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Mandriva and TurboLinux have mounted a continent-crossing charge on the Linux market. The software makers have formed a development collective dubbed Manbo-Labs dedicated to peace, harmony and a common base for their respective flavors of the Linux operating system.

The Open Document Format Alliance has released a paper refuting the recent Burton Group's Report on ODF and MSOOXML. I asked for and received permission to publish it here on Groklaw. The ODF Alliance response takes 18 points from the Burton Group's Report and answers them point by point. I think you will enjoy it. And I have a few impressions of my own to share with you, and then you can tell me what you think of it all.

The yum-security package is a new feature of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 update. If installed, the yum module provided by this package can be used to limit yum to retrieve only security-related updates. It can also be used to provide information about which Red Hat advisory, bug in Red Hat’s Bugzilla database, or CVE number from MITRE’s Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures directory is addressed by a package update.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve worked extensively with Firefox, and while it still has its warts (and while I believe that its days of double digit rises in adoption are probably coming to a close) overall, I’ve found that it has become, for me anyway, my de facto browser into the web and the focus of most of the web applications (and extensions) that I’ve built in the last year.

Sun Microsystems finally matters again. The company is buying MySQL, the open source database leader, for $1 billion. But this new opportunity for Sun also includes five key challenges, according to The VAR Guy. Here’s a look at those challenges, and how Sun will need to address them

Value-priced - after $100 mail-in rebate - Linux PC features an Intel Celeron 1.6GHz Intel Celeron processor, 1GB memory, 80GB hard drive, Freespire 2.0, free CNR software delivery service and more

Commercial (closed source) software support is neither better nor worse. The open source "community," a.k.a. forums and mailing lists, is credited for much of the strength of open source. This is true, but today we're going to explore professional support organizations and their promises. A mailing list isn't too useful when your mission critical server is down through no fault of your own. Often you will find answers to error messages and common mistakes, but all too often it turns out to be a bug that you must somehow work around.

"As a dba, I'm constantly looking to learn more about networking and system administration. Both can have quite an impact on the performance of my piece of the puzzle. A welcome addition to the materials to help me learn about networking is Carla Schroder's "Linux Networking Cookbook". This book is just right for the person like myself who enjoys learning by getting hands-on experience with the technology. The scope is wide and so someone with a great depth of networking experience may find that the treatments of each is a bit shallow. On the other hand, that wide scope means this book may hold something new, even for someone with some level of experience."

If you are curious about the Sun-MySQL deal -- and why wouldn't you be? -- here are some resources for you that will probably answer most of your immediate questions.

Last year, Linspire announced that it was opening its software distribution service, CNR (short for Click 'n' Run), to users of the Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu distributions. A month ago, it announced a beta version of CNR that includes support for Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10 (the two most recent versions), with versions for the other systems on the way. Alas, after trying it on my Ubuntu system, I think it needs work.

According to Microsoft, Windows PowerShell is a "command line shell and scripting language helps IT professionals achieve greater control and productivity". I provided a link to the Windows Powershell page at Microsoft in this review for reference but if you are at all interested in this book, you probably already know the basics of PowerShell, what is it and, to some degree, what it can do. The question is then, does Lee Holmes provide the right "recipes" in his "cookbook" to help you get baking (or is it only half-baked)?

Annvix is a distribution aimed at providing a secure, stable, and fast base for servers. Be warned, however: Annvix is not for everyone. When you boot the Annvix netinstall CD, you're greeted with a shell and informed that the root password is "root" and should be changed. It also advises that you set up your network and use lynx on another terminal to browse the documentation for the install. Already I could tell that this was not going to be your average user-friendly GUI installer.

By acquiring MySQL, Sun clearly wants to buy into the hugely-successful LAMP stack and its success in running most of Web 2.0. But to get the fullest benefit, it must push out GNU/Linux, either with OpenSolaris or Solaris. Is this the birth of SAMP?

The Xen hypervisor may be the poster child for open source virtualization, but it's not the only option. Since its launch in late 2005, the SWsoft-backed OpenVZ project has been gradually growing its presence. This week, OpenVZ set out to expand its reach by adding support for Ubuntu Linux 7.10. The same technology that powers SWsoft's flagship offering, Virtuozzo, also powers OpenVZ. OpenVZ provides users with access to the code, and in turn anticipates an open source community will grow around the product and contribute to the testing, support and development of the Linux-based virtualization effort.

Linux is gaining. It’s almost impossible to miss, even for non-techies. Not only that, those non-techies are demanding it. Linux interest is spreading, perhaps driven by the dissatisfaction with the latest OS from Redmond. They’re tired of the viruses, the worms, the trojans, and all the other malware that they have to spend an additional $100 of software to keep out of their systems. On top of that, Vista has gotten bad reviews. All of this seems to indicate Microsoft has seen its peak of glory. They are not going to disappear (soon), but it seems that they aren’t going to regain the monopoly that they once had.

With the global crusaders on the march, with every politician spewing factoids about his or her campaign saving the Earth with new environmental measures, with hybrid cars being constructed in droves, with new energy saving light bulbs all the rage, isn't it time to look at the greener alternative in the PC World? I'm talking about the Linux computer, and it's becoming clear that it's the green monster.

Want to find open source tools? Linux distros have long had the tradition that software is bundled into easily-installed packages. Yet, finding packages can be less than intuitively obvious and even then they may not appear to be available for your flavour of choice. Here’s how to get the most out of Linux packages.

sshfs is a file system in userspace (FUSE) and can be used to mount a remote ssh account locally in a folder. This is absolutely great - If I need to work on files from my server I can use a simple command and mount the remote file system over a encrypted connection. None of the programs are aware the files are remote and working on a file in the folder sshfs/ is the same as for local files - at least if the connection is fast enough. The great thing thing about autofs is that the commandline is no longer needed. The mounting of the remote file system is done in the moment I try to access the folder by the autofs daemon.

Mandriva and Turbolinux announce a partnership by creating a lab named: Manbo-Labs. This Lab is the result of an agreement between Mandriva and Turbolinux to share resources and technology to release a common base system on each of the Linux distributions. Mandriva, the leading European editor of Linux distributions, and Turbolinux, a leading Linux client and server distributor in Japan and China, signed the agreement about Manbo-Labs last October and have been working together since then. Both companies decided to wait until first internal delivery to issue this announcement.

Most analysts agree it all depends on what Sun does with MySQL, the leading open-source database management system. So will this move give Sun the software stack its customers need? Will it prove an expensive, badly managed merger? The ultimate answer lies in Sun's hands.