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If Eclipse was hoping to escape its current over reliance on IBM then it's off to a slow start judging by early work on its next platform - E4, due in 2010. Project members are meeting during the next two days at an E4 summit in Ottawa, Canada, to push on with the practical work of building E4, announced at EclipseCon in March.

When Bassim Hamadeh was a student at the University of California, San Diego, he experienced firsthand the challenge of procuring the right textbooks for his classes. "They were high-priced, poor quality custom textbooks," Hamadeh says. So he started planning a business that would make it easier for professors to create and publish high-quality custom texts, and provide those materials to students at an affordable price. Since its launch in 1992, Hamadeh has been running UniversityReaders on open source software.

Despite having an open source strategy the South African government doesn’t really understand how to benefit from OSS. This is according to Microsoft director of corporate standards, Jason Matusow.

The Fedora project has always offered installation options. The best known of these options are the Fedora spins -- roll-your-own install images that emphasize a particular desktop or purpose, such as providing the distribution's complete repository on DVD. With Fedora 9, the project has expanded its traditional emphasis with two new tools: LiveUSB Creator, a Windows application for producing live Fedora flash drives, and PreUpgrade, a wizard to help existing users move from one release to another. Each in its own way helps to clarify part of the process of installing the Fedora operating system.

Microsoft announced on late Wednesday it will support ODF version 1.1 in the release of Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2), scheduled for the first half of 2009. The company will also support PDF and XPS in Office 2007 SP2. OOXML is partially supported in the current version of Microsoft's office productivity suite and, according to Microsoft's announcement, will not be fully supported in Office until the release of "Office 14", which as yet has no confirmed release date.

Last week you learned how to rescue a failing hard drive by copying files to a second local hard drive. Carla Schroder walks through network rescues, Windows machine rescues, and fixing the MBR in Part 2 of 2 of the System Rescue series.

At it's most basic level, Wuala is an online storage service. Like other services it aims to allow you to access your files from anywhere, even if your home or office computer is turned off. You can store any file in your Wuala 'drive' and they can be any size (up to your storage limit, of course). The big difference that sets Wuala apart from other offerings, such as Amazon's S3, is that Wuala is peer-to-peer. The developers of Wuala have adapted many of the ideas of peer-to-peer systems such as bittorrent to make your data both highly available and fast to download.

ApacheMap plots the location of each Web hit your site receives on a Google Map. The utility converts IP addresses from Apache logs into longitude and latitude information using hostip.info. HostIP relies on users submitting information about what geographic location should be associated with an IP address. This can present problems, because some IP addresses cannot be resolved into geographic information. In fact, the IP address I was using when I visited hostip.info was not recognized, but sites such as geoiptool.com offered a reasonable guess as to my location based purely on my IP address. Regardless, the results of a geographic lookup from an IP address should always be taken with a grain of salt.

Comodo, a global leader in Identity and Trust Assurance Management solutions, announced today that it would offer free SSL certificates to any online businesses affected by the security flaw recently detected in Debian - the LINUX distribution. While Comodo stressed that the SSL certificates it issued are not vulnerable (it is the private keys generated by the users that may be vulnerable), it is offering assistance to Comodo customers as well as to anyone using a competitive SSL certificate from VeriSign or others by offering a new SSL certificate free of charge.

Apparently, hundreds of partners are banging on Digium’s door because the company has built a better mousetrap in the IP PBX space. Here's the latest on Digium and its Asterisk revolution, according to The VAR Guy.

"A French user asked for a refund after buying an ASUS computer that came with Windows XP and other software pre-installed. ASUS tried to apply a procedure which cost more money to the consumer than they will give back... The court ruled in favor of the user, who received back 130 Euro (~200 $) for the software. Here is the ruling (PDF, French). In France, this is the fourth victory for refund seekers during the last two years, and many people are now filing for refunds (in French). Two French associations (AFUL and April) published a press release on this victory the same day an important hearing happened." dutch link :http://www.zdnet.be/news.cfm?id=85367 http://www.aful.org/communiques/court-paris-ufc-darty

Novell and Red Hat both updated their Linux operating systems Wednesday, adding improvements in virtualization, desktops, networking, management and hardware support. Novell released SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack 2 (SP2), while Red Hat shipped Version 5.2 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Both vendors added improvements on the desktop and the server.

Most of the time, Microsoft's public declarations are pretty easy to parse. A bit of pre-announcement here, a touch of FUD there, with the odd dollop of feel-good waffle thrown in for good measure. Occasionally, though, it produces what can only be called a googly – not to be confused with a Google – with announcements like this one about adding support for ODF in Microsoft Office:..

The recent success of the ASUS Eee PC has shown that running Linux from flash memory is now commercially viable in the consumer market. If you don't have an Eee PC, you can still run Linux from a humble USB flash disk, which will hold not only Linux but also your data. Several Linux distributions run from flash; here's how some of them compare. Some Linux distributions, such as Mandriva Flash, are specially designed to work from flash devices. Some provide installers to get them onto thumb drives, while others can be coerced onto a USB flash drive with some simple modifications. I tested five Linux distributions -- Damn Small Linux (DSL), Puppy Linux, Pendrivelinux, Ubuntu, and Mandriva Flash -- to see how they fare running from a flash disk.

Last weekend I lost my desktop system to hardware failure -- the kind of failure not worth repairing. This closely followed a laptop dying as well. I found myself scrambling to make life and work go on with less for now.

This document describes how to install a Postfix mail server based that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. I will also demonstrate the installation and configuration of Courier (Courier-POP3, Courier-IMAP), so that Courier can authenticate against the same MySQL database Postfix uses. The resulting Postfix server is capable of SMTP-AUTH and TLS and quota. Passwords are stored in encrypted form in the database. In addition to that, this tutorial covers the installation of Amavisd, SpamAssassin and ClamAV so that emails will be scanned for spam and viruses. I will also show how to install SquirrelMail as a webmail interface so that users can read and send emails and change their passwords.

Mark Shuttleworth explains why he called it Ubuntu, reveals the upcoming Netbook Remix - a version of Ubuntu designed for ultraportables - and talks about how the Internet is the new killer app that opens the door for open source.

Despite recession, the finding seems to suggest that the pace of obligatorily-disclosed amounts now trivially exceeds $10 million for Microsoft alone (annually).

I don't know how I missed it, but one of the best writers out there on open-source software, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, has -- for reasons unknown to me -- ceased working for Ziff-Davis, the owner of the DesktopLinux.com Web site for which he had written hundreds of entries.

Conventional wisdom says Google -- backed by open source, software as a service and Web 2.0 -- will eventually crush Microsoft. But analysis from The VAR Guy shows that Microsoft's revenue has actually grown more than Google's since 2002.