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Many would-be Linux users don't make the leap because there are one or two Windows applications they just can't live without. That doesn't have to hold them back anymore.

Linux users can choose from several big, bulky financial packages to manage their finances, but what about consultants and freelancers who just need to whip out a few basic invoices by the end of the month? For that niche, Simple Invoices, a Web-based, GPLed invoicing system, is a winner for folks with a bit of tech savvy.

In this issue, we have following articles:

1 Announcing Fedora 7 Test 2 (6.91)
2 Reduction of Fedora releases (in Bugzilla)
3 Phoronix: Fedora 7 KVM Virtualization How-To
4 IBM DeveloperWorks: Build a Fedora Live CD
5 Linux.com: Fedora cleans its repositories, considers move to Free Software
6 LWN: Who wrote (Linux Kernel) 2.6.20
7 FOSDEM 2007 KickOff & Pictures
8 Security Week in Review 2007-02-25
9 Fedora Weekly Reports 2007-02-26
10 Fedora Core 5 and 6 Updates
11 Contributing to Fedora Weekly News
12 Editor's Blog

California has introduced a bill to make open document format (ODF) a mandatory requirement for agencies when acquiring software, turning up the heat on Microsoft. The bill follows similar legislation in Texas and Minnesota and adds further to the pressure on Microsoft which is pushing its own proprietary Office Open XML (OOXML) document format in the recently released Office 2007.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: KSplashX, a potential replacement for the KSplashML engine is imported into KDE SVN. Continued progress in the Solid and NetworkManager integration. More refinement, including better keyboard shortcuts, in Konsole. New keyboard layouts in KTouch. Icon and undo support in Step, the educational physics simulation package. KBounce becomes the latest game to move to a scalable interface and graphics. More work in KSquares, Konquest, KSpaceDuel and KReversi. KSudoku starts to be ported to KDE 4...

Need to sync data between Google Calendar (Gcal) and your desktop calendaring application? GCALDaemon, a nifty Java-based utility, provides two-way synchronization between Gcal and virtually any iCalendar-compatible application. Besides the ability to sync calendaring data, GCALDaemon can act as a Gmail notifier, and can pull your Gmail contacts via LDAP.

Indian state provides Windows XP Starter Edition for those who want it, but will continue to encourage Linux use.

Gaisler Research AB has announced Linux 2.6 Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) support for the LEON3 processor. The Linux 2.6 SMP is able to automatically load balance applications across multiple LEON3 cores. The SMP support also enables developers to realize the performance potential of multicore architectures while maximizing software reuse. The combination of Linux 2.6 SMP and the LEON3 multiprocessor capability yields the most advanced hardware/software architecture for high performance systems.

OK - I actually like and enjoy LDAP, but do not allow that to cloud your judgment. LDAP took much more of my time and effort to learn than Bind and/or DNS. And I recall sitting in front of DNS chapters wondering why we needed another language to do something as easy as mapping a friendly name to an IP address. This jargon stuff has value though such as constraing insomnia.

It finally happened. Someone finally said it. I was attending a recent talk by a nameless major speaker in charge of a large Health IT organization. I had to get up and walk out on the speaker. I'm not normally one to get up and walk out on people in a huff, but long ago I made a contract with myself that if anyone uttered 2 fateful words again I was going to get up and walk out. Those two words are:

The initiators of the Month of PHP Bugs (MOPB) have published vulnerabilities in the Zend engine, PHP4, and the current developer version of the script language. Software updates have already been provided for a few of these7 flaws.

That's the question that occurs to me as I read this piece in Roughly Drafted. It's about how Apple is kicking Microsoft's butt at the high end of the desktop market, and how Microsoft seems to be bumbling its way out of desktop hegemony anyway. Linux is mentioned only twice in this long piece, but the harbingery of the references are significant.

HYDERABAD: Communist Party of India (Marxist) has asked the Centre to shift to free and open source software in all its e-governance applications, as it will be a major step towards breaking the `monopoly' of proprietary software that currently exists.

Motorola Inc. has initiated a new open source project to develop a complete high availability operating environment based on Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) standards. The objective of the new "OpenSAF" project is to accelerate broad adoption of an SA Forum compliant operating environment.

Although Google’s success in making billions from web advertising was a “wake-up call” inside Microsoft, Ray Ozzie, the company’s chief software architect, says Google’s approach to delivering productivity software is the wrong way to go.

The seventh issue of the Amarok Newsletter is out. We talk about Amarok's success in the Linuxquestions.org yearly poll, new features in the upcoming Amarok 2, and continue to point out interesting related projects. Read on for some Amarok lovin' from Wil Wheaton. In the other news, Wil Wheaton from Star Trek reviews Amarok. When you see quotes like "Amarok is much more than just another music player or iTunes clone; in fact, it blows iTunes away. It is Kryptonite to iTunes Superman. It's the Death Star to iTunes' Alderaan." and "[...] it's like having Uncle Joe Benson and Rodney Bingenheimer sitting in your living room with you", you know you can't miss it!

Less than two weeks after launching its Linux-based "single core" U900 phone aimed at the mid-range market, Grundig Mobile has introduced another Linux-powered smartphone. The B700 targets enterprise users with a full hardware QWERTY keyboard and push email, similar to RIM's Blackberry.

JasperSoft Corp., a provider of open source business intelligence solutions, and MySQL AB have announced the availability of Jasper for MySQL: OEM Edition, a suite of operational reporting products that includes a high-performance interactive report server, a graphical report creation tool and a pixel-perfect reporting system with dashboards, tables, crosstabs and charts.

Puppet is a secure configuration management tool for Unix-like operating systems, with features that will undoubtedly mark it for fame. Puppet has been around for nearly two years now, and has claimed a large share of cfengine converts. As mentioned last week, its configuration is more of a specification than a set of instructions, designed to make managing large groups of servers and services more than just tolerable—it can completely streamline an infrastructure.

Countless pieces of software, protocols and complex interdependencies together form a system for which it is difficult to guarantee any particular property-particularly security. Even software specifically designed to enhance security can, at the behest of clever individuals armed with detailed knowledge, work to its detriment. Vulnerabilities have been discovered in all sorts of security software from firewalls to implementations of the Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol. For example, OpenSSH is developed by some of the most security-conscious developers in the world, and yet it occasionally contains a remotely exploitable vulnerability.