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The performance of desktop computers increases year by year. This gives the programmers great opportunities to further improve the desktop experience of the users. However, what should you do when you have an old computer that is not capable of running the latest and hottest software? No need for upgrading your PC. Let me introduce you Enlightenment E17 — the window manager with minimal hardware requirements that may amaze you.

Less than two weeks after launching its Linux-based "single core" U900 phone aimed at the mid-range market, Grundig Mobile has introduced another Linux-powered smartphone. The B700 targets enterprise users with a full hardware QWERTY keyboard and push email, similar to RIM's Blackberry.

JasperSoft Corp., a provider of open source business intelligence solutions, and MySQL AB have announced the availability of Jasper for MySQL: OEM Edition, a suite of operational reporting products that includes a high-performance interactive report server, a graphical report creation tool and a pixel-perfect reporting system with dashboards, tables, crosstabs and charts.

Puppet is a secure configuration management tool for Unix-like operating systems, with features that will undoubtedly mark it for fame. Puppet has been around for nearly two years now, and has claimed a large share of cfengine converts. As mentioned last week, its configuration is more of a specification than a set of instructions, designed to make managing large groups of servers and services more than just tolerable—it can completely streamline an infrastructure.

Countless pieces of software, protocols and complex interdependencies together form a system for which it is difficult to guarantee any particular property-particularly security. Even software specifically designed to enhance security can, at the behest of clever individuals armed with detailed knowledge, work to its detriment. Vulnerabilities have been discovered in all sorts of security software from firewalls to implementations of the Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol. For example, OpenSSH is developed by some of the most security-conscious developers in the world, and yet it occasionally contains a remotely exploitable vulnerability.

An industry that has long resisted IT automation got a double dose of medicine last week. Both Microsoft and backers of key open source initiatives laid out plans to push IT further into health care--plans that also put the Windows and Linux camps on another collision course.

Ted Leung is an open source developer (he works on Mitch Kapor’s Chandler project) and he warns that Adobe wants to be the Microsoft of the Web with its Apollo and Flex platforms. He doesn’t want to give control of his work to yet another single vendor.

In January I reviewed Vector Linux 5.8. While the review was mainly positive I did complain about what I saw as some faults in the distribution. The response from the developers of Vector Linux was almost immediate, both in the Vector Linux forum and in the comments under my reviews, and was incredibly positive. In the weeks since then a surprising number of changes and improvements have already been made, particularly in the area of internationalization and localization. A suggestion I made in the VL forum regarding compiling and building packages to insure that localization files (translations into various languages) are included was taken to heart by the developers. The result is that when an updated Xfce package was built after version 4.4.0 was released it included the additional language support. So… if you’re native language is Danish or Hebrew or any other language for which translations exist in Xfce you’ll find, for example, suitable menus for your desktop.

The market for open source support services is going to boom over the next five years, according to a recent Gartner survey. The study of organizations in geographies around the world – including Canada and the U.S. – predict that spending in this country will likely see a compound annual growth rate of 16.1 per cent between 2006 and 2010. That's marginally below the expectation in the U.S. and almost three per cent more than the global average.

Although Red Hat is poised to roll out its much-anticipated Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 release shortly, work still continues on previous versions of RHEL. This week, Red Hat rolled out a beta release of its fifth update to RHEL 4, officially tagged Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5. It provides users with a small taste of the virtualization that is to come in RHEL 5.

Trolltech has done a lot of things right, in terms of making it easy for open source developers to write Qtopia applications. However, the company's unlocked, open Greenphone is hampered by counterproductive end-user license agreement (EULA) terms, concludes a review of the phone at LinuxLookup.

Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox and Apple Inc.'s Safari Web browsers both continued to snare market share from Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE) last month, a Web metrics company said today. According to Net Applications' February data, both Firefox and Safari accounted for slightly larger slices of the browser pie than the month before. IE, on the other hand, slipped by nearly the same amount.

Mozilla on March 2 released Thunderbird 1.5.0.10, a security and stability update for the popular open-source email client. Users of Thunderbird 1.5.0.x will receive an automated update notification within a couple of days, a Mozilla spokesperson said.

The IKVM.Net software tools provide an implementation of Java for the Microsoft .Net framework. IKVM provides a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and a Java byte-code translator, ikvmc. Used in place of the normal Java command, the IKVM JVM runs Java applications and applets dynamically. The ikvmc translator converts Java applications and libraries into .Net executable programs and Dynamic Link Library (DLL) files.

"It has happened that at the very mention of ESR among some GNU supporters, they basically "cover their ears", refusing to hear anything about him or anything that he may have to say. Linking them with the World Domination 201 essay co-authored by ESR resulted in refusal to read it simply because it was written by ESR."

The GNOME project released version 2.17.92 of its popular Linux desktop on Feb. 28. This is the last unstable bugfix release prior to the 2.18.0 release, set for March 14, a project spokesperson said.

The Free Software Foundation, taking advantage of what it says is the rejection of Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system, is urging major computer hardware manufacturers to offer consumers computers without any operating system or with a free GNU/Linux OS.

Following the Gecko security update releases a few days ago, the SeaMonkey project has issued new security and stability releases today for its all-in-one internet application suite. SeaMonkey 1.1.1 is now available for download, fixing several security vulnerabilities, along with a few issues reported on SeaMonkey 1.1. Simultaneously, SeaMonkey 1.0.8, a security update based on the SeaMonkey 1.0 series, was also released.

In January, Motorola announced the formation of the LiMo foundation, the not-quite open source project that will collaborate on a Linux-based ecosystem for mobile applications development. Now, with the launch of the new OpenSAF project, Motorola and friends are moving up to middleware, and moving closer to true open source in the process.

I’ve used both Windows and Mac OS X, and I don’t know how people manage to install software on them. Yes, I’m a fan of aptitude (and I’ve had good experiences with Yum). It’s pretty clear to me that this software installation system has tremendous advantages over the traditional “download a random binary package from somewhere” approach common to Windows and Mac OS X, as long as the package you want is in the proper repository.