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Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Saturday ordered 1 million low-cost laptops from Portugal — one of several bilateral deals that Portuguese officials valued at more than US$3 billion. The agreements cover housing, utility infrastructure and energy cooperation. "We are building a solid relationship" with Portugal, Chavez said at a signing ceremony in Lisbon. "We have negotiated (these deals) with our mutual interests in mind." The blue-and-white laptops — based on Intel Corp.'s Classmate PC design — are manufactured under license in Portugal and are primarily aimed at schoolchildren in developing countries. They contain the latest Intel microprocessors, digital cameras and broadband Internet access.

Chris Harrick, SugarCRM's vice president of corporate and product marketing, discusses the advantages of open source software with Customer Inter@ction Solutions writer David Sims in a Q-and-A interview. They discuss the advantages of open source software as compared with proprietary software.

That ubiquitous Linux! It's on your computer, your mobile phone, your handheld GPS. What's more, it's also in movies, cartoons, comics and books around you too! Here are my top 5 Linux references as found in popular culture.

Ringside Networks was a very cool company - one of the best new open-source companies, as I wrote earlier this year. The company had a dream similar to Ning's - to make social networking-type applications an integral part of a wide array of websites and enterprises. This past month, however, even as Ning neared 500,000 social networks (at least one of which is not used for porn! Go figure!!), Ringside went down for the count.

F/OSS is perhaps the most important development in the information technology world since the personal computer and the Internet. The Gartner Report predicted last April that by 2012 more than 90 percent of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded forms. Essentially all businesses are running F/OSS; health care, financial services and manufacturing are three sectors experiencing particularly rapid growth of F/OSS use. Because IT personnel are able to download F/OSS (free), without budget approval, oftentimes management is completely unaware of the prevalence of F/OSS on their company’s systems.

Lennart Poettering, main programmer of the PulseAudio project, has written a 'Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle': "At the Audio MC at the Linux Plumbers Conference one thing became very clear: it is very difficult for programmers to figure out which audio API to use for which purpose and which API not to use when doing audio programming on Linux. So here's my try to guide you through this jungle."

Given the number of Linux distros out there, how did we pick just 14? Some were obvious; the likes of Slackware and Debian have been around since Linus was in short trousers. SUSE, Fedora, Mandriva and Ubuntu are similarly too significant to ignore. What about the others? To survive, a distro must have something to offer – a large userbase, unique features, ease of use – something that makes it a little (or a lot) different from the rest. We hope that the selection here is sufficiently varied, but please forgive us if we have omitted your favourite distro – try some of the alternatives to see what you may be missing out on.

Here in the states we are coming up on a very important election - the election of the President of the United States. And I would be remiss if I did not address this topic in a blog dedicated to the topic of open source. The last two presidential elections proved that our system of voting is either broken or corrupt (or both). In August of this year Deibold (the maker of electronic voting machines) finally admitted their systems have been broken for ten years: Chris Riggal (a spokesman for Deibold) says their system contained a: “…critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point”

The free software movement aims for a social change: to make all software free so that all software users are free and can be part of a community of cooperation. Every non-free program gives its developer unjust power over the users. Our goal is to put an end to that injustice. The road to freedom is a long road. It will take many steps and many years to reach a world in which it is normal for software users to have freedom. Some of these steps are hard, and require sacrifice. Some steps become easier if we make compromises with people that have different goals.

I’m writing this from Ubuntu 8.04 in a live session (booted from USB stick). This *nix distribution runs well, does what I want it to do and runs just fine without complaint. Let’s forget the fact that it’s super-awesome-cool I can just pop in a USB stick, boot Ubuntu, run it, connect to a wireless network with no problems at all and do my work. You can’t do that with Windows or OS X. Let’s also forget the fact for a moment I’ve been using *nix distros off and on since Red Hat 5 (Apollo).

For every random need, group, or type of hardware, there seems to be a specific Linux distribution available. Looking for Christian software? Check out Ubuntu Christian Edition with GnomeSword, BibleMemorizer, BibleTime and Web controls powered by Dansguardian. Want Ubuntu on the PlayStation 3? Look no further than PSUbuntu. Need one specific for the firewall or router? There are a few choices, including ClarkConnect, Coyote Linux, Devil Linux, IPCop, SmoothWall, eBox and Gibraltar.

Netcraft -- er, Jim Zemlin, confirms it: Solaris is dying. Customers are leaving it and legacy Unix behind for Linux, in his purview. Open sourcing the platform was too little, too late. Well, maybe not sundown, but it's getting mighty dark out. These are actually not new sentiments; I picked them up from Jim when I talked to him back at OSCON -- a place where, ironically enough, I had also talked to folks from Sun. They were and are smart guys, deeply proud of the work they're doing, but I hope they all understand they are never going to steal any of Linux's thunder. (The refrain I've heard from many different quarters about this issue has been expressed in almost the same exact words by all concerned: "If only they had done this [open sourced Solaris] three/five/ten years earlier...")

Big Money Matt Asay is fairly dismissive of European open source. It lacks the killer instinct, he writes. The only way to graft that on is to bring the European to America. He cites Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol, as an example. He has a point, as my friend Roberto Galoppini demonstrated recently at OSIMWorld in Berlin. Roberto held a workshop on bringing open source into the business model during the show, which was well attended. And he had all his facts in order, complete with attractive charts.

For some Linux distribution projects, new releases come twice a year. That had been the plan for Gentoo Linux this year, until it canceled its current planned release -- the second time it's done so in the past 12 months. But the news doesn't necessarily mean a setback for the project. Instead, Gentoo developers said they are pushing a new model for their distribution -- one that eschews the conventional release wisdom used by Red Hat, Novell, Debian and others. Instead of fixed releases, Gentoo is promoting its vision of a live, continuously updating distribution. In practice, that effort revolves around its weekly minimal images, which are then supplemented with customized installed packages.

As travel expenses escalate and budgets shrink during this economic slowdown, businesses are finding ways to"do more with less," according to Brent Arslaner. As vice president of marketing at Unisfair, Arslaner says the concept of virtual conferences is"starting to catch on."

Discussions about free and open source software can arouse strong emotions. That's something I've known for many years but one often tends to forget these things in the rush of daily life. It comes back to you in a flash when someone reacts in a totally unbalanced way to something you've written or said, a totally harmless comment that should be absolutely inoffensive when considered logically. But logic rarely comes into the picture when people feel that you are criticising the free and open source community and anything associated with it.

Microsoft may be the only company in a position to provide "any real competition" for Google in the online search business, CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday. But first it will need to figure out a way to do it. "We need to do some work to fundamentally reinvent the search business model," Ballmer said during a dinner at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley. "You don't brute-force your way into a market. You only make great strides when you redefine the category for the user." And that will take some time. "It's a five-year task," Ballmer said. But Microsoft is ready to spend a lot of money trying. The company told its shareholders recently that it was prepared to lose "5 to 10 percent of total operating income for several years" to improve its position in search, Ballmer said.

This post is about the desktop operating systems that fly under the radar of most people. We are definitely not talking about Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, or even BSD or Solaris. There are much less mainstream options out there for the OS-curious. These alternative operating systems are usually developed either by enthusiasts or small companies (or both), and there are more of them than you might expect. There are even more than we have included in this article, though we think this is a good selection of the more interesting ones and we have focused specifically on desktop operating systems.

One of the pleasures of Linux is that you can try out different distributions to see which one works best for you. You like Ubuntu, but you want to fine tune the desktop engine? OK, try Kubuntu with its KDE desktop then. Some worthwhile distributions, however, don't get as much attention as they deserve. So, here's my list of five great distributions that you might want to try.

In case anyone hasn't been paying attention, apparently the US economy isn't doing too well these days. There is a lot of news lately about banks failing, government bail-outs, and natural disasters that will cost us all a lot of money (thanks, Ike).