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Sun Microsystems announced today that they are buying Innotek. You can read the announcement here. In case you don't immediately recognize the name Innotek, they are the makers of the VirtualBox virtualization software that many of us have come to know and love. It's a great alternative to VMWare and they have an Open Source edition as well.

SAM Linux Desktop, an Xfce-fronted distribution based on PCLinuxOS, aims to be a complete and modern desktop operating system. Though it has problems that need to be worked out before it will match the competition, it offers an easy install, a 3-D desktop environment, and a flurry of programs to suit your needs.

Vimicro Corporation, a leading fabless semiconductor company that designs advanced mixed-signal multimedia products and solutions, today announced the launch of its most recent open mobile platform, Vinno-III-Linux, based on the Linux operating system, and the addition of two new Vimicro Mobile Multimedia Processors, the VC0848 and VC0878, to the company's product line when attending Mobile World Congress 2008 in Barcelona, Spain.

At CeBIT LinuxPark, Linpus Technologies will be demonstrating its brand new Linux operating system, Linpus Linux Lite, designed to empower the next billion PC customers. Linpus Linux Lite has a unique dual-mode user interface making it the quickest and easiest way to start enjoying the opportunity of information. It also works on extremely low cost hardware bringing the dream of buying a PC much closer for many people.

This document describes how to set up the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) Open Source Edition v5.0 on Debian Etch. The resulting system provides a full featured collaboration-suite with many features that I cannot list all here - please have a look at the feature list. It also comes with a nice (themeable) AJAX web interface for administration and user access.

A while ago, I wrote a comment on Brian Jones' OOXML blog, asking 'Why doesn't Microsoft try to save its clients money, instead of making sure their clients waste more money like which is the result of trying to get OOXML standardized at ISO?" I also used the form on his page to ask him to comment on my entry about two weeks ago, but till today, no reaction. Probably the people I'd like an answer from don't read LXer, but I thought I might try posting it anyway. The 'Full story' link links to my original comment of Dec 14th 2007. Sad to see there's no answer.

In the time between the previous community news and the last, there have been a number of new and interesting cool features added to Compiz-Fusion. The changes have taken place due to our community and our very own onestone who has added a slew of KDE 4 composite features to Compiz. Some highlights this week are: KDE 4 Window decorator plasma integration, Show Mouse and Area-Based maginification through the mag plugin, Wiimote integration and True blending of wallpapers and cubecaps.

PCLinuxOS Magazine, February 2008 (Issue 18) is available to download.

If you are a Netflix member with and HD DVD player you may have received notice. But if you are still on the fence on choosing sides in the format war, take note: Netflix is now exclusively Bluray.

People often note the surprising number of Macs at Linux events. The question is why? The short answer is Macs are pretty. So now the question is why can't Dell or System76 rival Apple's design.

You knew Ubuntu was stable. You also knew it could handle quite a bit of work. However, the bloggers at the NetNewser have tested Ubuntu beyond almost all measures, on a relatively common PC. Go here for a glimpse of how productivity, stability, and eye candy all come together in an insane experience.

I’ve been running Vector Linux 5.9 Standard since it was released about six weeks ago. I’ve mostly been satisfied with it. I ran into a problem, though, when I first tried to install the Culmus fonts, a popular font set for the Hebrew character set.

When Firefox 2.12 came out on Feb. 7, it brought with it fixes for three critical security holes and seven that were not quite so serious. According to the security advisories, many of these problems were also fixed in the Thunderbird 2.12 e-mail client. Unfortunately, there is no Thunderbird 2.12. The Mozilla Foundation's press release focused on the Firefox 2.12 security fixes. The Foundation also reported, though, in its MFSA (Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory), that these same bugs had been fixed in the fictitious Thunderbird 2.12.

Microsoft’s position is hardening as the ISO vote on OOXML (DIS 29500) in Geneva approaches at the end of this month. We know more clearly now how Microsoft and its proxy group, ECMA, will position Microsoft’s OOXML specification in advance of the vote. In short, Microsoft is betting that its influence with National Bodies will allow it to push through a specification which elevates its own interests over that of truly competitive, open international standards. In the end, it will be Microsoft’s own inflexibility that will be its undoing, and that undoing means knocking the OOXML out of approval for ISO status.

Saturday, January 19th 2008, will mark the 30 year countdown to the Y2K38 wraparound of regular 32-bit UNIX time. UNIX internal time is stored in a data structure using a long int, containing the number of seconds since 1970. On a 32-bit machine this value is sufficient to store time up to the 18th of January 2038. After this date 32-bit clocks will overflow and return false values.

Through partnerships with more than 125 integrators and consulting firms, SugarCRM hopes to double in size this year, according to MSPmentor. Plus, a lot of that growth will come from software as a service (SaaS). Here's a quick look at the strategy and some quick quotes from SugarCRM CEO John Roberts.

Xfce is just as customisable as KDE or GNOME, so I set myself a goal: make Xubuntu look like Windows Vista. Why? Because I can.

Since publishing our Linux review of the AMD Phenom 9500 on the Spider platform a month ago, we have continued in our investigation of this first AMD desktop quad-core processor that has been very problematic with Ubuntu 7.10 Linux. Fortunately though this support isn't stagnate and a better picture is painted when using the latest development builds of Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" with the Linux 2.6.24 kernel. Per reader requests, we have carried out additional benchmarks of the Phenom 9500 to compare its 32-bit and 64-bit Linux performance.

The Strigi project is the core of the index and search technology for KDE 4. Strigi is designed to be small and fast, and it can be installed and used with or without KDE 4, as we'll see. Strigi uses plugins to handle its indices, filetypes, and metadata extraction. Currently the filesystem index can be stored in SQLite 3, Xapian, CLucene and Hyper Estraier. The filetype plugins allow Strigi to get at the text content of non plain text files, such as PDF or office file formats. The metadata extraction plugins can tell Strigi information about files -- for example, the ID3 metadata tags from audio files.

The ultimate collection of cheat sheets for linux users. Enough to fill up your whole wall with commands yielded by the geek gods! Be sure to digg this so more people can have the opportunity to get ahold of all these in one place.

[How cool is this? Everything I need to make myself look smart, all in one place. :-) - Scott]