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Mandriva Linux today announced the signature of a broad technical co-operation and training agreement with Angola.

A musical notation system for KOffice, a cross-platform kiosk browser, a help system editor for GNOME -- these are just a few of the projects completed in this year's Google Summer of Code (SOC) event, during which Google paid students to work on free and open source software projects. The innovations in this third year appear to have enriched the experience for participants, but not affected the project completion rate.

Today (22 September) isOneWebDay, a project I'm proud to have been a part of sinceSusan Crawford thought it up many months before the first one last year. OneWebDay is meant as a day on which we celebrate the Web and what it does for each of us. So I want to celebrate what the Web does, and continues to do, for me as a journalist.The arc of my writing career is something of a parabola: a broad U-shaped valley between the time when I worked as a newspaper and magazine writer and editor and the time when I started writing on— and about— the Web, and everything that makes it good, including (and especially) Linux.

Enterprise distributions are an important part of the economic success story of Linux. The creation of highly stable, highly supported distributions has brought significant revenue streams to some distributors and enabled the deployment of Linux into many "mission critical" situations. Enterprise distributions encourage the commercial world to take Linux seriously. At LinuxConf Europe, however, your editor has stumbled into a few conversations which characterized enterprise distributions as one of the bigger problems the development community has now. Then a talk by Dirk Hohndel made that point again in a different context.

A frustrated sounding Andrew Morton released the 2.6.23-rc6-mm1 kernel as"a 29MB diff against 2.6.23-rc6." Many patches are merged first into Andrew's -mm tree for testing before being pushed to Linus' mainline tree during the merge window. Andrew suggested that the -mm process wasn't working as well as it could:"It took me over two solid days to get this lot compiling and booting on a few boxes. This required around ninety fixup patches and patch droppings. There are several bugs in here which I know of (details below) and presumably many more which I don't know of. I have to say that this just isn't working any more."

IBM for Multicore Acceleration for Linux is an advanced, high-performance cross-compiler tuned for IBM XL C and C++ compiler for the Cell Broadband Engine Processor. This updated version provides support for SDK for Multicore Acceleration 3.0; automatic generation of overlays for SPU; improved listing support for SPU; and auto-SIMDization improvements.

Trolltech today announced http://www.linuxlookup.com/2007/sep/18/trolltech_and_openmok...">Qtopia Phone Edition, the leading application platform and user interface for Linux based mobile phones, has been ported to the Neo1973 mobile phone from Taiwanese manufacturer FIC and open-source software provider OpenMoko. Now, in addition to Trolltech’s Qtopia Greenphone, developers have an additional reference platform and form factor for development and testing of new mobile Qtopia applications.

Predicting SCO's demise is a popular hobby in open-source circles. Now, however, with SCO recent filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the experts believe that SCO's end is near.

In July, Mozilla executives admitted that they weren't quite sure what to do with Thunderbird, the open-source e-mail client, since Firefox, the popular open-source Web browser, demanded most of the company's attention. On Sept. 17, Mozilla announced that it had decided to spin Thunderbird off into a company of its own: MailCo.

Although the idea of using an application to manage your personal finances makes a lot of sense, not all of us have the time and patience to learn all the intricacies of tools like GnuCash or Money Manager Ex. If that sounds like you, try Buddi, probably the easiest to use personal finance manager out there. Written in Java, Buddi runs on most platforms that can run the Java Runtime Environment. If you are running Debian or Ubuntu, you can download and install it from a .deb package; otherwise you can opt for a plain .jar file that will run on pretty much any Linux distro.

A new website has been launched to offer information on free, libre and open source software with particular reference to the use of ICT in the NGO sector.

I recently read a blog entry on InfoWorld.com that urged the Linux community to fork the kernel into desktop and server versions because, according to the author, all Linus Torvalds cares about is big iron. Sorry, but that's both wrong and stupid.

Along comes Apple with the new iPod Touch and throws a few SHA1 hashes into the start of the database which not only locks it to your iPod but prevents anyone from fiddling with the file format. Actually, that is not true. You can fiddle with the format, and you can try and sync with something other than iTunes. It won't work though, because iTunesDB will report that it contains precisely zero songs if you do.

Ganeti is a cluster virtualization management system based on Xen. In this tutorial I will explain how to create one virtual Xen machine (called an instance) on a cluster of two physical nodes, and how to manage and failover this instance between the two physical nodes.

The GPL-licensed Pivot blogging software stands out among blogging applications because it requires no database, no extra libraries, and minimal installation effort. While it's still in an early stage of development, its flexibilty and the ease with which it can be set up make it ideal for those new to maintaining their own blogging Web sites. To use Pivot, you need a server that's running PHP 4.1.0 or higher. Unlike WordPress or Movable Type, Pivot requires no MySQL database; it stores most of its data within XML files. Pivot also strives to use no extra libraries so as to be available and usable by as many people as possible.

Watch out, here comes IBM with its Microsoft Office killer. The company is expected to announce a free set of downloadable office applications later today. Slashdot speculates that the suite will be called Loutus Symphony and will be based on OpenOffice.org. IBM's Lotus Notes 8 runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, so there is a good chance this suite will be available for Linux.

We’ve read your emails, and we’ve seen your posts. It’s pretty clear that you’re all smart cookies. Well, the time has come to test your open source smarts. Introducing the first ever Red Hat Certified Challenge.

In the wake of the Windows Update fiasco, LinuxInsider quoted Stephen O'Grady's explanation of why users trust GNU/Linux more than Windows where the auto-update features are concerned. His explanation is important, as it hits the nail on the head as to why many users are finding it easier to switch over to libre software. It all comes down to trust.

Thanks, Johnny Hughes. He commented on my previous CentOS odyssey, which led me to install version 3.9 on my VIA C3-equipped test box. He said CentOS 4.5 would run on it. I had previously tried the 4.4 live CD, and that wouldn't boot, so I never bothered to burn a 4.5 install disc. Johnny was right. I did burn the first CentOS 4.5 disc, and typing i586 at the boot prompt worked.

This week on Open News SCO Files For Bankruptcy, Sun Sells ... Windows?, and The Magic SysRq Keys.