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Paul Ferrill takes us on a tour of Novell's Open Enterprise Server, which is built on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). OES has all the bells and whistles that modern network admins require: cross-platform interoperability, domain services, user management, migration assistance, Web-based management, and more.

Today IBM announced that it has teamed with Canonical and Virtual Bridges to offer a Linux-based virtual desktop computing environment. With this product, IBM hopes to emphasize and increase adoption of its Lotus collaboration software, as well as promote the use of Linux (Canonical's Ubuntu) by way of Virtual Bridges' VERDE desktop virtualization platform.

One of the top executives at SugarCRM has moved on to join Pentaho, where he's now building the open source BI company's partner program. Here's the scoop, from The VAR Guy.

IBM announced the availability of a "Microsoft alternative" virtual desktop that uses virtualization technology from Virtual Bridges and incorporates Canonical's Ubuntu Linux and IBM's Lotus applications. Based on Virtual Bridges's Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment (VERDE), the desktop environment is far more affordable than running Microsoft desktops, claims IBM.

Ubuntu has once again opened up a call for submissions to anyone interested in being a part of the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase. If you're a musician, artist, photographer, or all-around creative genius and would like to enter your work in the current competition, you've got until February 9, 2009 to submit something to the judges.

In a long-term project, the OpenOffice team wants to thoroughly rework the free office software's user interface. This was already widely expected to happen with version 3.0, which no longer looks contemporary in many users' eyes. In addition, the office suite's menus have become so cluttered and badly structured that users find it impossible to locate certain functions – a problem Microsoft addressed with the ribbon feature in Office 2007. Ribbons have replaced the classic menus of Word, Excel, Access and Powerpoint in the latest Office, and will come to Paint and Wordpad in Windows 7.

Sun Microsystems, it is generally felt, lost the desktop to Microsoft a long time ago. Aware of this, Sun in recent years evangelized mobile as Java's habitat - mobile is, after all, where Microsoft's at its weakest. It's with great ceremony, then, that Sun's marking the fact it comprehensively missed that JavaFX Mobile deadline by returning to the desktop with the scheduled launch today of JavaFX Desktop 1.0 - now just JavaFX 1.0. Linux, meanwhile, is the new Java for mobile it seems. Linux looks set to grow in the mobile space, with ABI Research last year predicting there'd be more than 127 million devices using Linux by 2012, up from 8.1 million in 2007.

Bouncing along the bottom of a recession is not where most people think of doing long term planning. But open source doesn’t think first about money, so the Open World Forum has taken a long, hard look into the deep future of the year 2020. (I will be 64 when that year opens, hence the headline.)

The FTP team at the Debian project have decided that the Affero GPL version 3 licensing (AGPLv3) is consistent enough with the guidelines of the Linux distro that software with the licensing can go into Debian's main archive.

There is no doubt that people are leaving Windows, many going to the Mac and some are turning to Linux. This is partly due in part to dissatisfaction with Vista. The reason isn’t important. What is happening to the Linux community is. We see that Windows users are having an impact on the Linux community that we may not have anticipated. Windows users aren’t used to choice. For them the array of choices that Linux presents is confusing.

From the "it's not Linux, but it's got the same apps" files: Sun has rolled opensolaris 2008.11, loaded with open source applications that are well known to Linux distribution users

If you use GUI then you can right-click on the pictures and see properties. But can you see the image properties (or metadata) from command line interface? Yes! you can do that using identify command. Here is how.

There are a host of Linux certifications, such as the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), Novell's Novell Linux Certified Engineer (NLCE), and the Linux Professional Institute's entry-level LPIC-1. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols looks for the answer to the question, How much help are they for turning your Linux expertise into a Linux job?

Ruby on Rails is garnering a lot of praise as an easy-to-use, database-driven Web framework for developing Web applications. Most of the documentation for Ruby on Rails centers on Macintosh, with the remainder seemingly only for Windows machines, but RoR is perfectly usable on Linux computers too. This article explains how to install and begin developing with RoR in Linux.

Bashing Microsoft for being closed and proprietary has been a popular pastime in the media and the IT industry for many years, and there is no doubt that much of this has been well deserved. After having its wings clipped on several occasions by regulators, however, the Microsoft of today, while not totally reformed, is a lot more open and well behaved than it was, say, 10 years ago.

Microsoft on Wednesday announced several incremental enhancements to the compatibility of its Office Open XML document format. The enhancements came out of the Document Interoperability Initiative (DII), a working group set up in March between Microsoft and companies such as Novell, QuickOffice and Dataviz. The object of the DII was to boost the interoperability between Office Open XML (OOXML) and rival XML-based document formats such as the open-source OpenDocument Format (ODF), which was already a ratified ISO standard.

Opera released an alpha version of Opera 10 today, a first step toward the next major release of the popular cross-platform web browser. First and foremost, Opera 10 is looking to offer stiff competition with the blazing rendering engines in the upcoming Firefox release (Tracemonkey) and Google Chrome (V8) with an update to its rendering engine, Presto—which Opera claims offers a 30% speed boost over the previous version of the engine. But that's not all.

People who use laptops often need different configurations. They may want the option of removing their external display, docking station, or other peripheral. In some cases, like with network cards, it's quite easy and normally the user doesn't need to modify anything. In some cases the user needs to execute some commands to modify the default behavior. Normally when you need to re-execute the same command twice it's time to write a script and put it in the right place to be executed in the right moment.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Wednesday, December 3, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. In today's news, not only is Linux apparently broken, so is the open source business model. Mandriva falls on hard times again, viruses cripple US military base, Microsoft pays for recommending them, OpenSUSE throws out the EULA, the costs of piracy, and a new browser war.

After many years of development, the Songbird open source software is finally released as version 1.0. Multimedia player Songbird is one among a group of Mozilla Foundation tools with Linux versions for 32-bit and 64-bit systems.