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The Race to Linux is over, and the coding contest's sponsors have declared the winners.

The National Center for Open Source Policy and Research (NCOSPR) was launched today at the first Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) at Oregon State University, a meeting of more than 200 representatives of government entities and software developers hosted by the university's Open Source Lab (OSL).

After nearly 25 years as a proprietary software company, Xara is throwing itself headfirst into the open source community with two announcements that could have a significant impact on the vector graphics software landscape.

In a recent article about VoIP softphones, I touched on the problem of proprietary, patent-encumbered codecs. To recap, the point was that a triumph of open protocols, like Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Inter-Asterisk EXchange (IAX), is hollow if the marketplace standardizes on closed, proprietary codecs for delivering the voice data itself. But how do you find the good free codecs? Here are some options.

This week, advisories were released for mason, cpio, dia, masqmail, shorewall, tcpdump, openvpn, up-imapproxy, ethereal, weex, py2play, graphviz, xloadimage, xli, xine-lib, hylafax, Ruby, SVG, hexlix player, uw-imap, openssl, thunderbird, binutils, and libuser. The distributors include Debian, Gentoo, and Red Hat.

So, you became excited and made a raft of changes to Firefox in one fell swoop? You can't remember what all those tweaks involved, but you've already noticed some feature or function that's not working the way it should. The fault probably does lie with something you did, but occasionally that's not true. Let's discuss a couple of very common, not-your-fault problems you might stumble across, and what you can do about them.

Having watched and nurtured an open source community based around the Sugar customer relationship management (CRM) platform for the last 14 months, SugarCRM is hosting a developer contest to mark the 100th extension on the SugarForge.org development forum, and draw more attention to the already successful company.

Sometimes encryption isn't enough to keep your conversations private. With standard encryption, it's theoretically possible for someone to steal your secret encryption keys and decipher the conversation. For conversations that need to be kept confidential, the Off-the-Record (OTR) plugin for Gaim saves the day. It leaves no trace of a conversation ever having taken place.

While others debate whether GNU/Linux is ready for the desktop, Userful is quietly proving that it is -- and making a profit while doing so.

Continuing where we left off yesterday -- careful assessment of integration and customization costs in many ways is the key to avoiding an open source nightmare. Unlike commercial products, open source projects are not usually created with the modern IT infrastructure environment in mind. Integration with single sign-on or support for monitoring protocols such as SNMP might not exist. Support for databases might be narrow and limited to a few choices or to one database. Support for standards might be lacking.

Choice is a good thing, and Linux users have plenty of it when selecting a program for Web development. Users can choose from the basic no-frills text editors, to full-featured "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) programs. Here's a survey of the best programs I've used.

CapitolAdvantage.com started out as a paper directory of members of Congress that founder Bob Hansan sold to corporations in the Washington, DC, area in the late '80s. When the Internet boomed in 1996, Hansan moved everything online and conducted a quiet revolution that has permanently changed the way constituents communicate with their congressmen and senators. Today, the entire operation runs on Red Hat Linux.

One of the first things that is asked of any new project in a modern IT department is that a cost benefit analysis be created to determine if the investment of time and resources makes sense. This takes many forms, but at many companies the idea of return on investment, or ROI, is king.

The Ubuntu 5.10 release, also known as Breezy Badger, is not drastically different from the previous Ubuntu release, 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog, but it is an excellent distribution that is well worth a look for any user interested in a Linux distro for the desktop or server.

Debian users have always boasted that their Advanced Package Tool (APT) was the best and fastest way there has ever been to install and delete software. They were right, except for two details: First, many computer users are scared of the command line -- and APT is a command line utility. Second, even for users not afraid of the command line, setting download repositories and other parameters was not easy unless you spent enough of your time administering computers to remember all the text commands it took to make APT do what you wanted. Then came Synaptic, which promised to make Debian software installs GUI-friendly. Not long after that came a version of Synaptic that didn't crash every time I tried to use it. And finally, in late 2004, Synaptic became so lovable that I would no longer want to have a desktop computer without it.

Open source Web site content management systems (CMS) don't provide a full solution for the needs of many Web site administrators because they lacked a shopping cart. But thanks to projects like Drupal's E-Commerce shopping cart and Mambo's mambo-phpShop, things are getting easier: The shopping carts integrate directly into the core of the system, providing an acceptable shopping experience without requiring multiple logins, and they keep the theme of the Web site intact.

Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices is not your standard "learn to program" Perl book. Think of it as The Elements of Style for Perl -- the book will help you to write Perl programs that are easier to read and maintain and less likely to have errors.

Welcome to this year's 41st issue of DistroWatch Weekly. A very busy week of exciting new releases is behind us, but that doesn't mean that this week will be any less interesting - in fact, we expect a new KDE 3.4.3 on Wednesday, while the "Breezy Badger" family of Ubuntu Linux and its partner projects are scheduled for release on Thursday. Also in this issue: we'll analyse the events of the past week, introduce Mandriva 2006 Discovery Live, feature WIENUX 1.0, continue with the usual release summaries, and conclude with a handful of interesting new distributions. Enjoy! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

The Mall School for boys in Richmond, UK, has been around for 133 years, and to IT head Sue Warrington, it seemed like the prep school's Windows network was almost as old. Recently, the school got rid of its aging collection of "fat client" PCs and purchased a brand new network of Linux thin clients, including all the software a bunch of 4- to 13-year-old boys could possibly need, for a lot less than a proprietary solution.

OK, you one-click installers, listen up! In spite of the early dementia no doubt being brought on by living in a GUI cocoon, there's a chance you might learn something from this week's CLI Magic. Here's the thing: given the ease of installing free software apps these days, especially those installed outside your distro's package management, how do you get that the great game you installed from scratch last week when you learn it opens your system up to hostile takeover? Think that just removing the executable does the trick? Think again, oh rodent lover. Now you're ready to learn about Checkinstall.