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FFidelity Information Services Free/Open Source GT.M Mumps database is gaining traction outside of private-sector Veterans Affairs VistA Electronic Health Record while Veterans Affairs VistA development in the private sector is proceeding at a furious rate. Companies such as M/Gateway, Astronaut (owned by the same conspiracy that owns Linux Medical News) Medsphere, DSS and others are making announcement after announcement of new development in the Veterans Affairs VistA Electronic Health Record or closely related space.

Red Hat is rattled. Sure, it remains the world's biggest Linux company by revenue market share. But it's beginning to feel that it's under pressure - and that it must respond. That pressure is coming not from Microsoft, but from fellow Linux vendors. Individually, they aren't causing too much trouble, but collectively, they could be creating an environment in which customers are starting to question why they should pay Red Hat to support their Linux at all.

Six months after the last big Firefox release, Mozilla today is rolling out Firefox 3.6. The new browser, which began its life under the codename Namaroka", includes numerous enhancement over its predecessor, Firefox 3.5.

The second day of Camp KDE was filled with many more interesting talks. This day's talks were of the more technical nature versus the first day, and the KDE team took notes. As usual, the talks were recorded and videos will be available soon. A detailed rundown of the second day of talks are behind the link. The second day started with a keynote by Frank Karlitschek about KDE vs. The Cloud(TM), looking ahead a couple of years into the future. Frank pointed to the trend to use cloud based applications instead of desktop applications. The question this raised was: can KDE could provide a superior experience if we properly combine the advantages of cloud based technology with the freedom of open source and the power of desktop applications?

OpenOffice gets all the attention, but Linux gives you several excellent office suites to choose from. KOffice is fast, powerful, and has a nice clean customizable interface; Eric Geier shares some tips to help make your KOffice experience as great as possible.

Back in December Zeitgeist 0.3 was released with many changes and its engine was even largely reworked. Since then there have been a few point releases as GNOME Zeitgeist is in the process of being stabilized for a Zeitgeist 0.4 release in time for GNOME 2.30. Yesterday afternoon Zeitgeist 0.3.2 was released to deliver on more stabilization work along with better support for GNOME's Activity Journal. The release announcement can be read on the mailing list.

Chromium hacker Hexxeh has released a faster, USB-bootable build of Google's Chrome OS called Chromium OS Zero. Meanwhile, ArsTechnica interviewed Google's Engineering Director for Chrome OS, Matthew Papakipos on the past and future of Chrome OS. Hexxeh's final build of Chromium OS Zero follows earlier, well-regarded releases of versions including Chromium OS Diet and Cherry. Based on the open source Linux Chromium code that Google began to release in late November, with the goal of releasing a final Chrome OS for netbooks later this year, Chromium OS Zero promises major speed improvements "for many users," according to Hexxeh's blog announcement.

The glorious weather that had punctuated the first two days of the conference held, heralding in the third day in a blaze of sunshine. The conference proper was introduced by a keynote by Benjamin Mako Hill on Antifeatures: Why your software works against you and why software freedom offers hope of a better future. Mako explored the concept of anti-features as deliberately included functionality or a lack of functionality that users hate so much they will pay to have them removed. Some classic examples included the gator spyware that was included with free version of p2p software on the windows platform - with a spyware-free version available for a fee.

Last week, David Coursey reported that Microsoft entertainment and devices boss Robbie Bach made the prediction in an analyst briefing that Linux on mobile will lose. Why? It’s choice is a bad thing for customers and that there is too much Linux in the mobile marketplace. By Bach’s count there are 17 variants of Linux available on mobile phones. He sees this as a bad thing for customers. We, unsurprisingly, see this as a bad thing for Microsoft.

Canonical's Tim Gardner is seeking comments regarding a new build of Ubuntu Server that he is proposing. Canonical is considering another build of Ubuntu Server (there is already Ubuntu Server 32-bit and 64-bit along with specialized builds for cloud computing with Amazon EC2 and UEC), but this one would be specialized for just 64-bit platforms that have low-latency requirements and on power consumptive systems.

Google announced that it was delaying the launch of two Android phones in China due to a dispute with the Chinese government over censorship issues. The delay will affect Google-endorsed Android phones from Samsung and Motorola that were to be carried by China Unicom, says an eWEEK story.

Sauce Labs has released Sauce IDE, a record and playback system for Selenium tests that allows individuals new to Selenium do automated application functional testing on multiple browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera and multiple operating systems, all without writing any code.

On any list of lightweight Linux window managers, you’ll find Fluxbox. Originally a fork of Blackbox, Flux is well known as a fast, light, highly configurable desktop. Unfortunately, Fluxbox’s emphasis on text files for nearly all configuration often acts as a roadblock for those first trying it out. There is a GUI which provides some of the basic config options, but the bulk of it (menus, colors, keybindings) is found in text files. In this article, we’ll go over most of Fluxbox’s config files and how to tweak them to your needs.

Google has received a patent for the technique known as MapReduce. The patent, number 7,650,331 applied for in 2004, is entitled "System and method for efficient large-scale data processing" and covers the process of mapping work to multiple processors and then reducing the intermediate results from these processors to a final result. The technique is used widely by data mining companies, for example, in Yahoo's search infrastructure, Amazon's Elastic MapReduce service and IBM's M2 platform. The Apache Hadoop project is the most prominent open source implementation of the technique.

On the last day of November, 2009, after the initial rush of excitement around Google's Chrome OS launch had quieted a bit, Ryan Paul and I sat down with Matthew Papakipos, the engineering director for the Chrome OS project, and Eitan Bencuya, from Google PR. I had done my best to sort out the why's and wherefore's of Google's first consumer OS effort in my initial launch coverage but I still had many questions about the past, present, and future of the project.

Former JBoss chief Marc Fleury has weighed in on MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius' campaign to stop Oracle's ownership of the open-source database. Fleury has reprimanded Widenius publicly in his blog, calling the MySQL "situation" a "disgrace" that's hurting Sun and could damage the future of open source software.

Customizing and theming, or "skinning", your open source browser is about to get easier, thanks to the integration of Personas in the upcoming Mozilla Firefox 3.6 release. The Personas engine, which enables users to easily change the way the browser looks, had previously been available as a Firefox add-on, but will soon become part of the default browser itself. Other popular Firefox add-ons, including Weave and Prism might one day follow suit, as well as a new technology for add-ons called Jetpacks, Mozilla said.

The schemes commonly used to encrypt GSM telephone calls, SMS messages, and data transmissions have been theoretically broken for years at both the protocol and cipher levels, but results presented in Berlin at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) on December 27 demonstrate that a practical attack can be easily implemented. Researchers unveiled cracking tables requiring just two terabytes of disk space that can be used to look up a GSM encryption key and decrypt a transmission. The tables were computed on 40 commodity hardware PC nodes in just a few months' time, and are shared through Bittorrent. Furthermore, the presentation explains that the more difficult practical task of intercepting and capturing GSM calls can already be done with inexpensive radio equipment and open source software.

Mozilla Labs has rolled out a major update to Bespin, an open source text editing engine that is built with standards-based Web technologies. The project has undergone a "reboot" with the aim of improving the ease with which it can be used and enhanced. Bespin 0.6, codenamed Ash, reflects the significant effort that went into the architectural overhaul. The code is more modular and is designed so that virtually all of the core functionality is implemented in plugins. The developers have also made it considerably easier to embed Bespin in webpages, an improvement that will lower the barriers to adoption.

The ASV Roboat has made a name for itself in many robotic sailboat competitions, and now a real research project is in store for the Linux-powered vessel.