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Firefox 2.0 is almost here, and Microsoft is expected to start pushing out Internet Explorer 7 to users via the Windows Automatic Update software-distribution mechanism by year's end. In short, the browser wars are about to begin again.

[Well, if you don't like this author, don't read his article. - dcparris]

RALEIGH, N.C. — Shares of Red Hat Inc., the largest distributor of the Linux operating system, tumbled more than 7 percent Friday after a Wall Street analyst suggested that Oracle Corp. may soon introduce its own Linux products.

You've seen the TV commercials: young white man stuck in a dead-end, low-paying job wakes up one morning, decides to sign up for classes at Foo Tech, and is transformed into a skilled computer technician working in his dream job. Apparently degrees from Foo Tech translate into good salaries and co-workers and customers who are pleasant, and do not drive you insane. Riiight. But stereotypes and hype aside, how does a person become an ace computing deity? Do you need college, certifications, apprenticeships at the feet of wizened gurus? Why would a person even want to consider a tech career? Aren't all the good jobs being outsourced? Isn't the tech industry full of unwashed grumpy guys who hate everything?

PC-BSD is a desktop-oriented distribution that masks the stability of the FreeBSD kernel behind an easy-to-use package. Its graphical system installer and point-and-click PBI package management system have been drawing in users who've never tried a BSD-based operating system before. This week the project was acquired by iXsystems, a high-end enterprise hardware solution provider. While the community is expressing skepticism of the move, the developers of PC-BSD and iXsystems both say that this partnership can only take the distribution forward.

Santa Fe, New Mexico - (Cheap Web Hosting Directory) - October 13, 2006 - Search software company, Deep Web Technologies, (DWT), has made its ''open source intelligence'' (OSINT) solution, accessible to the public free of charge. Maintained and created by DWT, the search technology and deep web solutions provider, empowers the search capabilities of federal government-sponsored sites.

The Portland Project has officially released Portland 1.0, a software framework designed to facilitate interoperability and simplify development of desktop Linux software by giving developers a common set of Linux Desktop Interfaces and tools to enable applications under development to easily integrate into both the GNOME and KDE desktop environments. This significant first release has met with relative enthusiasm from open source software development companies and Linux distributors. Already available in Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE, Portland 1.0 is also expected to appear in upcoming releases of Red Flag and Xandros.

The Apache Foundation and Doug Cutting, inventor of the open source Nutch search engine, have teamed with Baynote to expand the adoption of open source search. "The goal of Nutch is to provide effective Web site search," said Cutting. "Baynote's open source program will benefit Web developers and system administrators ... who can use one of Baynote's three Nutch-based options for their own sites."

Arcom has introduced an entry level embedded Linux development kit to support its low power PXA255 XScale-based single board computers.

Users will get Internet Explorer 7 whether they want it or not. Microsoft's upgrade to Internet Explorer will be automatically pushed to desktops later this month, but a web testing firm has warned that many companies may not be ready.

The openSUSE project has released an updated set of installation CDs and DVDs of SUSE Linux 10.1: "I'm happy to announce the availability of SUSE Linux 10.1 'remastered'. This release combines the 10.1 GM and all online updates that we have released for 10.1 so far, including libzypp, which should make the installing and working experience much smoother for everyone. We have created new CD ISO images and supplied delta ISOs from the goldmaster.

Users Can Benefit from Operating System-Level Virtualization Technology. The OpenVZ project (www.openvz.org) today announced its operating system-level server virtualization software technology has been ported and is available for systems using Power 64-bit processors giving users full access to OpenVZ software, which helps increase server utilization rates.

I found early versions of Linux weren't very user-friendly, so this time around, I used my 7-year-old son as my test subject. I gave him a little lesson on how to use Mandriva One and off he went. On his own, he was able to boot up the machine and get himself online to his favorite kid Web sites without any problems at all -- meaning today's Linux has a short learning curve.

[Another "I never heard of this Linux thing before" stories. - Scott]

John Kenyon, a highly recommended professional trainer, will conduct a workshop Thursday, November 2, 2006, at the Fitzpatrick Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine and Applied Sciences (FCIEMAS) on the Duke University campus, Durham, NC. The morning session is on Open Source Content Management Systems, focusing on Drupal, and the afternoon session is on Open Source Customer Relationship Management Systems, focusing on CiviCRM. See http://civicrm.org/aboutcivicrm for more information about CiviCRM and a list of key features.

Out of the box Movable Type’s (MT) search engine isn’t terrible. It meets minimum requirements, is fairly accurate, but not much more. The big issue is performance. Under any sort of load, MT’s native search starts to creak and groan, and suck gobs of CPU time.

A new trend is emerging wherein channel partners and independent software vendors (ISVs) are largely turning toward subscription-based platform as against the proprietary model and thus opening ample opportunities for enhanced Linux-based operation, Tirthankar Mitra, head - Channels and SI, Red Hat India said.

Mozilla's Firefox increased its share of the browser market last month at the expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and other browsers, according to one set of statistics released this week. But with another set showing that the opposite happened - with Firefox's share dropping in September - it's unclear which figures are correct.

Bill Welty, CIO of the California Air Resources Board, is well-known as an open source evangelist. Today, in Portland, Ore., he spoke at GOSCON 06 -- the Government Open Source Conference -- to a gathering of the faithful.

Embedded software specialist Wind River has hired Sven Dummer to manage its line of Eclipse-based Workbench tools for embedded Linux developers. Dummer joins Wind River from Novell, where he formerly led product management efforts for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Future iterations of the Palm operating system (OS) will no longer bear that name. Instead--as predicted since Palm sold its PalmSource OS division to Japanese firm Access last year--it is now called Access Linux Platform (ALP).

What do you get when you combine OpenSolaris, the GNU utilities, and Ubuntu? Nexenta -- a GNU-based open source operating system built on top of the OpenSolaris kernel and runtime. I took the Alpha 5 release out for a spin to see how well it's progressing. It might sound like an odd combination, but after more than a year of development, it actually works well, and is shaping up to be a very interesting operating system.