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"Sigh. And so it continues. I'm actually tired of reading "reviews" like this."

Dave Jones, RedHat developer, writes an interesting rebuttal to a review of Fedora Core 6. Well worth a read for everyone who doesn't understand why so many GNU/Linux distros don't support things like mp3 and certain wifi chipsets out of the box.

KnowledgeTree, the Cape Town-based open source document management system, released a a technology preview of their upcoming version 3.3. The new version has significant user interface enhancements for easier use.

One of the IT vendors with a particularly active and creative marketing department is Oracle. This means that while the company is undoubtedly doing a lot of good stuff, it is sometimes difficult to tell what's real among all the positively spun positioning. An area in which the Oracle messaging machine has been in overdrive is the coming together of its various existing application product lines. The idea is to combine the best bits from the Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and the original Oracle E-Business Suite applications to create a single product line known as Oracle Fusion Applications.

For a number of weeks now, I’ve been pondering exactly who chooses to migrate to Linux and perhaps even more importantly, why. Seriously, what is the motivating factor when it comes to making the move to a new OS? Generally speaking, it comes down to a need for a change. Whether this stems from the need to try something new, or the fact that Vista is making people in Windows land very nervous, the fact remains that there is a relative flood of new users coming over to the Linux world hoping to find a more effective alternative to proprietary operating systems.

VMware, long an advocate of pre-packaged software appliances that can be loaded onto virtualisation software, launched a programme on Tuesday to certify and sell such virtual appliances. The move expands VMware's earlier support for virtual appliances as a good way to try software. Now its Virtual Appliance Marketplace provides a way to buy as well. The EMC subsidiary also launched a certification programme to ensure such appliances are working properly.

A Linux-based, dashboard-mounted data acquisition (DAQ) device was named "Best New International Product" at the SEMA (Specialty Equipment Market Association) tradeshow this week in Las Vegas. Drew Tech's "DashDAQ" interfaces via ODB2, displaying a rich variety of engine diagnostics information.

Discover how you can use Derby as a managed element, including working with the database's unified utilization and management requirements and how using FCAPS can help you design an IT management solution.

Virtualization, mobility and open source are among the most promising technologies for enabling companies to become more agile, but these network and IT advances still have a lot of maturing to do, according to analysts at an IT conference in Boston this week. "There are parts of [the virtualization] market that have matured…and when I say parts of this market, I mean VMware," said Rachel Chalmers, senior analyst of enterprise software at The 451 Group, a New York-based industry research and analysis firm that orchestrated the Enterprise IT Innovation Summit.

This Ultimate Mashup series will show you how to use Java programming and a combination of servlets, JSP, software from the open source Jena project, and new native XML capability called pureXML to build the Mother of all Mashups.

Trolltech has announced the Qt Jambi Developer Contest, which is now open to all developers following the release of the third Technology Preview (TP) of Qt Jambi. The contest is aimed at encouraging both Java and Qt programmers to try out the new features available in the Qt Jambi TP3. This third and final technology preview is built on the newly-released Qt 4.2, giving Java programmers access to powerful new Qt features like the powerful 2D graphics canvas (Qt Graphics View) and simplified application styling through Widget Stylesheets.

Thanks to Dell, one UK Linux user has succeeded in the perennial quest to buy and use a laptop without paying for an unused bundled OS.

Wake up little SUSE, Wake up. No, that's not good enough. Wake up SUSE customers, wake up. Novell is jeopardizing the future of Linux for its own short-term rewards. If you want to see Linux flourish, let alone survive after Novell's five year deal with Microsoft expires, I suggest we make an alternative five year deal with Microsoft. In this case, our part of the deal is to spend the next five minutes, months, or years migrating away from every shred of Novell/SUSE software in our home, office, or enterprise.

Novell is not SCO. Novell is not the great anti-GPL. Get over it. I'm getting a little tired of the constant Novell-bashing. Do I think that Novell made a smart long term move by partnering up with Microsoft? No, I don't.

At the inaugural "Open Source in Mobile" conference this week in Amsterdam, Nokia's director of open source, Dr. Ari Jaaksi, compared community- versus corporate-controlled distribution and middleware development for mobile phones. Jaaksi generously agreed to share his presentation with LinuxDevices.com readers.

For over a year, ODF has been duking it out with Microsoft's OpenOfficeXML. Now there's a new kid on the block from China: the Uniform Open Format, with GUI, format and API specifications for work processing, spreadsheet and presentation modules, and plans for "related standards, such as physical storage format, application integration, etc."

A recent study suggests that Mozilla's Firefox is continuing to gain ground on Microsoft's Internet Explorer following the launch of new versions of both browsers.

[Seems like they might have waited to see a full percentage point, but that's just me. - dcparris]

Sun Microsystems is making its Java Enterprise Edition 5 programming platform available on the open-source Ubuntu Linux distribution.

In the computing world, open-source software is often taken to mean free - so why would a charity choose to fork out good money for proprietary software?

GreenPlum Inc has teamed up with web-development firm SitePen Inc to offer real-time data charting capabilities into a systems administration component planned for its Bizgres open source data warehousing platform later this year.

Open source has plenty of supporters—among them venture capitalists who view the software as a disruptive technology with huge potential. But that doesn’t mean they’re about to throw cash at open-source startups as they did at new companies during the dot-com rush.