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Welcome to this year's 13th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! As expected, the developers of the Ubuntu family of Linux distributions announced their beta releases late last week, edging towards that last month of intensive debugging before the final release. Other distributions are also hard at work: Mandriva has announced details about the upcoming Mandriva 2007 "Spring", KNOPPIX has delivered a new CeBIT DVD to the attendees of the popular show in Hannover, and Fedora is expected to publish its third development build, version 7 test3, in just a few days. In other news, Red Hat unveils plans for a new desktop distribution, Ian Murdoch criticises the project he founded for lacking strong leadership, and François Bancilhon is dismayed by the decision of the French Assemblée Nationale to choose Ubuntu over Mandriva for its Windows-to-Linux migration. More details below, so enjoy this week's issue DistroWatch Weekly and don't forget to share your opinions in the forum below!

"The Microsoft / Novell partnership should have included a technical Mono/.NET collaboration" Miguel de Icaza, founder of the Mono-project in an interview about the future of the free .Net-alternative, the Microsoft deal and basing a desktop on C#

If you're still searching for the perfect mate, I would definitely recommend checking out SAM. If you're just new to this alternative operating system world or are trying to turn someone onto Linux, SAM Linux 2007 is terrific for showcasing the awesome possibilities of a desktop. With SAM being available on a LiveCD, there really is no reason not to check it out.

At the end of 2006, ZDnet blogger Paul Murphy made what I thought at the time to be a poor prediction: That 2007 will see Sun's OpenSolaris eclipse Linux in the size and activity of its developer community, and all OS development projects, save Windows, will adopt OpenSolaris' organizational structure and licensing provisions.

A Federal Court has found Qualcomm Corporation guilty of the same type of conduct for which the FTC slammed memory technology maker Rambus: failing to disclose its patents in a standards process, only to assert its "submarine" patents after that standard had been widely adopted.

Linux server provider Pogo Linux has just released its latest network attached storage (NAS) device, calling it the most versatile and advanced Linux-based device to date.

The ERP business is one that has long been dominated by giant enterprise software vendors like SAP and Oracle's PeopleSoft. Microsoft has entered the fray, too, with its Dynamics applications to further make the ERP marketplace even more competitive.

The first thing I want to note is: The merge is NOT ON, it looks incredibly likely, and it's looked incredibly likely for a few weeks now, but there are still some very important things to work out, and a lot of discussion still needs to happen. [...] Some of the final details are being discussed now and once David gets back from brainshare we hope to be able to work out the remaining problems and have some more news within a week or so!

The dull looking toolbar at the bottom of any KDE installation is known officially as the Panel and, like most of Linux, has about a gazillion configuration options.

Shelley the Republican presents a masterly dissection of the lies and falsehoods of the Democ-rat Liberal Satanist Linux agenda. OLPC seems to be an insidious atheist European plot to give American intellectual property to third-world countries. Fortunately, it can't compete against the Christian Windows Vista (TM) laptop.

[You know you're popular when you're being parodied :-) - Sander]

This tutorial shows how you can import Outlook Express emails, contacts, and account settings into Mozilla Thunderbird and Evolution. This is quite useful if you want to switch from Windows to Linux but do not want to lose your mails and address book. The procedure should be similar if you use Outlook instead of Outlook Express.

Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Beta Preview

Digium, developer of the Asterisk open source IP PBX software, has launched the Asterisk Appliance, PBX hardware running Asterisk and able to serve up to 50 users.

Brussels, 15 March 2007 – Leading European, Brazilian and Chinese information and communications technology (ICT) players announced today that they have joined forces to launch QualiPSo, a quality platform to foster the development and use of open source software to help their industries in the global race for growth.

I wrote ashort expose on Practice Fusion, over atFree Software Magazine. Practice Fusion is not"Googles EHR" it is company using AdSense to cover EHR costs. Further usingMirrorMed or the like, its trivial to set something like this up.

Don’t you wish you could talk, listen, watch — in other words, interact — with anyone, anywhere in the world, and not have to worry about cost? Step into the world of internet telephony software, that allows you to make telephone calls to other computers at minimum or no cost. One of the most famous and easy-to-use software is Skype, which offers Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony that integrates smoothly into your computer.

As noted in Chapter 2 of this book, the release of the Altair microcomputer in 1975 heralded the beginning of the modern high-tech industry. But observers of the period also believe there was more to the Altair than just chips; the unit seemed to emit a mysterious elixir that entered the body of computer aficionados worldwide and sparked a strange war of the soul that has raged in the body of the computer geekdom for more than three decades. The war is between those who advocate for free software and open, patentless technology available to all and those who believe in making substantial sums of money from selling proprietary software and the vigorous protection of intellectual property. It’s the Kumbayahs vs. the Capitalists.

Gervase Markham writes: "The Mozilla Foundation is taking part in the Google Summer of Code again this year. If you are student, and would like to get paid over the summer to work on Mozilla stuff, please visit the projects page and see if there's anything you'd like to do. People should also feel free to come up with their own idea. Realistic and better-researched ideas would have more chance of getting chosen."

Tom Hoffman is leading an open-source software revolution from his Victorian house in Providence. His ‘SchoolTool’ software allows schools to manage schedules, grades and more – with no licensing fees.

Duplicate content confuses search engines, which can cause your rankings in the search engines to suffer. This tip shows you how to take full advantage of the Atom id tag as the main identifier, including other information about the feed entry, to avoid duplicates in your Atom feeds.