Ubuntu operating system to grab the third spot in the Linux server market.

OpenLab International has released the latest iteration of its education-cum-general-desktop Linux distribution, OpenLab. Richard Frank asks chief software architect, AJ Venter, what he has been brewing.