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Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the world's largest consumer electronics maker, NEC Corp. And Texas Instruments Inc. will invest 12 billion yen ($104 million) in a venture to develop software for high-speed mobile phones. The venture, to be formed in August, will focus on software development for chips used in so-called third-generation, or 3G, cell phones.

VMware announced in February that it would be releasing VMware Server, an "entry-level virtualization product," for free. After several months of beta testing, VMware Server 1.0 has finally gone gold. After spending several days testing the 1.0 release, I'm pleased with its performance and ease of use, particularly given the price.

[...]
The only thing that concerns me, and should concern any company investing in virtualization, is that VMware Server -- while "free" as in beer -- is still a proprietary product. VMware giveth, and VMware can take away.

PORTLAND, Ore. -- The eighth annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) continued Thursday with updates on Perl 6 and Python, discussion of the Zen of Free, and the final day of exhibits.

We made Unix available for free with OpenSolaris 10, but customers want services for patches and help. We find that most customers want that service and pay us for it. By giving it away we have increased the use of Solaris in a large way and have [generated] larger revenue for support.
-- Simon Phipps

What happens if you open an operating system but no developers come? The answer is: the project eventually dies. That's exactly what has happened to the OpenDarwin project. Darwin is the foundation of Mac OS X.

Ten Days After Its Official Launch, Over 165,000 Downloads of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Products

The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) Technology Group has positioned Linux as a medium term technology bet, which means one to three years to mass adoption.

Get an introduction to the Bash shell, which you can use on nearly any UNIX-based operating system. Bash is a mature, powerful, yet easy-to-use shell that is freely available. This tutorial provides an overview of Bash, as well as how to work at a command prompt, with files and directories, customizing, and job control all within the Bash shell. Also learn more about the UNIX file system.

The Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) is a distinguishing feature of Debian-based systems. APT was the first major alternative in GNU/Linux to boast automatic dependency resolution. Most GNU/Linux users know it through the apt-get command, a utility that calls on the lower-level dpkg command. However, other APT-based utilities remain largely unknown to desktop users. Some of these utilities offer a range of functionality far beyond those of the basic tools.

The third African VoIP Forum to be held in Nigeria during August has attracted a number of international and regional organisations including the ITU and senior African government regulators ministers.

There's a lot more to the Linux operating system than just the kernel itself. Each Linux distribution ships with compilers, utilities, small tools, and even full-blown desktop applications. Some of that software is essential; no Linux system could run without it. In other cases, however, it's superfluous. Sometimes it's even a hindrance.

Linux leader maintains his objections to provisions against digital rights managment.

[At least Stallman is fighting DRM. I don't see too many others doing that. - dcparris]

The idea is that each icon maker (desktop environments, applications, etc) will make their own icon set, suitable for their environment, but will include this image so that the user can recognize the document as an OpenDocument file. Think of PDF. KDE and Gnome have different PDF icons, but both are recognizable as PDF because of the red squiggle that is associated with PDF. Wouldn't it be nice to have something like that for OpenDocument? Having such an image would significantly improve awareness of the OpenDocument format.

Today, ATI has released new version 8.27.10 of its fglrx Linux display driver, part of the ATI CATALYST suite.

[ posted for the ones who need it. I know we don't like the proprietary drivers - hkwint]

South Korean Linux developer Haansoft Inc. has joined Open Source Development Labs Inc. (OSDL), a nonprofit industry group that promotes the use of the Linux operating system in enterprises, and will participate in OSDL's Carrier-Grade Linux working group, the group said Thursday.

Once, our webhosting provider sent a mail about a failed CPU fan in the machine which runs our domain, announing that it would be down for something like half an hour or so to repair it. I was impressed. Since I know that this machine is running an older AMD K7, and how hot they can get, I thought: “Wow - he discovered this before the poor CPU went to meet it’s $DEITY?”

PORTLAND, Oregon -- When Narayan Newton, an Oregon State computer science student, received an e-mail from a prominent developer of Linux desktop applications, he expected it to be a complaint. "I'd submitted some bug reports," he says. Instead, Newton was surprised to learn that the programmer, Duncan Mac-Vicar, would be his personal mentor for three months, courtesy of Google's "Summer of Code" program.

Even the most mission-critical Unix-based central business systems are being replaced by Linux running on commodity hardware, according to delegates at the Linuxworld 2006 Conference and Expo in Sydney Tuesday.

The ODF Alliance issued a press release containing further good news yesterday, providing a good excuse to check in at their Website to see how that organization is doing. The answer appears to be rather nicely, thank you, with membership standing at "nealry 280," representing 43 countries according to the press release.

Free and open source software will be punted at the Southern African Youth Festival organised by the Zimbabwe Youth Council and organisers are already using open source tools to promote the event.