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Just when I was beginning to feel upbeat about all the events and innovations going on in China this year, I see this thread from the CentOS List. The thread is not new, nor is the ‘offer’ being made in it. For all my years in China I do remember the days when distro’s were sold for 68 RMB and all our BLUG members celebrated the active distribution of Linux software for the low cost of 68 RMB ($8 USD). Back in the day downloading ISOs was near impossible, especially for most of the local software engineering students. We thought this was a great way to get Linux into the hands of a greater number of local developers.

KateOS is a Polish (and polished!) community-driven distribution. Each new release of the system brings decent innovations and offers an even better GNU/Linux *lightweight multimedia desktop*. On February 12th a new beta version KateOS Live 3.2 was released. I decided to give it a try and share my experience with this modern Linux distribution.

Grundig Mobile has launched a Linux phone based on a single-core, single-chip architecture, long considered to be the "holy grail" of modern handset technology. The U900 runs Linux and an RTOS (real-time operating system) on an NXP ARM9-based SoC (system-on-chip), using VirtualLogix platform virtualization technology.

There's nothing like free software to save some drain on your storage management or data protection budget -- if that free software works, of course. Here are 10 storage utilities you can download and start using to manage your storage-area network (SAN), deploy network-attached storage (NAS), or monitor and assess the privacy of your network.

Mozilla Corp. today released updated versions of the Firefox browser, v1.5.0.10 and v2.0.0.2, for Windows, Mac, and Linux, that close a major security flaw called the "location.hostname vulnerability." The fix stops hackers from being able to tamper with how websites are displayed.

The larger the garment industry has become, the more apparel companies have operated opaque businesses and employed questionable (if not abominable) practices in order to keep up with the goliath scale of manufacturing. At this point, most consumers have at least partial awareness of the perilous conditions of sweatshops, but the majority of clothes still come from behind a veil; and because consumers know how limited our choices are for goods with a transparent backstory, we don't always choose to try to see what's behind that closed source.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) provides an easy way to declaratively create an image using XML, and XForms provides an easy way to edit XML. In this article you will put the two together to create an XForms-based XVG editor for creating SVG images such as logos.

In the past, Microsoft has said that its ASP.NET AJAX (Atlas) framework could be used sans Microsoft development tools. Particularly, the client-side library in ASP.NET AJAX can interact with several web-based programming languages as it consists of nothing more than JavaScript. That being said, one industrious Microsoft dev has gone ahead and created a library called "PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library" that allows PHP developers to easily interact with Microsoft's rich client framework.

An engineer from Advanced Micro Devices has reportedly released source-code of BIOS (basic input/output system) for a mainboard by Gigabyte Technology. The move allows die-hard Linux followers to reprogram BIOS according to their needs, for instance, to get better overclocking functionality.

IBM is not ready to guarantee that its computer programs are compatible with Oracle Corp.'s recently launched version of the Linux operating system, an IBM spokesman said on Friday. This means that if IBM software programs turn out to be incompatible with Oracle Enterprise Linux, then it will be up to Oracle -- and not IBM -- to resolve the issue, said IBM spokesman Matthew McMahon.

As part of Mozilla Corporation's ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 1.5.0.10 and Firefox 2.0.0.2 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download from getfirefox.com. Due to the security fixes, we strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to these latest releases.

Free software does not mean getting it for free, it means the freedom to choose, deploy, run and make changes according to the needs of the user, said Biman Bose, the politburo member and state general secretary of CPI(M). Soon state schools will have teachers who have the necessary training to teach the various facets of free and open source software to secondary and higher secondary students.

Extend your WebSphere Portal Personalization capabilities to make data from external sources available to your portal using Personalization Rules.

Python is a unique programming language that is widely used in places like Google, NASA and many other companies for mission critical applications. I'm reporting from the 2007 Python conventionpyCon in search of healthcare possibilities. I'm finding some but it seems as though straight Electronic Medical Record work has gone dormant. Tim Cook's efforts with FreePM which is now TORCH and Andrew Ho's work with Zope and OIO are the only examples that come to mind but it doesn't appear that Python has significant EMR software. That does not appear to be the case with PHP/MySQL which has a thriving community. Why?

Although the GPL is considered the most widely used license in open source projects today, plenty of commercial open source projects choose to use a Mozilla Public License (MPL) variant instead. Open source enterprise content management firm Alfresco used to be one such commercial vendor. But as of today, Alfresco is moving from an MPL license to the GPL.

One of the good things about OpenOffice.org is its ability to use different database engines. Just give it the right driver, and OpenOffice.org can connect to virtually any database system, including MySQL. However, deciding what database driver to use and configuring a connection between MySQL and OpenOffice.org can be a bit tricky. Let's walk through the process.

Alcatel-Lucent isn't the only winner in a federal jury's $1.52 billion patent infringement award against Microsoft this week. Other beneficiaries are the many rivals to the MP3 audio-compression format.

LXer Feature: 24-Feb-2007

When Eric Raymond sent off an e-mail complaining about the Fedora project and distribution, some suspected his action was motivated by his conflicting values, with respect to including non-free multimedia codecs in Fedora Core, and that there might be some connection to his work with Linspire. Linspire's CEO Kevin Carmony posted a comment on LXer's forum to clarify the unilateral nature of Raymond's mail.

It's no secret that Linus Torvalds, Linux's founder, dislikes the GNOME desktop. In 2005, for example, Torvalds posted on the GNOME-usability list that "I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE."

The KDE project announces the availability of the third development snapshot of the upcoming KDE 4. This snapshot is meant as a reference for developers who want to play with parts of the new technology KDE 4 will provide, those who want to start porting their applications to the new KDE 4 platform and for those that want to start to develop applications based on KDE 4. This snapshot is not for end users, there is no guarantee that it will be stable, the interfaces are subject to changes at any time.