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It's one of those perennial age-old battles that can never be resolved. Coke or Pepsi? Chocolate or vanilla? Linux or Windows? I've been in the trenches of those wars for years. I've written about Windows since the days of Windows 2.0, including numerous books and hundreds or even thousands of articles, blogs and columns. Along the way, I've been called every name in the book -- and many you won't find in any books, either -- by Linux proponents, because I've extolled the benefits of Windows, while ignoring those of Linux.

Red Hat, Inc. today announced the global availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, featuring the latest open source, commercial-strength technology innovations. In the third update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, customers will receive a wide range of enhancements, including significantly increased virtualization scalability, expanded hardware platform support and incorporation of OpenJDK Java technologies. Screenshots

Sun keeps it lively by obsoleting more stuff you're used to using for patching.

After recently reviewing the gOS Gadgets Ubuntu-remix, I decided to try adding Mozilla Prism, Google Gadgets, and a Wbar animated application-launch icon dock to standard Ubuntu. Here's how to do that.

The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through open source technologies and products. The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley's most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He revealed he has been asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration. "It's intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software," he said. "Open source does not require you to pay a penny to Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or any proprietary vendor any money."

KBasic is a new programming language similar to Visual Basic. It combines the best features of those tools and comes with built-in backward support for those tools as it is 100% syntax compatible to VB and QBasic. It is written with Qt making it entirely cross platform. The Full Version Professional Edition is available to download for KDE now. It follows the old Qt licencing of being GPL licenced for Free Software and commercially sold for proprietary software.

Version 5.9.2 of PLplot has been released. PLplot is a cross-platform, scientific graphics plotting library.

Developers might get the picture, but Eclipse reckons it had better ramp up awareness its products among senior management as it moves beyond tools in 2009. Eclipse Foundation marketing director Ian Skerrett has blogged it's important to help senior business and technology executives to understand the Foundation as it moves into runtimes.

Lucid Imagination, new venture to provide commercial support and services for the Apache Lucene text search engine is ramping up with an official launch on January 26, 2009.

Providing another indication of convergence between open source and the cloud, Evans Data researchers are reporting today that nearly half of developers working on open source projects plan to offer applications as web services via cloud providers.

The Ubuntu Mobile operating system is undergoing its most radical change with a port to the ARM processor for Internet devices and netbooks, and may use Nokia's LGPL Qt development environment as an alternative to GNOME. During a presentation at this year's linux.conf.au conference in Hobart, Canonical's David Mandala said Ubuntu Mobile has changed a lot over the past year in that it now includes netbook devices in addition to MIDs and the ARM port.

A new GNUmed live CD is out. With the help of this CD one can test drive GNUmed without altering the currently running environment such as operating system. No installation necessary. Just download the CD image and either burn it to a CD or set up VirtualBox, Vmware/Vmplayer, QEmu or the likes to accept the CD image as a virtual CD drive. Just boot the CD in your physical or virtual PC/Mac and testdrive GNUmed. GNUmed client 0.3.9 is included and configured to connect to either the public GNUmed server via the internet or connect to a GNUmed server included with the CD. No setup needed. Have fun and please let us know how it works for you.

Fred Grott, a programmer who specializes in smartphone applications, has two models for his business: He can write specialized applications in native code that take advantage of all of the features of a specific smartphone, or he can write a Web application that works in the Web browsers of all of the top devices. "Guess which one of those business models [needs] $15K in seed capital and [which] one is in the $250,000 range?" he asks. Given the economics, Grott's choice is simple. Take a standard Web application, add a bit of logic that tests the type of Web browser and then send back slightly customized versions formatted to the screens of smaller handsets.

A quick look at the security vulnerabilities fixed between Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and 5.3 including metrics and mitigations. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 since release and to date, every critical vulnerability has had an update available to address it available from the Red Hat Network either the same day or the next calendar day after the issue was public.

OpenSimulator, sometimes described as the "the Apache of virtual worlds." The open source project originated as a reverse-engineered spinoff of Second Life's GPL-licensed viewer code, and continues growing and evolving far beyond it. Especially with the recent addition of an important feature: the "Hypergrid", a new core OpenSim network architecture which may well establish the HTTP protocol of the metaverse.

One key issue that RHEL 5.3 addresses is Windows Vista interoperability. Red Hat has updated and improved the Samba (define), Linux to Window file sharing technology so that it will support Window Vista. "We have seen demand for Vista compatibility in 2008 and it became a problem that we didn't have really good support for," Riek admitted. "We did some changes on the Samba side to get the new Vista enablement there we also did some work on CIFS (define) side so Linux can work as a client to Windows servers."

CherryPal announced an Atom-based "Bing" netbook that runs Linux or Windows XP, and offers a claimed five hours of battery life. The company also announced an upgraded version of its Linux-based nettop, the CherryPal C114, and launched a "Green Maraschino" open-source Linux distribution supporting the Bing.

Taiwan-based hardware manufacturer Shuttle has released a series of mini-desktops running Linux. The next generation will have power-efficient VIA Nano processors.

The South African State IT Agency’s (SITA) Free and Open Source Software Programme Office (FPO) will host the second annual chief information officers (CIO) workshop on February 24. The one-day workshop will bring together all government IT decision makers to share ideas and experiences regarding FOSS implementation in government.

Enrico Zini is a long time Fellow of the FSFE and a prominent Debian developer. He has been involved in many different projects relating to Free Software and is deeply concerned about social issues. I had a nice chat with Enrico and asked him about some of his favourite causes.