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How to make the distinction between open file descriptors and open files, and report on them, using the proc filesystem on Linux or Unix.

In the past I’ve spoken highly of VistA, the Veteran’s Administration computerized health records system—and with good reason. VistA has a lot going for it. In 2006, it won an “Innovations in American Government Award” from Harvard. Studies show that use of VistA has improved VA productivity by 6 percent a year since national implementation was achieved in 1999. In a time of sky rocketing health care costs, VA care has become 32 percent less expensive than it was in 1996 in part thanks to VistA. The computerized system also has helped the VA reach an amazing prescription accuracy rate of over 99.997 percent. And last—but certainly not least—VistA is a flexible program that allows for much independent tinkering in the name of improvement, both by techies outside of the VA and those within the administration.

Welcome to this year's 23rd issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Ever since the launch of ASUS Linux Eee PC late last year, the ultra-portable computer market has turned into a major battleground of operating systems. Who will win? Microsoft with its thick wallet and pressure tactics or Linux with its low cost and open development model? Last week's Computex in Taipei revealed surprising differences between the ways hardware manufacturers embrace this exciting market. In the news section, Debian announces upcoming freeze of "Lenny", Mandriva celebrates its 10-year birthday, Canonical releases Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and FreeBSD updates the End-of-Life dates for its current and past releases. Also in this week's issue, a good collection of search resources for CentOS and RHEL users, and a list of valuable third-party repositories for openSUSE 11.0. Finally, with the annual package database update on DistroWatch, do let us know which new packages you want us to include in the tracking process. Happy reading!

IBM has launched a commercially supported version of its Lotus Symphony productivity suite, ready to take on Microsoft Office. The software is free, with unlimited technical support for around US$25 (£13) per user, and it supports the ODF document format--which could cast an unflattering light on the confusion around Microsoft Office

The department at the French Ministry of Education that is handling purchasing of software and software licenses is increasing its Open Source offerings to some 1.5 million teachers and education workers in 250 institutes France

This is a remind to let you know that the 5th edition of the Firebird Developers Day's Brazilian conference will take place in Piracicaba-SP, in 19/July. Subscriptions can be made on-line, in the conference site (www.FirebirdDevelopersDay.com.br). There you can check all the information, and see the reports (with pictures) of the past editions.

Beijing-based Ingenic Seminconductor is shipping three MIPS-based SoCs (system on chips) that support Linux. The Jz4720, Jz4730, and Jz4740 target devices ranging from basic PMPs (personal media players) to smartphones, with "high performance and low power consumption," the company says.

The Bulgarian government will turn more and more to Open Source software, predicts Krasimir Panayotov, coordinator of the GNU/Linux User Group in the city of Rousse, the country's fifth-largest city.

Last week we released Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 and one of the article requests we received as a result was to do a side-by-side comparison between the popular desktop Linux distributions. Ask and you shall receive. Today we have up 28 test results from Ubuntu 8.04, Fedora 9, and Mandriva 2008.1.

Banshee 1.0 was released a couple of days ago. Here's an article reviewing the most notable features of Banshee together with upsides and downsides of this GNOME audio player.

Pidgin is a multi-protocol instant messaging application allows the use of AIM, ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, MySpaceIM, and Zephyr.

Even the biggest fanatics of the black console box won’t hold it against me if I say that in the respect of interacting with the computer, the future belongs to the GUI. And along comes the question: how will the desktop environments of the future look like? To envision them, we’re going to take a look at the interfaces available today, at typical and non-typical solutions given us by their creators, which finally will lead us to the question: is this still about the improvement of the comfort of work or something else?

Mandriva is the leading European Linux distributor. It was founded in 1998 under the name Mandrake, producing the Linux Mandrake distribution. The name Mandriva was adopted in 2005, following a merger between Mandrake and Conectiva (a Brazilian Linux distributor) and also a trademark lawsuit in which Mandrake was sued by Hearst Publications, an American company which syndicates a comic strip named Mandrake the Magician.

This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu Studio 8.04 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

Slackware has a well earned reputation for reliability, stability, and performance. It may also be the least user friendly major Linux distribution on the planet short of building Linux From Scratch.

Encoding is a CPU-intensive operation. Whilst encoding, using optimised code is crucial. In this short article I will explain how I gained a 300% speed boost when encoding DVDs and will show how having the program’s sources and being able to talk to the maintainers sometimes really, really helps. Welcome to doing things “the GNU/Linux way”. For the full story go to FSM

Quick and easy shell script to help setup openssl, openssh and zlib, while creating new ssh host keys, network-wide using rsh.

A software tool aimed at helping users administer macro benchmarks like kernel compile time tests has achieved its first stable release. Version 1.0 of the Phoronix test suite can download and compile various well-known open source packages, or users' own software, generating detailed XML/HTML reports.

Before to comment in details the latest production of Mr. Matusow, I'd like the reader to pay attention to the following: in his post, Mr. Matusow's mentions: Collaborative Development: 9 times, OSS: 8 times, Free (as in Free software): only once. So could you ask, what is this collaborative development, this new syntagm Mr. Matusow is using all over the place? Well, buried deep towards the very end of his post, Mr. Matusow gives us a definition of sort:

Anybody who spends time trying new free software applications and distributions will soon notice that version numbering and labeling is next to meaningless. These days, versioning rarely gives an accurate idea of the state of development, except relative to other builds of the same project. It is simply a label that distinguishes one build from another. That's too bad, because a properly labeled release can give users a sense of how advanced the build actually is.