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In the last year, a growing number of companies based on free and open source software (FOSS) have come out of stealth mode. One of the latest is Acquia, which provides services for organizations that use Drupal, the popular content management platform. "Until now," says Jeff Whatcott, Acquia's vice president of marketing, "there hasn't been a Red Hat or Ubuntu of the Drupal world." Acquia plans to fill that gap by selling subscription services that will improve what Whatcott calls the "few rough edges and gaps" in Drupal, at the same time that the company establishes itself in the eyes of community.

A comprehensive tutorial showing how to install 25 small and simple games on your Linux Desktop (with installation instructions for Ubuntu 7.10 ) also included are instructions on playing classic Dos Games , NES/SNES games and Scummvm games on your Ubuntu desktop

Sun Microsystems is endorsing a Java project from the Eclipse Foundation, but don't think the battle for figurehead status in the Java community is over. The EclipseLink project has been selected by Sun as the reference implementation for the Java Persistence 2.0 API, which is working its way through the Java Community Process - the rival Java forum to Eclipse. EclipseLink will be used with Glassfish, the Sun-led Java Enterprise Edition application server implementation.

The U.S. Supreme Court Monday refused to hear Microsoft's appeal of a lower court ruling, thus setting the stage for yet another antitrust trial for the software giant. At issue is a private lawsuit brought against the company in 2004 over whether the Redmond, Wash. company unlawfully used its monopoly power to crush Novell's incipient move into productivity applications 12 years ago.

[You know what I love about the U.S. legal system? It's expediency.. - Scott]

When Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian takes to the stage to open the company’s BrainShare 2008 conference here March 17, he will talk about what has been achieved over the past year and what he hopes to do in the year ahead. Part of that will be to stress the company’s financial performance and stability, and its commitment to growing its product set and customer base.

If you've ever wanted to save those videos you watch on YouTube, you've no doubt looked to (or wondered about) various Firefox plugins or programs to do the job. Well, no need to go hunting and installing. The whole process is a lot easier than you think.

The latest beta version of Sabayon Linux has been released to the general public. Included in this release is the new Gentoo compatible binary distribution system and GUI package manager (Spritz) for it, which finally brings Sabayon the ability to do a rolling release instead of a static release for those not intimately familiar with the portage system.

The next major, long-term support version of Ubuntu is days away from its first, and only, beta release. Ubuntu has announced that Ubuntu 8.04 is now in beta freeze. What this means is that no new package changes are going to be allowed in the well-regarded Linux distribution. The only exceptions will be for bug fixes for already known problems.

Nothing says high performance like a good race. Got your Linux box? Got a good accelerated video card as well? Then get yourself these great racing games, get behind the wheel, and drive!

Looking at the software listed at Kokkini Zita it's easy to see where developer Fons Adriaensen's interests lie. He has written one of the best organ synthesizers for Linux, he has contributed to the LADSPA collection of processing plugins, and he has provided Linux sound researchers with some excellent tools for measuring and representing audio signals. He is also involved in improving Linux support for the Ambisonics technology of encoding and decoding multichannel audio.

As you might expect, GNOME 2.22, the latest version of the popular desktop, which was released last week, has some functional tweaks and new default applications. If the release has a focus, it is on utilities, ranging from added features in standard GNOME applications such as Evolution and Archive Manager to improved accessibility and a handful of new applets. Few of these changes are dramatic, but the overall impression is of dozens of small enhancements that nudge GNOME toward greater usability.

Former Novell CEO Ray Noorda used to speak about coopetition — the need to both cooperate and compete with technology companies. But the current Microsoft-Novell relationship is giving new meaning to the term coopetition, especially during this week’s BrainShare. Here's the scoop.

Since Asus announced that it would release a Windows XP version of phenomenally popular Eee PC for the extra cost of a Windows license, market pundits have been kissing the cheaper Xandros Linux version goodbye. However, Asus is ambivalent about the issue.

Ardour is currently the most advanced digital audio workstation for Linux. However, several other useful applications are also available. This article presents Traverso, Qtractor, Wired, Frinika, and Protux DAWs.

Today is St. Patrick's Day, a national holiday in Ireland that's celebrated by people of Irish lineage worldwide. Like Ireland itself, the holiday is associated with the color green -- as are many things in the Linux universe.

The Online Publishers Association (OPA) of South Africa on Friday elected a new chair in Habari Media’s Adrian Hewlett with Ananzi MD Mark Buwalda taking up the deputy chairmanship. The election of the 2008/09 board for OPA comes at a time when the OPA faqces challenges to its monopoly over the local online publishing metrics system.

The first alpha release of KDE 4.1 isn't planned until the end of April, but this past weekend the OpenSuSE team had updated their KDE Four Live spin against the latest KDE 4.0.66 snapshot packages. The KDE 4.0.66 development packages contain new Kickoff and Plasma features along with much other work to the numerous packages that will ultimately make up this first major update to KDE 4.

On March 15th Dan Kegel sent a email to the wine-devel mailing list with a outline of the new release schedule for Wine 1.0

Most users know about proprietary software packages such as Norton Ghost that can be used for cloning hard disks for backup or distribution purposes. And a few may know about Partition Image, an open source alternative for saving partition images. But how many users know about Clonezilla, an all-in-one cloning tool that promises both speed and power?

Welcome to this year's 11th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! PC-BSD, a user-friendly variant of FreeBSD with a web-based software installation system, continues to deliver updated releases on a regular basis. We'll take a look at the just-released version 1.5. Does it support modern hardware well? And can it challenge the popular desktop Linux distributions? Read below for some answers. In the news section, Ubuntu enters a beta freeze stage, KNOPPIX gets busy with bug fixes, the Hungarian PCLinuxOS community releases PCe17OS, OpenBSD publishes the 4.3 information page, and Dru Lavigne announces the availability of an up-to-date BSDA certification DVD. Also in this issue, learn about pkg-get, a package management utility for OpenSolaris and follow an interesting analysis of the DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking logs as published by a group of data mining researchers in France. Happy reading!