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Just a few days ago, Dell launched a site to solicit feedback from customers regarding what they most want to see coming from newer systems. Some of the various feature requests include stock multi-boot systems, an option to have no additional software installed aside from the OS, OpenOffice installations and – topping the list by a margin of 2 to 1 – pre-installed Linux. Whether it be with Ubuntu, Fedora Core, OpenSUSE or others, there are more than 20,000 requests for Dell to begin offering systems with Linux pre-installed by default. Clearly, demand for such systems are rising.

Wind River Systems has acquired the technology assets of FSMLabs, a small company selling a specialized variant of the Linux operating system used for devices like animatronic robots that are extremely sensitive to precise timing.

An Australia-wide chapter of LinuxChix has formed, for women living in Australia who are interested in Linux and Free Software.

More information is available on our website: http://au.linuxchix.org/

You can subscribe to our mailing list at: http://lists.au.linuxchix.org/lists/listinfo/chix

AussieChix is a replacement of and expansion of the Sydney and Melbourne chapters of LinuxChix, as many interested Australian women live outside Sydney and Melbourne, and the Sydney and Melbourne chapters were not interacting much. We welcome women living anywhere in Australia to join AussieChix and meet other women in Australia interested in Linux and Free Software.

Vote for the name of the new KDE developer and sysadmin wiki. *** Nathan Sanders reveals that KDE 4's Sonnet will turbocharge language processing at Linux.com. *** Trolltech announced the first beta release of Qt Jambi, now available for testing and feedback. *** ChainLink is a new Qt 4 integrated environment for scientific data analysis and visualisation using Matlab/Octave/Scilab compatible syntax. Version 0.5.3 was released last week and the author is looking for some talented developers. *** CSS3.info blogs that Konqueror is the most compliant browser for CSS.

Ballmer's comments came during a conference call with financial analysts in which he repeatedly hammered home the theme that sales forecasts for Windows -- Vista in particular -- have been "overly optimistic."

Astraware is excited to announce their first steps toward support of an additional mobile platform for their range of PDA and Smartphone games. The company has been working on updates to its own core technology library to enable its games to run on Linux. based mobile platforms, and the first fruits of this labor, running under an early SDK and hardware, have recently been demonstrated by ACCESS Co, Ltd at 3GSM in Barcelona, Spain.

Has open source lost its halo, as Eric Lai's Computerworld article suggests? Is open-source still a grassroots social movement made up of idealistic underdogs trying to revolutionize an amoral industry? Or is that a straw-man argument cooked up for a slow news day? Maybe Eric Lai just has a vocabulary problem.

OpenMind 2007 is an Italian event dedicated to Free Software and free content. The event will be from this Thursday until Saturday (22nd to 24th) February in San Giorgio a Cremano, Naples. Giovanni Venturi, KDE Italia webmaster, KDE Italian translator and KSniffer developer will present KDE 3.5 and will give an update on the state of KDE 4 and Qt 4 on the 24th (Saturday) and will be running a KDE booth. Italian readers can find more in the complete article.

At times it is crucial to programmatically control the writability of data in your XForms. This tip shows how you can change the read-only property of controls programmatically. As data changes in your XForms form it can be essential to know and do something with the new data right away. This second tip shows you how to hook such events right into JavaScript methods to then use the data in many different ways.

On Tuesday, SWsoft will fortify current efforts to challenge virtualization software leader VMware by announcing free 24-by-7 support from Microsoft for Windows applications running on SWsoft's Virtuozzo software.

Exercise good memory-related coding practices by creating a comprehensive program to keep memory errors under control.

IBM announced a new marketing program intended to entice customers into using Linux on x86 servers running the Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) stack of web server software. While running LAMP applications, a full rack of five p5-560Q systems running at 70% utilization can replace 320 x86 servers that take up nearly eight racks of space and power, IBM executives said at LinuxWorld.

Wikis are widely used as tools to help speed development, increase productivity, and educate others. This tutorial creates a wiki from scratch using PHP, with value-added features useful for tracking production. It focuses on application design with PHP. All of these things make PHP a good choice for writing a wiki engine.

IBM says the 1.6 million stand-alone Linux servers running in enterprise data centers is too many. It's not Linux IBM has a thing against; it's the physical server hardware running the operating system.

Organisations such as the newly formed Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) face considerable challenges in their efforts to promote the improved integration of open source business systems, experts have warned. Analyst firm Gartner said that open source integration remains an "elusive goal" despite the ongoing efforts of groups including the OSA, the Open Source Development Lab, the Apache Software Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation.

A national centre to promote the development of open source software will be officially launched next week. The National Open Centre (NOC) holds its official launch at the Houses of Parliament on 26 February.

Thumbs up to Dell for the launch of its IdeaStorm website, which asks customers what new products and/or services they'd like Dell to launch, then gets them to vote on the best ones.

[Site busy at moment - Service Temporarily Unavailable - Please try again later. Apache/2.2.2 (Fedora) Server at http://www.dellideastorm.com Port 80 - Hey Dell uses Fedora? - AS]

CollabNet joined nine other open source and Linux vendors last week at the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York to form the Open Solutions Alliance, a group dedicated to driving adoption of open source business systems.

It's been a very busy week in the LinuxQuestions Screenshots department. This week we installed and grabbed some cool screenshots of the following distributions: Edubuntu 7.04 Alpha 4, Xubuntu 7.04 Alpha 4, Ubuntu 7.04 Alpha 4, Kubuntu 7.04 Alpha 4, openSUSE 10.3 Alpha 1, PCLinuxOS 2007 Test 2, SAM Desktop 2007 Test 2, sidux 2007-01 Preview 3, X-Evian 2.0 prebeta, Knoppel 0.8, DesktopBSD 1.0, KateOS 3.2 LIVE Beta, FreeSBIE 2.0.1 and Mandriva 2007.1 Beta 1. Enjoy!

With an introduction of a new Firefox extension in PHP, Terry Chay comments in his blog about the nitty-gritty that he had experienced working on it. He first explains the purpose that this extension allows PHP scripts to send debugging or profiling information to Firefox’s Firebug without having to write the page itself. He says the standard way of debugging in PHP involves echoing code to the screen. The fact that PHP is a scripting language makes this an way of debugging on the Web. But this may lead to some breaks in your site. This is especially relevant when you are debugging a well formed XML or JSON response, he says.