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Novell is paying Microsoft for its patents, and will pay royalties ongoing. Microsoft in turn promises not to sue individual non-commercial coders or paid coders who contribute to SUSE:

Protection racket, anyone?- TC

While this may sound as likely as George Bush and John Kerry singing a duet together, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft will be announcing that it will offer sales support for Novell's SUSE Linux family. In addition, it said, the two companies will work together on technologies that will make it easier for users to run both SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 and Windows XP and Vista on the same desktop.

Digium has released the Asterisk 1.4 beta. New! Shiny! Improved! This is the first major update since 1.2 was launched over a year ago. Don't put it on production machines yet, but you can have many pleasant hours of fun getting acquainted with it on a text box. Today we'll take a look at some new features, and run through installing it. Installation has changed a bit, so we'll take a walk through the new bits.

Righteous Software, has launched an all-Linux version of its backup server offering. The new product, primarily developed in response to industry leaders demand, offers nearly continuous backups for Linux servers. According to the company, the technology remains unmatched in the industry, running on a standalone server, to provide simultaneous disk-based backup services for up to three hundred Linux servers.

In this two part series Jon Hall, president of Linux International, speaks at length on the progress and challenges for open source, and on the need to recapture a purer vision of education, consumerism, and more.

The term "continuous integration," commonly attributed to Martin Fowler, who first wrote about the software development practice back in 2000 (see Resources for a link to the article), is one of the pillars of modern programming techniques. CI involves automatically building and testing an application at frequent intervals on a dedicated integration server. Developers regularly commit small updates and are notified rapidly if their changes cause the build to fail.

But the Norwegian company, which in July became only the second Linux operation after Red Hat to float its shares publicly, had already played its part in developing some of the world's best-known software brands, including Adobe Photoshop Elements, Skype and Google Earth. And these are just a few of the thousands of applications using Trolltech's Qt cross-platform application development tool or its mobile spin-off Qtopia; others include NASA (for flight simulators), Volvo (for its human-machine interface for bus drivers) and Sony (for the Mylo personal communicator).

Red Hat has revealed that the Red Hat ISV Partner Program has experienced record growth, posting an increase in certified software partners by 122 percent in the last six months, April through October 2006. The company targeted application providers in industry verticals where open source adoption is happening rapidly, healthcare, telecommunications and financial services.

When Novell and Red Hat set up open source communities in China last year, most Chinese companies merely watched. Recently, however, China-based software companies have begun to show a greater interest in creating communities of their own. TurboLinux and Red Flag have created Whitefin and Linux-Ren, respectively. Red Flag also plans to create two additional open source communities -- UMPC (with Intel) and OpenAsianux -- before the end of this year. Why have Chinese companies suddenly changed their tunes?

The software maker announced that its telco hardened version of Linux will be tuned for Sun's UltraSPARC T1 processor. Customers will need to wait quite awhile to see the - prepare for it - Wind River Platform for Networking Equipment, Linux Edition operating system - phew - run on Sun's UltraSPARC T1 - aka Niagara. The companies plan to have everything done and dusted in the second half of 2007 by which time Niagara II should be stirring.

Oracle's plans for its own Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) product, announced last week, follow on the heels of Red Hat derivatives put together by dozens of open source projects, including CentOS, Pie Box, and Startcom Linux. But this week, members of the influential CentOS community voiced strong pessimism over Oracle Linux.

Mathematics is the King of Science. Commercial uses for mathematical workstations are vast: From basic engineering to designer drugs and from gene therapy to celestial navigation, mathematics rules the world.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has unveiled a new Linux distribution, free of the proprietary software contained in most Linuxes. gNewSense is based on Ubuntu and Debian, and offers users "the stability of Ubuntu with the addition of freedom," developers Brian Brazil and Paul O'Malley said.

The 2006 edition of Italian Linux Day on October 28 was the first in the six-year history of the event to be celebrated in more than 100 cities in every corner of the country. The prime-time news program on the main national TV channel TG1 spent almost two minutes on a story about the event ("and they didn't even make mistakes!", a LUG activist said).

The ultimate goal of the Unicode Consortium is to define all human languages for use with computers. That goal is still some ways off, but, with the release of version 5.0 of the Unicode standard after nearly three years of work, the consortium has taken a step toward it, according to Mark Davis, president of the Unicode council and one of the founders of the standard. With the publication due shortly, Davis recently took the time to explain Unicode, how it is developing, and some of the challenges it faces.

Debian-based live CD distribution Knoppix is widely known as a distro with excellent hardware detection. The latest 5.0.1 version, released in June, builds upon its legacy and continues to improve.

Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!

Earlier this week, Microsoft teamed with Zend Technologies. It is the latest in a series of partnerships with open source vendors that began in September 2005 with JBoss.

While the capabilities of operating systems have improved over the last years, the improvements have largely focused on under the hood changes. New functionality is reaching the user via additional applications which allow her to write a DVD, connect to her mp3 player, download streaming video locally and other tasks which were not present before. But the graphical interface of the computer itself is keeping the same concepts introduced with its appearance.

Research giant Gartner has come out strongly in favour of Oracle’s cut-price support for Red Hat Linux by urging Red Hat customers to renegotiate contracts.