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Kai Hendry has announced the release of Webconverger 4.9, a Debian-based live CD and web kiosk designed for deployments in places like offices or Internet cafés where only web applications are used. What's new? "Shows a new Iceweasel (Firefox) security update 3.0.11; back to Xpdf despite printing dialog problems, because it's lighter and integrates better with the browser (no EULA to agree to every time); Webconverger base 4.9 featuring wireless essid with spaces fix and a compose key option; known to work flawlessly with Eee PC 900. Known issues: hard drive installer is not present on the ISO edition (or any edition for that matter)."

BlankOn Linux is a Linux distribution developed by Indonesia Linux Movement Foundation (Yayasan Penggerak Linux Indonesia / YPLI) and Indonesia Ubuntu Community which aim to fulfill the need of computer user in general. Using the easiness and stability philosophy of Ubuntu Linux as the base distribution, BlankOn Linux developed as an open source project and developed together to create a unique Indonesia Linux distribution. Jakarta, June 16th, 2009 - Today the BlankOn Developer team officialy release BlankOn 5.0 with the code name Nanggar, the culture that is brought up to this version is from Batak culture. The name Nanggar is taken from Batak language which means “Hammer”. Some of the new unique features in Nanggar are the Contextual Desktop which developed by BlankOn Developer Team, with the ability to change the theme and the wallpaper of the desktop based on the computer clock or based on the current weather condition.

Coders have reacted with disappointment and frustration to Microsoft's decision to cease development of a connector to Oracle in its .NET Framework, a move that looks like another budget cut. Microsoft has said it will no longer develop OracleClient, or System.Data.OracleClient, with the the up-coming .NET Framework 4.0. It will still be included with the framework but will be "marked as deprecated."

The compact and flexible nature of the Linux Kernel, plus the fact that it and all its support code is modular open source, means it lends itself very well to stripped down small and efficient distributions. This article explores a few of these distributions and explains just how useful they can be

Linux kernel development continues to roar ahead, and 2.6.30 is cram-full of excellent new features: Tomoyo, the learning framework for SELinux, NILFS (new implementation of a log-structured file system), IEEE 802.11w enhanced wireless security, and fastboot, which is a speedier boot process in the kernel itself. Sean Michael Kerner reports.

Xandros-owned email and groupware vendor Scalix released Scalix ActiveSync 1.0, a push email and synchronization add-on to Scalix Server that implements Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync protocol for wireless message synchronization. Scalix also released Scalix Server 11.4.4, touted for its over 200 improvements.

Going back to 2007 we have been talking about Valve Software and Linux games after they were hiring software engineers to port Windows-based games to the Linux platform. Late last year we also got some confirmation of a Steam Linux client through some Linux shared libraries that had mistakenly shipped with the Left 4 Dead game client along with some other information we received through the grapevine. Well, now there may be another sign of impending Linux support by Valve Software. In fact, it's listed right on the Valve Software web-site!

It's interesting to note that Dell is planning to offer small and medium businesses (SMBs) preconfigured hardware and open source software bundles. The bundles seem targeted at the Asia Pacific region. This news comes days after a Forrester study found "only 9 percent of enterprises said they were 'very concerned' [about the security of open source] compared with 45 percent for the SMBs."

In this wide world of Linux, there are primarily just two package management systems which reign: RPM and Deb. Most binary distributions use one or the other and there has long been tension between the two. So which system performs better?

Larry the Free Software Guy has strapped himself into the driver's seat in test-driving Fedora 11 on three different desktops -- GNOME, KDE and Xfce -- and the results range from reuniting with an old friend to receiving divine intervention.

While every Fedora fans enjoy the newly released Fedora 11 Linux-based operating system, the developers are working hard on the next release, Fedora 12, due for release in November-December 2009. Make sure you visit our website, starting with August 8th when the first alpha will be released, as we will do a full coverage of the Fedora 12 development process. Without any further introduction, let's have a look at the release schedule..

One of the questions I see the most in forums and sites like Yahoo Answers is : "What is the best Linux distribution for beginners?" or "What is the easiest Linux distribution?" Well, unlike what you may think these questions are not that easy to answer, as the easiest Linux distribution is not necessarily the best for all beginners because other factors like the availability of support and commercial applications availability have to be taken into account.

One of the topics of ongoing interest in the kernel community is that of maintaining quality. It is trivially obvious that we need to maintain and even improve quality. It is less obvious how best to do so. One broad approach that has found some real success is to increase the visibility of various aspects of the kernel. This makes the quality of those aspects more apparent, so this tends to lead to an improvement of the quality.

Steven Edwards of the Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 1.8 today. Bordeaux 1.8 has had many changes on the back end. The build process has been totally rewritten, packaging has been totally rewritten, the .sh installer is terminal based now and the dependency for pygtk and pango has been removed, the .sh installer will now run on any supported platform Linux, BSD, Solaris and Mac. Our winetricks script has been synced to the latest official release, Steam should now install and run, There has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks. This complete rewrite gives Bordeaux a much more clean and portable codebase, making new improvements much easier to provide. We already have some exciting things in the works for the next release.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Fedora 11 desktop (GNOME) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

IDG World Expo has announced speakers for its inaugural OpenSource World 2009 show (formerly LinuxWorld) on Aug. 12-13 in San Francisco. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen will keynote the conference, which will feature presentations on Linux desktops, netbooks, Android, mobile devices, enterprise, security, troubleshooting, and numerous "cloud" topics.

Today we are launching the Social Desktop Contest. As you know the idea of the Social Desktop is to connect online webservices with desktop applications. We give away great prices to developers who help making this vision reality. The Open Collaboration Services API has gotten many new features in the past few months and is now stable. The first features will ship with KDE 4.3, but this is only the beginning. Now that the infrastructure is in place we think that it is a good time to open up the development to more developers.

You can’t be half-pregnant. And Hewlett-Packard can’t be half-committed to Ubuntu Server Edition. Over the next few months, I think you’ll see HP make a far more comprehensive commitment to Canonical’s Linux server strategy.

Microsoft is burying $10,000 somewhere on the web for Australians with IE8's user agent string (*cough* User-Agent Swticher plugin for Firefox).

Amazon is now making new source code available for its Amazon Kindle. Basically what it represents is Amazon's responsibility to make the GPL licensed source code that is used in the Kindle available to others. That's part of the GPL license and Amazon is doing its part. Digging into the code that Amazon is now making available provides some really interesting insight into the underlying structure of the Kindle. For one, Kindle (at least the DX) is using a modified Linux 2.6.22 kernel