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Recently, I helped set up a small co-operative preschool. One of the many things we needed was an accounting software package. Our ideal application would be easy to use, cost little or nothing, and allow users to work with it remotely. We wanted to keep the records on site, but not require the treasurer (me) to come in repeatedly. An analysis of the costs and abilities led us to choose a free solution. SQL-Ledger, which is licensed under the GNU GPL, fits the bill. We chose it for its ease of use and for features like emailed PDF invoices.

Last weekend, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting took place in Brussels. KDE was present there with a lot of developers, a devroom and several interesting talks. Among the speakers were Jonathan Riddell from the Kubuntu Distribution, Sebastian Kügler from the KDE's Marketing Working Group, Bart Coppens from the Krita development team and Raphael Langerhorst & Sander Koning from the KOffice teams. Bart's Krita talk

The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox 1.5 blew away the competition to take the top award in the Enterprise Linux category in the Datamation Product of the Year 2006 awards.

A U.S. Army supercomputing center with a legacy that dates back to the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) launched in 1946 is moving to Linux-based clusters that will more than double its computing capability.

The Army Research Laboratory Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) in Aberdeen, Md., is buying four Linux Networx Inc. Advanced Technology Clusters, including a system with 4,488 processing cores, or 1,122 nodes, with each node made up of two dual-core Intel Xeon chips. A second system has 842 nodes. In total, the purchase will increase the MSRC's computing capability from 36 trillion floating-point operations per second to more than 80 TFLOPS, Army officials said.

IBM will also use the new framework, code-named Higgins, to create an identity management system, a counterpart to Microsoft's InfoCard, that would work on Linux computers, he said.

The family of operating systems based on the Ubuntu platform continues to expand – this time to the ever-growing embedded world of small, light devices like PDAs and Internet tablets. A new Ubuntu project, Embedded Ubuntu, hopes to bring Ubuntu down to size.

FRAMINGHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 27, 2006--IDG World Expo today announced details of the conference program for LinuxWorld Conference & Expo(R), which will take place April 3-6, 2006 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. The world-class program will feature in-depth conference sessions focused on Linux as well as the broader range of open source technologies. Led by recognized experts in their respective fields, the conference sessions will offer attendees the opportunity to see the latest developments across the entire Linux and open source marketplace, and learn how to capitalize on the business value of these fast-growing technologies.

Linus Torvalds released the 2.6.15-rc5 release candidate kernel summarizing the changes since -rc4, "there's not much to say about this: people have been pretty good, and it's just a random collection of fixes in various random areas. The shortlog is actually pretty short, and it really describes the updates better than anything else." Read on for the shortlog.

Adrian Bunk followed up with a list of 6 known regressions in 2.6.16-rc5 as compared to 2.6.15:usb_submit_urb(ctrl) failed on 2.6.16-rc4-git10 kernel,Oops in Kernel 2.6.16-rc4 on Modprobe of saa7134.ko,saa7146: no devices created in /dev/dvb,S3 sleep hangs the second time - 600X,2.6.16-rc[34]: resume-from-RAM unreliable (SATA),total ps2 keyboard lockup from boot, andpsmouse starts losing sync in 2.6.16-rc2.

Want to keep an eye on what's going on in your home or office when you're not there? You can turn a Linux box into a motion detector by using an old webcam and Motion -- software for monitoring a Video4Linux device. User Level: Intermediate

We recently bought a Linux gaming console at work as a prize in a draw. Not thinking too much of it I packed it up and sent it off to the winner. A few days later I got an email claiming the device didn't work. So I emailed the parent company complaining that the instructions were less than clear and this is their reply.

There are various practices associated with software development that can be of great benefit to an IT department, but since few IT managers follow what goes on in the software engineering field, and even fewer come from a software engineering background, most managers are unaware of these ideas and technologies. This is unfortunate, as there are so many tools and techniques employed by programmers that could be put to good use in IT.

Google has become the de facto standard in the search arena. It's easy, quick and powerful. For those same reasons that the general user has gravitated to Google, so have the hackers. And as we all know, if the hackers use, the security professionals need to utilize it as well. And it doesn't hurt to have Johnny Long (with help from Ed Skoudis) showing you the ropes.

If you learned critical analysis in school, you may want to apply it to ferret out what the press has to say. In this close-up of the forms of articles we separate journalism from bigotry. For example, John Dvorak's writing has always come into question, especially when he pens Will Apple Adopt Windows? You don't have to call him names or say he's stopped taking his medications like the Mac sites do. Just get a handle on the content he provides and you can dismiss him quickly.

Do open source systems provide a better way of preventing bugs, or are their developers just cultural elitists?

[ED: Starts off a bit snide, but as it progesses the arguments become stronger for being open. - HC]

"In this article we aim to focus on the position which Free Software movement has in this more broad Free Culture movement, and to emphasize the reasons to why Free Software needs to be an integral part of Free Culture, that we wish to create and cultivate."

After years of open source projects like Linux and MySQL taking share from proprietary software companies, hardware makers like Cisco and Juniper get to experience the heart-stopping terror of open source hardware hitting the market. ... So far, the response from Cisco and Juniper has been a yawn.

They've got a new chief financial officr over at Sun Microsystems Inc. , and he's already acquiring a company known as a "knowledge driven" solution that significantly eases the management of open and mixed source server stacks.

Michael Lehman has been hired as CFO, replacing Steve McGowan, who will remain at Sun as executive vice president of Finance and will work closely with Lehman to ensure a seamless transition. McGowan announced his intentions to retire last October.

At 3GSM Congress E28 Limited and BridgePort Networks have showed a platform for dual-mode smartphones made by E28.

Welcome to this year's 9th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Written entirely by Robert Storey, this week's issue looks ahead at the upcoming 64-bit Mini-ITX processors, passes on a link to a freely downloadable copy of The Complete FreeBSD, and investigates "bcrypt" and "dm-crypt", the much-loved encryption utilities for the paranoid. In the first looks section, Robert investigates the newest OpenBSD-based live CDs - OliveBSD. Happy reading! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

IT managers planning for possible security threats in 2006 might be tempted to look back at some of the big security debacles of 2005 for inspiration.