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The latest version of OpenOffice.org is now available using a browser with a single click of a mouse, with no download or installation process ('no install') of the productivity suite required. This new service by Ulteo offers many benefits for users of the productivity suite, and has been well received by early beta users across Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems.

Although China's Linux market as a whole doubled from 2003 to 2006 to $20 million per year, sales of Linux desktop software grew more slowly. In fact, the market share of Linux desktop software in China dropped from 16% to 12% in the same period. But according to CCID Consulting, sales of Linux desktop software increased 25.1% in the third quarter of this year, catching up with the quick growth of China's Linux industry as a whole. Several new developments have added fuel to the growth.

In the last eight months, the islands of Andaman and Nicobar have witnessed tremendous development in the IT sector, especially in the case of open source and Linux. Those I call the “IT people of Andaman” have been reluctant to implement and explore the benefits of open source software in the past. Some still are. But the growing popularity of Linux within India is amazing.

Time for The VAR Guy to stir up a little controversy, this time in the Linux desktop market. He thinks a small desktop setback at Red Hat could lead to more PC momentum for Ubuntu Linux. Here’s the scoop.

The year is winding down and while we have a lot to look forward to next year, what were the greatest Linux innovations of this year? This year at Phoronix, we have published over 325 articles, with most of them being Linux hardware and graphics reviews, and that is in addition to over 700 original news entries. After spending much time in considering what the "best" and most substantial Linux gains over the year have been, we have comprised a list of what we believe are the greatest Linux innovations of 2007 along with our reasoning behind these decisions.

Red Hat hopes to stand out from other vendors offering Eclipse-based Java tools by not discriminating between "free" and "useful" when it comes to features in its JBoss Developer Studio, released this week.

The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the second release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks the last mile on the road to KDE 4.0. This release sees increasing participation from distributions, you can download packages for Debian, Kubuntu, Mandriva, openSUSE & Fedora or grab the live CDs from Kubuntu & openSUSE.

VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. It is remote control software which allows you to view and fully interact with one computer desktop using a VNC viewer on another computer desktop anywhere on the LAN or Internet. The two computers don't even have to be the same type, so for example you can use VNC to view a Windows XP desktop at the office on a Linux or Mac computer at home. Once you are connected, traffic between the viewer and the server is unencrypted, and could be sniffed by someone with access to the intervening network.

From the article...
Operating Systems:
Don't buy: Linux.
The world's cheapest operating system is the darling of every do-it-yourselfer and the potential bane of every cheapskate user. You'll save money and, I bet, lose your mind if you switch to Linux. Note to DIYers: This advice is intended for middle-of-the-road tech consumers. You, with the screwdriver in your hand, please feel free to download as many copies of Ubuntu as you want.

[I think I figured this one out. Lance must be from one of those dimensions where everything is backwards. - land0]

Red Hat Inc has postponed until January the launch of a new Linux software product for personal computers that would directly compete with Microsoft Corp's Windows operating system.

A Harvard study appearing in Health Affairs confirms what this Linux Medical News editorial entitled "RHIO's and the Illusion of Health IT Success" predicted in 2005:"...Electronic clinical data exchange promises substantial financial and societal benefits, but it is unclear whether and when it will become widespread. In early 2007 we surveyed 145 regional health information organizations (RHIOs), the U.S. entities working to establish data exchange. Nearly one in four was likely defunct. Only twenty efforts were of at least modest size and exchanging clinical data..." The 2005 Linux Medical News editorial gives hints as to why this might be. Kudos to the Harvard researchers for doing the heavy lifting.

Paldo Linux is a cross between a source-based and binary distribution. It installs as a binary system to provide a quick and easy desktop. Once it's running, users can either build packages from source as they would with Gentoo, or install binary packages, as is common with Debian, openSUSE, or Mandriva. Paldo's main features are an easy hard drive installer, GNOME desktop environment, and Upkg package management system. Stable version 1.12 was released last month. I found it to be one of the more interesting and promising distros to come along in a long time.

The GNOME Foundation is charged with several tasks, including serving as the official voice of the project, coordinating releases, deciding which projects fit under the GNOME umbrella, supporting events, and more. Once a year, a board of directors is chosen by the Foundation's members. This time around, there are ten candidates running for the seven available positions. This election may seem like another boring bureaucratic exercise, but its results are important: GNOME is the desktop used by a great many free software users, and it is the platform supported by the Free Software Foundation.

Six months ago, Linux vendor Red Hat acquired the closed source Exadel Studio Pro IDE and pledged to turn it into a fully open source Red Hat product. On Monday, Red Hat officially released JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS), based on the Exadel product as a 100 percent open source IDE (define). The new Eclipse based IDE offering from Red Hat's JBoss division will provide a development environment that will work on both Windows and Linux for Java middleware solutions from JBoss.

After releasing the multicore, multithreaded chip earlier this year, Sun plans to release the UltraSPARC T2's source code to the open-source community.

GNU Project and Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman posted a message on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list titled, "real men don't attack straw men", suggesting that some comments he had made were being misrepresented. He noted, "one question particularly relevant for this list is why I don't recommend OpenBSD. It is not about what the system allows. (Any general purpose system allows doing anything at all.) It is about what the system suggests to the user." He went on to note that though he knew of no non-free software included in the base OpenBSD system, there was non-free software distributed via the ports collection, "if a collection of software contains (or suggests installation of) some non-free program, I do not recommend it."

Sometimes when I run ls to get a directory listing, I am looking for a specific file, but I want to see the whole context where the file resides. While you can pipe the output of ls to grep, that doesn't show you the whole directory with the matched files highlighted in a different color. I create a small script to do just what I want.

This document describes how to install a Postfix mail server 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 (quota is not built into Postfix by default, I will show how to patch your Postfix appropriately). Passwords are stored in encrypted form in the database (most documents I found were dealing with plain text passwords which is a security risk). In addition to that, this tutorial covers the installation of Amavisd, SpamAssassin and ClamAV so that emails will be scanned for spam and viruses.

CNN reports that "switching from a Windows-operated computer to a Linux-operated one could slash computer-generated e-waste levels by 50%." It's no longer about software freedom. It's also about environmental responsibility.

[ Indeed, green probably will be a marketing point for Linux in the future. It's one of the most important point Zonbu is using for selling their harddisk-less PC - hkwint ]

Thanks to a Filipino organisation, open source software is once again stepping in to help humanity with the release of a toolkit to assist human rights organisations in monitoring human rights violations.