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With Gizmo5, not only can you use your PC to make or get phone calls on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh PCs. But unlike similar programs, such as Skype, Gizmo5 uses open standards like Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Jabber, which makes it interoperable with a variety of clients. Previously known as the Gizmo Project, Gizmo5 is both the name of a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) network (with its own servers and users, working over the Internet) and of a program that lets you communicate by using that network. Though it uses open standards, Gizmo5 doesn't qualify as open software itself. It uses several proprietary codecs, and the client code itself is closed source.

Open source is no longer a novelty, even within the largest corporations. Today, 53 percent of businesses use open-source software, according to a recent CIO.com survey. However, not enough of those businesses are contributing code back to the open-source community, said Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, at the Red Hat Summit. And such contributions would benefit the enterprise even more than it would the development community, he explained. According to Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation, 75 percent of software is written for in-house use. As Whitehurst pointed out, much of that code is never used—a true waste of resources. "Think how much software is written out there that is behind proprietary walls," Whitehurst said.

Acoustic Reality is a Danish company that sells speakers, amplifiers, storage devices, cables, and other products to build top-shelf home entertainment centers. It recently released eAR OS Free Edition, a free media center system built on top of Ubuntu that features a free version of the Acoustic Reality software technology used in the $100 eAR RT-OS Enterprise Edition and in the company's hardware Media 4 products. It provides a user-friendly media center along with a nice implementation of Ubuntu.

In all seriousness of being a linux user we sometimes forget the fun side of it all, here is an attempt to capture some of it.

If you drift between distributions, one of the first things you might notice is that Gedit, GNOME's text editor, is not always the same on each system. For instance, in Debian, Gedit is a relatively simple text edit, while in Ubuntu, it sprouts features that Debian users may never have seen. The difference is the plugins that each distribution packages with Gedit and enables by default. Many of these plugins make only small alterations by themselves, but enable a dozen or more and you'll find Gedit transformed almost out of recognition, regardless of whether you are using it to write code or plain text.

Disasters happen to the best of computers. Luckily, open source apps like SystemRescueCD, dd, Partedmagic, BackTrack, Security Tools Distribution, Helix, and TestDisk can help recover important data and bring dead systems back to life.

French open-source data integration vendor Talend Monday unveiled its data-profiling application, which will allow companies to assess their data quality as a key part of data integration projects. In an announcement Monday, the company claims that its Open Profiler application is the first open-source data profiler to be released to the marketplace.

Just a couple of weeks ago Linux New Media acquired the subscriber base of Linux Magazine in the USA. Now comes the news that it is axing the paper version and moving publication online.

I had recently discovered the Lojban language while I was surfing the net. The characteristics of this language greatly appealed to me as a debater and so, I decided to heavily invest my effort into studying this language. Consequently, I came across two free software tools that could aid my study of Lojban: KVocTrain and Mnemosyne. These are two excellent programs that definitely have a place my studies.

Part six of our now completed series on setting up Linux and Unix servers securely. At least, it's the end of the beginning...

Neuros Technology is the developer of the Neuros OSD, a digital media recorder. The devices works with external hard drives to archive and copy your media. Unlike a normal DVR, the OSD can record from any source: set top boxes, DVD players, DTV signals. It is limited to standard definition signals (720x480 max), but works with a plethora of formats, including MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, FLV, WMV, DiVX and others. Other limitations include S-Video input (no component) and no support for digital signals from HDMI sources.

HP is opening up its Tru64 Advanced File System (AdvFS) to the open source Linux community in a bid to help further Linux file system innovation. The AdvFS file system, which has its roots in Digital Equipment Corporation's Digital Unix, is used in mission-critical deployments by HP customers. But HP, which gained AdvFS through a series of acquisitions, has its own flavor of Unix, HP-UX, with its own file system.

Finally, a JavaScript book not for beginners and one that says so upfront! How refreshing. I was a little doubtful when I first read the back cover, but then reassured when part of the Preface said, "This is not a book for beginners...This is not a book for dummies...This book is small, but it is dense". Actually, I was wondering how a book less than 200 pages was going to present JavaScript, if it was indeed written for beginners. To nail down the target audience a little more, I'll continue to quote, "It is intended for programmers who...are venturing into JavaScript for the first time. It is also intended for programmers who have been working with JavaScript at a novice level and are now ready for a more sophisticated relationship..."

Microsoft Corporation is suddenly inviting all people behind ODF to 'pull a Patrick Durusau' and come to Microsoft's turf.

Discover how the Eclipse Ganymede release of 24 projects showcases the diversity and innovation going on inside the Eclipse ecosystem. Get an overview of several Ganymede projects, along with resources to find out more information.

Insisting that they have "repeatedly found them to be detrimental to Linux users, businesses, and the greater Linux ecosystem," today the Linux kernel community has started petitioning for open-source modules and open-source drivers for the Linux kernel. Such modules negate the openness, stability, flexibility, and maintainability of the Linux development model and shut their users off from the expertise of the Linux community. The Linux Foundation, led by Jim Zemlin, has issued a statement in favor of the Linux kernel developers' position. It's unclear why the kernel developers decided to speak out now, though the Linux Foundation indicates that the developers have been subjected to a steady barrage of questions on the topic for years. Apparently, they finally got sick of it.

For seven years Linux Game Publishing has been selling their Linux-ported games with no form of copy protection on their CD/DVDs, but beginning with their forthcoming port of Sacred: Gold that will be changed. Linux Game Publishing has developed their own Internet-based game copy protection system for Linux, and in this article we have more details on this scheme as well as their motives behind this work.

Forget the delays with handset production, the real story here is surely the fact that Android developers are getting frustrated with Google. They reckon that Google could jeopardize application compatibility as a result.

We've been meaning to deliver benchmarks of the NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX under Linux for some time, but with the recent rollout of the GeForce GTX 200 series, the competition presented by the ATI Radeon HD 4850, and the introduction of the GeForce 9800GTX+, the GeForce 9800GTX is dropping in price and captivating the interest of a different segment of users. Finally we are delivering these benchmarks of the GeForce 9800GTX with Ubuntu Linux and using the most recent NVIDIA driver release, which has a number of improvements since the G92 chipset was introduced back in April. The graphics card we're using is the EVGA 512-P3-N871-AR.

What do you have to lose by using Internet Phone with Ekiga Softphone. This is easy to set up and can save you a lot of money by using it. This is especially a useful tool if you have broadband access to the Internet. Here is a step-by-step approach to setting up your phone. Also provided is a link to compare Skype with Ekiga.