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Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 84 for the week of April 15th through April 21st, 2007.

Desktop search engines are all the rage these days. While Beagle may be the most popular desktop search engine for Linux, there are alternatives. If you are looking for a lightweight and easy-to-use yet powerful desktop search engine, you might want to try Recoll Recoll. Unlike Beagle, Recoll doesn't require Mono, it's fast, and it's highly configurable. Recoll is based on Xapian, a mature open source search engine library that supports advanced features such as phrase and proximity search, relevance feedback, document categorization, boolean queries, and wildcard search.

Free and open source software researcher Rishab Ayer Ghosh says that just 16 percent of software spend is on pre-packaged software and the majority of programmers work outside the pre-packaged software sector. "Proprietary software is an anomaly," says Ghosh.

Phillip Longman's Book 'Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care is Better Than Yours' is a narrative of the transformation of the Veterans Affairs hospital system from the worst in the nation to arguably the best in the world, becoming the 'Toyota of Healthcare'. Longman attributes the VA's success in large part to the VistA electronic health record system, application of quality metrics system wide made possible by VistA, and alignment of economic incentives. The author contrasts this with the private sector in which poor quality and disorganization are rewarded. He warns of the consequences of retaining the private sector status quo. He ends with a proposal for private sector change.

Microsoft's contention that Linux infringes unspecified Microsoft patents has always reminded of Richard Nixon's campaign pledge to end the Viet Nam war: "I have a secret plan, but I can't tell you what it is." If Steve Ballmer can say that Linux violates secret MS patents, why stop there?

Download a free trial version of IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment, which provides an easy-to-use console for remote deployment and management of operating systems.

Avi Kivity is the lead developer and maintainer of the Kernel-based Virtual Machine project, better known askvm. The project was started in mid-2006, and has been part of the Linux kernel since the 2.6.20 release in February of 2007. kvm is a full virtualization system for x86-based Linux hosts, allowing users to run isolated x86 guest operating systems in virtual machines.In this interview, Avi talks about the current status of the kvm project, detailing what kvm is, how it works, and how it differs from other virtualization projects. He goes on to examine future plans for improving stability and performance.read more

WITH TWO OVERLAPPING events, Microsoft admitted what we have been saying all along, Vista, aka Windows Me Two (Me II), is a joke that no one wants. It did two unprecedented things this week that frankly stunned us.

It is our great pleasure to announce the immediate availability of openModeller Desktop Version 1.0.5 openModeller is a generic framework for carrying out fundamental niche modelling experiments - typically used to predict species distribution given a set of environmental raster layers. The openModeller Desktop application builds on the openModeller library by providing a user friendly graphical user interface for carrying out niche modelling experiments.

Now it means that we are going to be called by Microsoft itself. As of Sunday night, a decision had not been made but calls had been placed. It is being seriously discussed and at the highest levels. Their message will be loud and clear to each and every one of us: Put Up Or Shut Up.

This handy Firefox extension integrates with your live bookmarks, scrolling selected feed headlines across your browser.

To this day, I still have to smile when new Linux users decide to take the plunge because they want the cool looking visual effects that Beryl offers. To some limited degree, I can understand the motivation. The stunning videos on YouTube are certainly compelling to those who have never tried to use the setup themselves. Unfortunately, there are still some valid reasons for sticking with the alternatives for the time being. Let's explore some of the issues that I have found with using Beryl.

The Queensland, Victorian, South Australian and Federal Governments, all exclusive Microsoft sites, were noticeably absent of any representation at the Government Day seminar at the inaugural LinuxWorld Expo held in Sydney in 2006.

This tutorial shows how to install and use suPHP with the ISPConfig control panel on a Debian Etch server. When you have set up suPHP on your ISPConfig server, you are able to run the PHP scripts under the admin user of the website instead of the Apache user.

Today, IBM announced a public beta trial of a virtual Linux environment that will let x86 applications run on its System p Unix servers without modification. The new IBM System p Application Virtual Environment (AVE) technology will allow x86 binaries to run as well without modification, removing the biggest barrier against effective virtualization for some companies. As a result, customers will be able to consolidate dozens, if not hundreds, of servers into one virtual environment.

Foundation forms mobile and embedded initiative to market, co-ordinate and grow Gnome platform on mobile devices. Jeff Waugh to head up new initiative.

The current agreement for the provision of free software to schools that was made between the Department of Education and Microsoft is soon coming up for renewal. Whether the deal will be renewed and what the details of the deal will be, still remain uncertain.

I’m thrilled to report that the latest beta of Audacity is indeed, just what the doctor ordered. If you have been an Audacity fan with your favorite distribution, you likely remember the headache of doing something as simple as assigning the proper sound device settings when working with something like a USB headset. Seriously, with the exception of higher end equipment, who is going to use that lousy mic jack built into their sound card when I can enjoy the noise canceling goodness of my USB headset?

Almost every autumn the beaches of Southwest Florida fill with stinking piles of dead fish, thanks to a tiny algae called Karenia brevis, better known as red tide. Researchers at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., are tallying red tide blooms with an arsenal that includes Linux and open source software.

Welcome to this year's 17th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! The week belonged to Ubuntu, whose new version 7.04 was made available as planned despite the skipped release candidate a week earlier. The hype surrounding the new release of the popular operating system completely eclipsed that of another desktop-oriented distribution - Mandriva Linux 2007.1, which was also made available last week, but which generated little excitement in comparison. Also in the news: a new openSUSE-based live CD featuring the latest KDE 4 snapshot, a link to an interview with Novell's Nat Friedman, and an update on the development of PC-BSD. Finally, don't miss our fifth and final part of the overview of top ten distributions, featuring Gentoo Linux and FreeBSD. Happy reading!