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In July Zend Technologies announced the latest version of PHP, the widely used scripting language for Web programming. Version 5 incorporates a series of substantial enhancements over previous releases. Here's an introduction to some of the new features.

ORLANDO, FLA --Gartner holds a yearly conference here called Symposium/ITxpo, one of four similar annual events it holds around the world. Yesterday I attended a Symposium/ITxpo presentation titled Does Open Source Deserve a Place in Your IT Portfolio? given by Gartner vice president Mark Driver. Most of the information he put out was correct, which was good.

here is a press-release about the success of wide-audience personal computers pre-loaded with the Mandrakelinux operating system, sold in a nation-wide store chain. For the first time, a major brick and mortar retail chain has widely marketed a low cost PC bundled with Linux. Previously, such sales had been limited to e-commerce. Metro Group, one of the largest retailers in Europe, is selling PC's with Mandrakelinux through their Planete Saturn subsidiary. Using a strong marketing campaign, including print, radio, and billboard advertising, sales have far exceeded expectations.

Here's a telling faux fas: A veteran Netscape developer, surveying the floor of LinuxWorld Expo 2004, found vendors running a mix of Windows, Linux and other OSs. She says in her blog review: “Sun was the worst, with only one Linux box I saw, and the rest all Windows: no Solaris that I saw.”

Welcome to this year's 41st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Raphaël Hertzog has written the first French book about Debian to honour the growing French speaking Debian community with a sample chapter online. Joey Hess has contacted submitters of older installation reports to retry and received a lot of promising responses. Carla Schroder reported about using Knoppix for system recovery.

Martin Taylor, global general manager of platform strategy at Microsoft, talks to vnunet.com about how the company is handling the open source threat.

JBoss on Monday released jBPM 2.0, an open-source workflow engine, which it developed in collaboration with the open-source project of the same name. Sacha Labourey, European general manager at JBoss, said this is the next stage in the company's strategy to build a full open-source middleware stack.

The Mozilla Foundation is getting ready to take the browser wars to a new front: the advertising pages of The New York Times.

Using Innovation to Introduce the Desktop Challenger.

OpenOffice.org continues to grow in India. The Linux community in particular sees OpenOffice.org as vital to localization (translation) efforts, which will reach new users. Our report on the recent meet in Mumbai illuminates the issues.

A small French company has started shipping Mandrake 10 on laptops for under 750 € (euros). The 1200X-ERX laptop runs on AMD's Athlon Mobile 2000+ (or optional 2600+ processor), has 256 DDR memory, a 20G hard drive, and a 15-inch TFT XGA screen. The notebook supports PCMCIA, hosts a Firewire port, and has a DVD reader/writer. The unit is covered by 2 year warrranty.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds released the official 2.6.9 kernel today, following what he referred to as "naming confusion" in which a test release named "-final" was first uploaded to kernel.org. Linus went on to add, "excuses aside, not a lot of changes since -rc4 (which was the last announced test-kernel), mainly some UML updates that don't affect anybody else. And a number of one-liners or compiler fixes. Full list appended." Official releases and test kernels can be found at a kernel.org mirror.

Part 1 in a series on embedded development explains the purpose of the project and outlines hardware options

An OpenOffice.org macro is a saved sequence of commands or keystrokes that are stored for later use. An example of a simple macro is one that "types" your address. Macros support commands that allow a variety of advanced functions, such as making decisions (for example, if the balance is less than zero, color it red; if not, color it black), looping (if the balance is greater than zero, subtract 10 from it), and even interacting with a person (asking the user for a number). It is common to assign a macro to a keystroke or toolbar icon so that it can be quickly started.

At Gartner Inc.'s Symposium/ITxpo, eWEEK.com got a sneak peek of Novell Inc.'s forthcoming Linux Desktop. According to company officials, the anticipated software package may arrive sooner than expected and offer customers a choice of looks and feels. Contrary to earlier reports, the Waltham, Mass.-based Novell has changed its plans and will not release a "best of breed" Linux desktop that combines the best features from the GNOME and KDE environments, said Ted Haeger, the Linux Desktop's director of marketing. Instead, users will be offered an option for either KDE or GNOME during the installation process.

Thunderbird 1.0 is just around the corner and it's already a hit. "Thunderbird makes emailing safer, faster, and easier than ever before with the industry's best implementations of features such as intelligent spam filters, a built-in spell checker, extension support, and much more." - mozilla.org At OSDir, we've put together a screenshot presentation of the 0.8 release to give you a taste of what to expect in 1.0.

Toshiba America Electronic Components (TAEC) has released a hardware/software reference design targeting digital multimedia appliances with sub-$100 BOMs (bills-of-material). The reference design, designated AVM49R, includes a mini-ITX board with a dedicated MPEG-1/2/4 codec chip alongside a 333MHz MIPS RISC-based SoC (system-on-chip). The design runs Linux.

Many aspects of KDE performance depend on the underlying system or the user's configuration. The KDE Performance Tips document, which lists some of the performance related issues together with instructions how to avoid or fix the problems, has been updated with new tips. If you would like to add new tips to this page, update the ones already listed, or discuss them, please use the kde-optimize@kde.org mailing list. Note that this list is for working on optimizing KDE -- not for complaining.

By this time next year you may well be using a Linux desktop at work. It may not be a choice you make but one that is made for you by managers concerned at cost and security issues associated with the Microsoft Windows platform.

Combined with recent Netscape app purchases, hire gets Linux provider closer to integrating desktops with network services.