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The Free Standards Group (FSG) is scheduled to announce today its answer to the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) -- the Linux Standard Base (LSB) Developer Network. The LSB Developer Network (LDN) will combine community content with original content in one convenient location to provide developers with information on writing portable Linux applications.

Anybody who has been working with free software for any period of time knows that hardware support is often one of the community's thorniest problems. Manufacturers are often reluctant to tell their customers how to actually use the hardware they sell. For some strange reason, people buy that hardware anyway, and promptly want it to work with their operating system of choice. If that system is Windows, the manufacturer will usually provide a driver (of uncertain quality). Free software users, instead, are usually on their own.

This week I'm going to cover some of the things they don't teach you in systems analysis and design courses. If you recall, the aim for the project I was working on was to convert an old _ and I mean very old _ Excel 4 application (before Visual Basic) and convert it to a MySQL and PHP based application.

FSMLabs reports that its real-time Linux distribution was used by Blue Mountain Avionics to build an electronic flight information system (EFIS) or "glass cockpit" for experimental aircraft. The EFIS/One offers dozens of solid-state instruments, digital autopilot, an air data computer, and a built-in flight recorder.

Every business faces competition, at least to some extent. Even if you’re currently the only provider of a certain service in your field of expertise, that doesn’t mean there aren’t people on the sidelines trying to secretly improve on what you’re doing and eventually lead your customers away from you. You may not see them, but they’re probably there.

JSON helps provide an Ajaxian nature to a Web application. Learn an elegant way to cache metadata on the client side with the help of server code, which provides JSON-formatted (JavaScript Object Notation) stringified metadata. This approach also enables you to handle multivalue and multigroup attributes in a manner similar to Ajax.

The Free Standards Group (FSG), a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing and promoting open source software standards, today announced it has partnered with O’Reilly Media to offer services to Linux application developers as part of its Linux Standard Base (LSB) Developer Network.

To make Linux applications usable worldwide -- with no inequity between Western dialects and languages around the world -- you must be able to input, store, retrieve, and render any language, no matter how complex. The multilingualization library, or m17n, provides a single solution for all languages on UNIX-like platforms.

KOffice 1.6, an update to the integrated office suite featured in the popular KDE desktop environment, is now available for download, and includes several significant enhancements. KOffice 1.6 also contains feature releases for its image editor Krita and its desktop database application Kexi.

We’ve been talking about security a lot lately, and for good reason. Every one of us has been forced into a position where we have to think about it, and if we don’t, then we’ll pay the price for it. Many of us have become so lazy that we sometimes skip installing system updates or new antivirus definitions even though all we may really need to do is click a button and wait a little while.

Mentora Group announced that it has deployed the GroundWork Monitor Professional monitoring framework from Groundwork Open Source to support its Application Hosting customers.

October 17, 2006 (Network World) -- Novell Inc. is three years into its transformation from a NetWare-centric software vendor to first and foremost a member in good standing of the Linux community. Along the way there has been great debate about the fate of the company's legacy products, including NetWare, and a complete overhaul of upper management.

Demand from customers -- particularly in the government sector -- who use open source servers such as Linux was one of the main reasons for it to move toward open source standards, said Microsoft spokesperson Tom Brookes. He said it was not connected to Microsoft's rows with EU regulators over supplying interoperability information to rivals.

[O.k., someone clue me in. Define "Open Source Standard". Do they mean "open source" or "open standards"? And does this mean that Microsoft admits that sharing can be good, or just better than the alternative? - dcparris]

Somewhere on an old backup disc buried under a stack of magazines, I still have a copy of the eDonkey file-sharing client. Last month its creator, MetaMachine, agreed to give $30 million to the RIAA in order to duck threatened litigation. The eDonkey2000 Web site has since disappeared, replaced by a belligerent message intended to scare away visitors by implying that they are being watched. Why did eDonkey2000 fail in an arena where proprietary projects are still thriving?

The annual KDE World Summit, Akademy, has found a home for 2007 in the vibrant city of Glasgow.

Open-source database company Ingres is continuing its strategy to expand around the world, opening operations in India.

Yellow Dog coming to Sony's next-gen consoleTerra Soft Solutions is to port its PowerPC-based Yellow Dog Linux distribution over to the PlayStation 3, the company claimed today. PS3 support will come courtesy of YDL 5.0, which is due to ship mid-November - as is the PS3.…

Zimbra experiences tremendous growth as more than 1,000 paid enterprises and organizations worldwide deploy Zimbra Collaboration Suite

October 17, 2006 (TechWorld.com) -- Open-source systems provider OpenLogic Inc. has announced it will provide legal protection for more than 160 projects in its open-source library.

Over the past few months we have concentrated on exploring Ubuntu Linux, the distribution that continues to grow in popularity, especially with the use of Linux on the desktop.