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Last Friday 4Front Technologies had released the binaries and source-code to OSS 4.0 Build 1013. This new build of the Open Sound System brings two major changes, which include the full source code now being available for the M-Audio Revolution and Delta sound card drivers, and a beta driver for the Sound Blast X-Fi series from Creative Labs. While earlier Sound Blaster generations have worked quite well with ALSA and OSS, the Creative X-Fi series is a black sheep under Linux. The X-Fi support that Creative Labs has provided to the Linux community has been abominable and support via ALSA (the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) has yet to go anywhere while support for the complete X-Fi series via OSS is just starting to emerge. Interestingly though, Creative had provided the register documentation and other code to 4Front Technologies for this new "sbxfi" driver.

Apple's much-touted new operating system, OS X Leopard, is in some ways worse than Windows Vista, says the founder of the Linux open source project, Linus Torvalds.

The atool package is a collection of Perl scripts that allows you to handle many different archive formats and compression schemes using a single command-line interface. Atool uses other tools behind the scenes to perform the heavy lifting. With atool, you can handle any archive without having to remember what command-line tool to use to expand it and which options that particular tool expects.

Sunbird is a calendar application built by the people at the Mozilla Foundation. It s entirely standalone: it doesn't require the bulk of another application to manage all of your appointments and events.

Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt called Yahoo Inc. CEO Jerry Yang to offer his company's help in any effort to thwart Microsoft Corp.'s unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo, say people familiar with the matter.

The LiMo Foundation has announced the first release of its mobile Linux platform. The foundation is one of several industry consortia seeking to create a standardized approach to Linux-based handsets. Its main rival at the moment is the Linux Phone Standards Forum, which is focused on creating shared, open specifications. The members of LiMo, by contrast, have taken the approach of creating a shared, open platform upon which they can build proprietary applications. The Lips Forum released its first set of specifications in December of last year.

The U.S. Army will eventually be switching entirely over to Linux. Once the Government and its institutions embrace Linux, how long until the people embrace it as well?

What if Yahoo's main value isn't its search engine or its advertising business, but the openness that makes it more Net-native and hacker-friendly than Microsoft? Does Microsoft understand the role this same openness is in large part to credit for Google's success as well?

Learn to “shred" XML documents into relational tables through annotated XML schema decomposition or XMLTABLE Decomposition. This article reviews the two methods of decomposing XML data including, how to use the XMLTABLE function for decomposition.

There’s been quite a bit of buzz recently after it was announced that OpenOffice 3 was due in September. It seems, however, most people still aren’t aware of what’s in store.

On January 17 of this year the first beta release of Renoise 1.9.1 was announced. Along with new features and fixes for its Windows and OSX versions, this release includes the first version of Renoise for Linux. This is rather significant news: Renoise is a popular program, with an active community of developers and users in the Win/Mac music worlds, and a native Linux release has been a community priority. The wait is over, so let's see (and hear) what Renoise brings to the Linux audio software party.

If all goes according to plan then MySpace will finally open its platform to developers on Tuesday, in keeping with plans announced last October. Details are vague but the youf social networking arm of Rupert Murdoch's media empire has at least confirmed the platform will support Google's OpenSocial interface. The timing couldn't be worse. Besides lagging pimply faced rival Facebook's decision to open up its platform to developers in May 2007, the move comes at a time of apparent declining interest in social networking. A bit like the Citizen's Band (CB) radio fad in the 1980s, the novelty appears to be wearing off now people have discovered its limited usefulness.

The Southern California Linux Expo continues to prepare and to add activities for this weekend's event.

[I can't wait to go! - Scott]

Like many VoIP telephony companies, Junction Networks uses Asterisk and other open source software to provide its customers with highly customizable VoIP service. Junction has been able to migrate its business model from a conference bridge service provider to a full-fledged telephone services company largely because of the flexibility and lower capital requirements of open source. "We're a completely bootstrapped company," says Mike Oeth, founder and CEO. "We were never locked into a business plan that was sold to investors." He says Junction is successful because it has been able to follow its customers' desires with open source.

This article will show you how to install Debian and Fluxbox with the basic programs to have a light weight Linux running either on your Laptop or Desktop computer.

Linspire, the company behind the commercial Linspire and the Freespire community desktop Linux, announced Jan. 31 that it was offering a new custom desktop Linux Build Service to its partners. The service is designed to make it easier for resellers and white box vendors to quickly deliver affordable custom desktop Linux configurations to customers. Linspire has courted this market for many years. Indeed, Linspire, its commercial Linux, is for all intents and purposes a reseller, rather than end-user, desktop Linux.

The latest release of open source database PostgreSQL hit Monday, packing a claimed record number of new and improved features. That means 280 patches. Version 8.3 of the sturdy alternative to MySQL has been re-worked for developers, DBAs and users with improvements targeting performance and maintenance.

High-end open source blogging applications may have all the features you can think of, but you may not need all that. For simple blogs, a lightweight alternative like Chyrp is worth a closer look. Chyrp runs on the PHP/MySQL stack, has a clean interface sprinkled with AJAX, and administration features that you can learn without resorting to a manual (in fact, there is no manual to speak of).

Linus Torvalds recently held a Q&A, in which he attacked Microsoft, Patent Trolls, Sun Microsystems, Virtualization, and the Linux Market Share! Is this good for Linux that one of its top representatives is pessimistic about the rise of Linux in the desktop?

Google Rips Microsoft's Proposed Takeover of Yahoo, Saying It Would Stifle Internet Innovation