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Linux VARs are hopeful the launch of a new national open source think tank could help drive up public sector Linux adoption. The National Open Centre (NOC), whose founding members include Birmingham City Council and the National Computing Centre, will push for wider adoption of open source software and standards in the UK, with a focus on central and local government.

rPath's Conary is a second-generation package manager. Considering that Erik Troan, rPath's CTO and co-founder, was one of the original authors of the RPM package format, some might be tempted to view Conary as an effort to do things right the second time around -- nor is that view far from wrong. In its design, Conary is a streamlined version of dpkg or RPM with Yum in which all the utilities of those package managers are combined in a single command and combined with version control to meet the demands of a modern distribution.

The wait is almost over. It may have taken two weeks longer than Red Hat would have liked, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the updated version of the company's commercial Linux platform, will be launched along with a bevy of new products and services on March 14. The delivery of RHEL 5, the fourth major commercial server release for Red Hat, will better position its Linux against Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 as well as Windows, Unix, and proprietary platforms.

Trolltech has loosened key licensing restrictions on its user-modifiable Linux-based mobile phone for open source software developers. Users of the Greenphone will no longer be restricted to running Qtopia software on the device, nor to using the device only in its supplied hardware/software configuration.

This month, TuxMobil celebrates its 10th anniversary. TuxMobil is the number one online resource providing information about Linux for laptops, PDAs, cellular phones and portable media players. In short, TuxMobil is all about Linux and portable devices. The name TuxMobil is an abridgement of the words Tux and "mobil." Tux is the well known name of the Linux mascot and "mobil" is a shortcut for mobile.

For more than a decade, PHP developers have had little choice in where they actually get the latest version of PHP: either PHP.net or as a package from a Linux distribution. Zend, the commercial backer of PHP, is now offering another choice. Zend Core 2.0, the first Zend Core release for the broader PHP community, is a PHP distribution that benefits from additional testing, bundled features, applications and support that also includes an update service. And though it extends PHP in a number of ways, it's still open source.

The Spain-based project team for ParallelKnoppix, a remastered live CD edition of Debian/Knoppix that allows the clustering of machines for parallel processing, has released v2.4 of the distro. It features a 2.6.20.1 kernel and the KDE default desktop environment.

The fourth quarterly report from KDE e.V. is now available. It covers the board meeting in Darmstradt, the fate of the technical working group and the status of the SQO-OSS research project. As usual there are reports from the working groups, including business cards, a branding meeting, an active HCI group and 27,478 commits. New members and finances are also covered. If you have been contributing to KDE for some time and want to get involved in the administrative side, do consider joining KDE e.V.

My Game Company releases Dirk Dashing v1.03 for Linux

"Spring forward; Fall back," That's the way the saying goes. Some years I get it backwards, but I eventually catch on. I've never had to worry about my PCs getting it wrong before, though. Now, with the recent changes in the Daylight Savings Time (DST) rules, I do. Fortunately, there are ways to make sure that both my Linux computers and I get the new rules right.

Take a step-by-step guide to creating custom Live CD’s on Fedora Linux. Fedora Linux is a popular and mature Linux distribution, which released its first official Live CD in December 2006. Learn how to build your own custom and easy-to-use Live CDs using a rewrite of Pilgrim, the Fedora Live CD creation tool.

Today I heard from Daniel Stone who is one of the people working on the R500 reverse engineering. At this point they are still in the early stages of this new driver but within a few weeks they hope the register dumps will become useful...

Red Hat has partnered with Exadel, a provider of rich application components, for mature, Eclipse-based developer tools for building service-oriented architecture (SOA) and rich, Web 2.0 applications to Red Hat's integrated platform, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat said the move marks the first time that a high caliber set of Eclipse-based developer tools will be available in open source.

Bahram Marvandi, A 35-year-old Iranian citizen residing in Austria, has written a software program using which the Firefox Browser can be used in Persian language.

Are we losing the war on spam? Is the war on spam a war we can win? Is there any reason for hope? When I learned how much spam was hitting our servers at O'Reilly, I decided to ask several long-time Internet luminaries these questions. Was the situation as bad as I thought it might be? In short, the answer is yes, which only makes me wonder why more people aren't talking about it.

As Second Life strains to keep up with recent popularity, InformationWeek looks at the real-world technology foundations of the make-believe world, and developer Linden Lab's plans to stay on top of growth.

Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari web browsers both continued to snare market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer last month, a web metrics company said.

Sony Ericsson last month at 3GSM in Barcelona said it was looking for partners for its UIQ platform, which it acquired several months earlier. The move was designed to help Sony Ericsson grow UIQ beyond just the confines of its own handset ecosystem and to challenge Nokia's S60 platform. Sony Ericsson is obviously trying to make sure that S60 doesn't dominate the smartphone marketplace. But is Sony Ericsson's current strategy the best way to achieve this end?

Chief maintainer Ken VanDine on March 4 announced the release of Foresight Linux 1.0.1, which boasts a 2.6.19.2 kernel and GNOME 2.16.3 desktop environment. Foresight Linux is based on rPath Linux (and its Conary package management), said to showcase the latest innovations from the GNOME project.

SugarCRM is opening an office in Dublin as part of a push into Europe.