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In 2005, when Slumberland faced end-of-lifecycle replacements of its proprietary Unix platform, its warehouse management system (WMS) vendor suggested a move to Red Hat Linux and commodity x86 servers. Seth Mitchell, the infrastructure team manager at the large furniture retailer, gladly agreed. Upper management wasn't quite as quick to jump on the open source bandwagon, but once the cost savings started rolling in, everyone agreed that it was a profitable decision.

When Microsoft announced it was planning to offer lightweight, web-based versions of some of its Office components, there was some speculation that maybe it could be used with alternate browsers. It seemed Firefox would be a likely candidate beyond IE, and some ventured to wonder about Safari.

KDE used to be a very nice desktop environment for Linux, I remember using it over the years in CentOS, Fedora Core, Kubuntu, Mandriva, and PCLinuxOS. I used KDE 3.5.x in Kubuntu and thought it was the best desktop environment available for the Linux operating system. But what would a new Linux user feel about Linux if KDE 4 were the first environment they attempted to run?

Neither Ubuntu nor any other brand of Linux is ever going to make it as a mainstream desktop operating system. Listen to a roar of protests from some of the millions of Linux desktop users around the world. Very loud they are but in the scheme of things their numbers are tiny - they are a tinority.

If you're used to Windows Vista or Mac OS X Leopard, you may be disappointed in the parental controls, or the lack there of, in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. But don't give up on open source for your youngsters yet-- Eric Geier shows how to create a safer computing environment on Linux.

Several extensions can help you work with photographic images on your Joomla! content management system. Here are some of the best. Multithumb is the Swiss Army knife of image manipulation. If you're not picky, it might be the only such extension you'll need. It can automatically generate thumbnails and eye-catching image galleries. Its options are highly customizable, and it's one of the easiest plugins to work with.

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install VMware Server 2 on a Mandriva 2009.0 desktop system. With VMware Server you can create and run guest operating systems (virtual machines) such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. under a host operating system. This has the benefit that you can run multiple operating systems on the same hardware which saves a lot of money, and you can move virtual machines from one VMware Server to the next one (or to a system that has the VMware Player which is also free).

Open-source software is almost universal in the enterprise, a survey from analyst group Garner has confirmed. New research has highlighted quite how pervasive open-source software (OSS) has become, with 85% of companies currently using OSS and the remaining 15% expecting to in the next 12 months. The findings come from a Gartner survey in May and June 2008, which covered 274 end-user organizations in Asia/Pacific, Europe and North America, and raise a series of management issues for businesses.

The music industry's courtroom campaign against people who share songs online is coming under counterattack. A Harvard Law School professor has launched a constitutional assault against a federal copyright law at the heart of the industry's aggressive strategy, which has wrung payments from thousands of song-swappers since 2003. The professor, Charles Nesson, has come to the defense of a Boston University graduate student targeted in one of the music industry's lawsuits. By taking on the case, Nesson hopes to challenge the basis for the suit, and all others like it.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Monday, November 17, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. In today's news, Microsoft adopts the Linux mascot, the penguin, for its ads (or maybe not), Dell keeps on pushing Linux netbooks, Windows users prefer OpenOffice.org, Sun rises again (and again) with open source, and black Friday netbook deals (you really need one).

Hi All, Here's my forth tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series: "You want to test your configuration for your directory server": The OpenLDAP Software Suite comes with many great command line tools which we will cover in the OpenLDAP Quick Tips series.

After a rocky beginning, the nonprofit group One Laptop Per Child thinks an advertising campaign will give a lift to the organization’s effort to place low-cost laptops in the hands of children in developing nations. About 500,000 of the group’s light and rugged machines are being used in 31 countries, including Afghanistan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Lebanon, Peru, Rwanda and Uruguay. But the cost of the laptops, at less than $200 each, has been prohibitively high for many countries,and the number of laptops distributed has fallen short of early projections.

The GNOME Foundation executive director, Stormy Peters, recently wrote a bit about why the focus on "the KDE versus GNOME" debate is not the real issue. Many commenters on her post agree (while others actively demonstrate) that it is counterproductive.

Close on the heels of OpenOffice.org 3.0, Sun today announced the release of StarOffice 9, it's own version of the office suite, with added support.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who are the greatest geeks of us all? That question -- posed in an Australian iTnews article,The Top 10 Greatest Geeks of All Time on Monday -- sparked quite a discussion in the blogosphere last week, garnering more than 1,300 Diggs and 280 comments by Friday.

DistroWatch Weekly was first published in June 2003 as a publication summarising the happenings in the distribution world on a weekly basis. Now, 5½ years and 278 issues later, an era is about to end. The publication that has been growing in stature and influence, needs a new editor, a person (or two) with fresh ideas, eager for new challenges, ready to report about the latest technologies in an unbiased manner. If you think you can fulfil the criteria, please read below for the official "position vacant" notice. In the meantime, please accept our apologies for missing an issue last week. We hope to bring you more quality articles, authoritative news summaries, and all the usual goodies you've come to expect from your DistroWatch Weekly in the future. Happy reading and thank you all for your continued support!

In response to growing demand from open source users, Adobe will today release a 64-bit version of its Flash 10 player for Linux. The 64-bit version will be an alpha release and will be followed by versions for other platforms at a later date.

[Yes, you read that right. 64-bit Flash for Linux first. 64-bit Windows will follow "someday" :-) - Sander]

For years, there has been one uploader option listed on Flickr that is Linux compatible. jUploadr continues to be a great tool (and though updates aren't frequent, it handles basic Flickr uploading tasks well). Don't let the fact that it's the only Linux uploader listed on Flickr's site make you believe it's the only option, or that Linux targeted uploaders are one trick ponies.

Kraft helps you keep track of business offers and invoices and can generate PDF files to help you easily issue these routine documents to third parties. Since Kraft is a KDE application, it can draw contact information directly from your KDE address book, so you don't have to duplicate or sync your contacts in order to generate an invoice.

In newspaper ads across the United States, Dell is promoting a low-cost notebook computer called the Inspiron Mini 9 running Ubuntu Linux. It's Microsoft's worst holiday nightmare.