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Microsoft delivers the beta of a download manager and packaged open-source applications to make it easier for Web developers to install Web products. The move follows Microsoft's support for an Eclipse Foundation project related to Silverlight and precedes sponsorship of the Government Open Source Conference. GOSCON will take place in Portland, Ore. Meanwhile, OpenLogic announces a slew of professional services to help companies interested in trying open-source software during the economic downturn.

This document will guide you through the necessary steps to configure a Drupal driven mail server. It provides the following features: Drupal managed email accounts, support for virtual domains, automatic forwarding, Postfix quota support, silent BCC monitoring, anti-spam, anti-virus.

What does Microsoft do when someone says: No, sorry, we do not want to use your software any more. If that someone is a small business operating in an increasingly cut-throat world, a great deal of pressure can be brought to bear on them to fall into line. But what if that someone is a whole nation, and that whole nation happens to be a world superpower with the resources and will to forge its own, alternative route to technological competitiveness? This is what has happened to Microsoft in Russia, and it all started with a school teacher. Back in 2007, Aleksandr Ponosov (pictured below right), the headmaster of a village school in Sepych, in the Perm region of Russia, was arrested for running unlicensed copies of Microsoft software on his school's computers.

I'll start with a quote from the official Songbird homepage, which goes like 'Songbird promises to be the Firefox of media players'. Although not (yet) as popular in the audio players world as Firefox is in the one of web browsers, Songbird looks and offers an interface which integrates both powerful browsing features and music collection management.

Some months ago I wrote What's on Your Bookshelf?. Readers chimed in with their own favorite reads: the Iliad, Odyssey, Art of War, the original un-sanitized Grimm's Fairy Tales, Kipling, Divine Comedy, and other cool books. I was pleased to see so much fiction mentioned, as a lot of my friends only read what they have to for work. Which seems like a great way to fossilize the brain and nurture a sour outlook on life.

Open source software is often an unsung hero in the online gaming universe. Game engines are complex applications with core functionalities provided by numerous modules. These include a rendering engine for 2-D or 3-D graphics and a physics engine or collision detection and response calculator.

Ubuntu has taken some heat over the years for its relationship with upstream projects, but the distribution seems determined to change that impression. To that end, Ubuntu has started by looking at bugs and bug reporting between the distribution and upstream projects. The visible result is the beta release of the Ubuntu Upstream Report, which displays the progress of getting bugs upstream. Users of Ubuntu report lots of bugs in the software they use but, for the most part, those bugs aren't in any way specific to Ubuntu; they tend to also exist in the upstream project.

Yesterday we reported on Canonical shipping an unreleased ATI Catalyst driver with the forthcoming release of Ubuntu 8.10. This driver labeled fglrx 8.54.3 adds support for X Server 1.5 / X.Org 7.4 and the Linux 2.6.27 kernel. Later in the day then, AMD did go ahead and release Catalyst 8.10. However, this isn't the same driver as what's found in Ubuntu.

During last year's Give One Get One, the lead OLPC reporter for Laptop Magazine, a beautiful Joanna Stern, asked me about starting a OLPC pilot in Mali. Laughing at the complexity of such an adventure, I told her it would be possible, but surely a voyage of discovery for her and Laptop Magazine.

Animation is one of the less-known features in OpenOffice.org Impress. Its most obvious uses are for transitions for individual objects on a slide (rather than for the entire slide), or for dramatic emphasis and calling attention to objects. But it can also be used for more serious purposes, such as illustrating a procedure that is clearer if you can see it in motion -- for instance, one of the most effective animations I saw showed was on a Society for Creative Anachronism site that explained how the links in chain mail fitted together.

One of the big problems of making a bootable USB is file size. Almost all of the how-to's out there that allow to pass kernel commands during the boot process require the use of syslinux, which uses FAT16/FAT32 formated partitions. This comes with the drawback of limiting your maximum file size to 2 Gigabyte if using FAT32. A DVD release has it's main file, livecd.squashfs it can run up to nearly 4 Gigabyte, twice the maximum allowable size. In other words, Epic Fail.

AIX? Yes, we remember to cover it every once in a while ;) Today we're going to go back to the AIX well (which we haven't visited since our fairly-old post on working with AIX LVM. That post links back to a bunch of other posts in the series, but it "has" been about 3 months since we've touched on the AIX OS, which is grossly disproportionate to the amount of attention Solaris, Linux and Open Source Software get. Perhaps, someday, I'll work on it enough that I'll feel more comfortable digging into its guts. ...figuratively, of course ;)

We've reported a few times on efforts to apply open source concepts to the world of music, where many people perceive the music industry to be in need of change and improvement. For example, we wrote about Radiohead's successful effort to open source a music video and Bojam's effort to get musicians around the world to collaborate in open source fashion. So I was interested in this post from Matt Asay about Severed Fifth, an effort to explore new music distribution approaches, headed up by Jono Bacon, who is Ubuntu's community lead.

Then, a day or so later, it was announced that Windows somehow made it in, despite this national interest in GNU/Linux. What happened? Well, fortunately we have been tracking some rather mysterious moves in NComputing as of late, namely an appointment of a former Windows manager

DarkStat is a simple Packet Sniffing Network Traffic/Bandwidth monitoring utility for Linux and UNIX. DarkStat presents simple webinterface with nice graphs and stats auto-refreshed. Darkstat uses a very low footprint and the memory, CPU usage and is used in pfSense, redWall opensource firewalls.

With the economy in turmoil, a lot of people who are looking to buy PCs are increasingly turning to cheap, low-power mini laptops. And that single move is bolstering what otherwise would be a soft PC industry, according to industry analysts at Gartner. With a strong push from the new slew of mini notebooks hitting the market, worldwide PC shipments reached 80.6 million units in the third quarter this year, marking a 15 percent increase from the third quarter of 2007.

Mozilla on Tuesday released the first beta of the next version of its browser, Firefox 3.1. The beta includes an enhanced Smart Location Bar, a new tab interface and what should be a faster JavaScript engine, dubbed"TraceMonkey." Developers also included improved Web standards in the Gecko layout engine.

Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler has adapted his Enlightenment window manager to low-powered, small-screen devices like mobile phones. The Linux desktop graphics pioneer has released a pared-down widget set, along with ports and video demonstrations of E17 on OpenMoko's NeoFreerunner phone and Palm's Treo650 (booted into Linux, naturally).

Five more things for the 2009 Linux Wishlist and one thing I'd like to remove.

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