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Asterisk, the leading open source telephony platform, is flourishing and AstriCon – the annual Asterisk conference and exhibition – has become the place to learn about it. Developers, resellers, IT managers and contact center managers grabbed their ten gallon hats and headed to Dallas to learn or to showcase their own Asterisk innovations. There were sessions for all levels, novice to expert, and intimate networking opportunities to meet a literal “who’s who” of open source telephony.

Someone just asked me whether, now that Novell's become buddies with Microsoft, I'll be turning away from Novell/SUSE as one of my favorite Linux distributions. My answer is no. I'm sticking with SUSE Linux on both my desktops and servers. Here's why.

[Why am I am not surprised. - Scott]

Searchmonkey, formerly known as Xsearch, is a graphical search tool whose main page describes it as the combining of Beagle's simplicity of use with the exactness of the find and grep commands. With its recent release of version 0.6.2, Searchmonkey has yet to fully match any of these rivals, but shows considerable promise, especially in its potential for encouraging users to explore and learn regular expressions.

The conference “The Role of Open Source Software for the Development of Information Society” was held in Yerevan, capital of Armenia from October 31 to November 1, 2006. The conference aimed at exchange of experience in open source promotion policy and in the use of open source software in specific areas such as public administration and education.

You would have to be a little gullible to believe that the agreement announced on Friday between Novell and Microsoft has much, if anything, to do with open source software.

It turns out that the world's premier web based commercial open source vendor, SugarCRM, has published their software under modified terms, which are not OSI approved, and will probably never be. Should they be de-listed from Sourceforge?

[Note to readers: LXer has not yet verified the claims made in this story. So read carefully and, as always, judge for yourself the merits of the author's claims. - dcparris]

An open source-based enterprise solutions for small manufacturers and distributors, OpenMFG, has unveiled version 2.0 of its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. Major enhancements include multi-currency capabilities, a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) module, as well as new functionality in the solution's Manufacturing and Scheduling module, the company said.

"There's been quite a flurry in the blogosphere in the last couple of days over this and it's clear that a lot of people aren't really looking at this from the right angle."

Last week we learned how to set up MaraDNS as an authoritative DNS server. Today we'll use MaraDNS for local name services, and for a local caching resolver. We'll also cover doing zone transfers between primary and secondary servers. You can speed up Web surfing and other online services noticeably by using a local DNS cache. With MaraDNS it's as easy as falling over

"There's a tendency to think of the community as being entirely volunteers somehow working for free in their basements, but invariably they're in government or research," said Red Hat's Rick Carr. "For the commercial products, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, where the customer base is Wall Street or wherever, the large majority of development is done by commercial IT companies."

Virtualisation slashes development timesOne of the oft-quoted advantages of virtualisation is the re-use of existing server resources, a capability which need not just apply to servers working in a production environment.

With Firefox 2.0 out the door last week, Mozilla is turning its attention to version 3.0, with a goal to deliver the new browser about this time next year. Among the features Mozilla wants for Firefox 3.0 is Places, the revamped bookmark tool that was dropped from 2.0 development in April. "We definitely didn't want to add [Places] until it was ready for prime time," says Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's director of engineering

The Cape IT Initiative (CITI) are launching their latest new business acceleration initiative, VeloCITI. The idea is to select IT businesses with innovative and sustainable ideas and provide the support to get the companies up and running.

And so, last week, “Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. ... announced a set of broad business and technical collaboration agreements to build, market and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft products work better together. The two companies also announced an agreement to provide each other’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products. These agreements will be in place until at least 2012”. I doubt it's as simple as that.

Sound eXchange (SoX) is a command-line sound sample translator. This Swiss Army knife of sound tools can be used to convert file formats of your audio files, and to apply sound effects such as echo, fade-in/out, and chorus to jazz up your music with just a few keystrokes.

Fighting fragmentationThe biggest obstacle in Java's path to becoming the dominant software architecture for mobile phones has been its fragmentation - both in terms of technical features and the various licensing schemes adopted by its early exponents. The past two years have seen the handset makers and large operators increasingly taking the steering wheel of the mobile Java movement, seeking to create unified platforms and work around the confusion caused by Sun's halfhearted open source approach.

The Beta sessions of the first South African LPI level 3 exams will be taking place in early December in Joburg and Cape Town. The exams can be written free of charge and registration is open to anyone with an LPI level 1 certification.

Much too often, we take things for granted, and don’t think about them. They just work, especially if you are using Debian with its outstanding dpkg and apt package management tools. But one thing which amazes me every now and then again is apt-proxy.

The beta version of the future Flash 9 is included; update from X.Org 7.0 to 7.1; Intel wireless firmware updates for the ipw2x00 models of wireless cards; Torus trooper, an amazing game made by Kenta Cho, with a retro-futuristic style; Transmission, a small basic BitTorrent client; E16 fonts - fixed problem with characters on the E16 menus and messages; E16 sounds - helpful sounds added to the 'Elive look' of E16 (a nice girl's voice explaining the available options); Java was again added to the development versions; Evidence no longer be in the dock, replaced by Thunar; Thunar media tags and archiver plugins have been added to Elive; Gaim updated to the latest version.

I spotted a couple of strange things in today's distrowatch.com news column.