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Actually, it's a 'cost recovery measure'Microsoft is to start charging $1.50 for beta versions of Office 2007. From 2 August anyone wanting to download the software will have to pay the small fee.

[Included as a dose of humor. I think it's hilarious. - dcparris

LogicBlaze Inc, one of the SimulaLabs open source companies, is releasing the next version of its open source Enterprise Service Bus.

I don't think anyone will be surprised by this, but watch out for Linux (am I five years too late?). According to market-research company IMS Research, the role of Linux in mobile systems will maintain a steady growth path. In addition, an increasing number of companies are announcing plans to develop Linux platforms. Admittedly, Linux phones still represent a small segment of the overall handset market.

LogicBlaze made a big splash in late March with the release of their FUSE open source SOA runtime environment -- and they've just announced a new 1.2 version of FUSE that's designed tocompete even more strongly with commercial SOA solutions.

Linux Format magazine has taken some of its previous tutorial series and put them online in the form of a wiki. Covering RPM, sound production, Perl programming, Subversion and PHP, the goal is to let users update articles as new programs are released. More tutorials are planned if it's a success!

How many tabs can you fit in one Firefox 2.0 window? While not as culturally stimulating as the Tootsie Pop question, it is nonetheless one of the new features explored in this mini-review of Firefox 2.0 Beta 1.

Web browser UI and features are not designed for WebApps. Synchronization is something which is non-existent among WebApps. Gimbalz aims to provide the mix of OS and browser features for WebApps.

Welcome to our issue number 57 of Fedora Weekly News. http://fedoranews.org/wiki/Fedora_Weekly_News_Issue_57 In this issue, we have following articles: 1 One Laptop Per Child: An Education Project 2 The K12 Open Source Interview Series Has Begun 3 OSCON Day 0 - Freedom 2.0 4 On-Disk.com Donations and Big Developer Payouts 5 Use Fedora Directory Server For Manageable LDAP 6 Book review: Red Hat Fedora 5 Unleashed 7 Fedora Weekly Reports 2006-07-24 8 Fedora Core 4 and 5 Updates 9 Contributing to Fedora Weekly News 10 Editor's Blog

Wind River has updated its commercial embedded Linux distribution, along with three vertical-market "Platforms" based on it. Many of the new features in Wind River Linux 1.3 target telecommunications, traditionally an area of Wind River strength. The company additionally updated its Eclipse-based development tools, and contributed some 300,000 lines of code to the open-source Eclipse project.

While releasing Linux 2.4.33-rc3 Marcelo Tosatti has announced that in future Willy Tarreau will maintain the Linux kernel series 2.4. Four and a half years ago Mr. Tosatti had at the age of 18 taken over the position of maintainer of the kernel series 2.4 from Version 2.4.15 upwards from Linus Torvalds. However, since the publication of the kernel series 2.6 Linux 2.4 has -- not unexpectedly -- seen its importance diminish. Thus of late Kernel 2.4 has only received minor corrections, with new functions and drivers for up-to-date hardware in short supply. Witness the patches for 2.4.31 and 2.4.32, which were down to 25 and 54 kilobytes (bz2 format) respectively, whereas, for example, the packed patch for upgrading 2.6.16 to 2.6.17 alone came to almost six megabytes.

Too many Linux image viewers are tinged with little annoyances -- they take too long to load, are slow to redraw the display, have limited format support, sport inconvenient controls -- so when you want to settle on one, inevitably there's something to make you utter feh! in general discontent. Good call -- feh is the name of a speedy little viewer that packs in a surprising number of features for its size.

Lixsystems (we reported about them already) has answered our questions and now offers a new HTPC based on an Asus AM2 mainboard:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., July 31 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Actel Corporation (Nasdaq: ACTL) today announced SoftConsole, a free software program development environment for Actel's CoreMP7, the industry's only soft 32-bit ARM7 microprocessor core for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Based on the widely used, open-source Eclipse Integrated Design Environment (IDE) and ARM7 GNU compiler and debugger, SoftConsole provides a cost-effective, reliable way to write and debug software programs for CoreMP7. The free tool enables designers to quickly and easily develop embedded system applications based on Actel's single-chip, flash-based FPGAs.

[Not sure whether this is really FOSS or not. If so, it might be a good thing for those who use the ARM7 platform. - dcparris]

Socialtext (http://www.socialtext.com) has released Socialtext Open for immediate download. The company said that Socialtext Open is the first open source wiki with a commercial venture as its primary contributor. It has all of Socialtext’s enterprise grade code aside from its enterprise management and enterprise integration tools. Socialtext also announced the availability of its Technical Professional Service, a new Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) Application Programming Interface (API) that enables developers to integrate and extend Socialtext Open, and the Socialtext Open Roadmap for the next 3 months.

[Say, is this one of those rat trap schemes - you know, where they give you part of the program under a gratis or libre license, but you have to get the commercial edition for the 'real' features? - dcparris]

Comments on OSNews bring home Africa's reputation problem. We're certainly undeserving of the rest of the world's scorn.

[Great insights from Jason on an important issue. - dcparris]

If there's one area where Linux distributions fall behind Windows, it's games. Most PC games are built for Windows. Where does that leave Linux users? With Cedega, a melding of Wine and DirectX developed by TransGaming. Today, Cedega 5.2.3 officially supports about 50 games, though in reality it can run a lot more.

[Note the licensing issues box in the article. It doesn't seem like an ideal project to me, but I'm not addicted to games, either. - dcparris]

CAN you run Adobe Photoshop on Linux? Many Web designers, graphic artists and bloggers might consider the answer to this question crucial when considering a shift from Windows.

[You might be interested if you must have Photoshop. Frankly, I guess I would need to be a much more serious image editor to "need" this non-free software. - dcparris]

A senior Red Hat executive today maintained the Xen open source virtualisation environment was not yet ready for enterprise use, despite "unbelievable" customer demand and the fact rival Novell has already started shipping the software.

When the co-founders started-up Google, their main source of funding was their credit cards. Any way they could find to leverage resources was critical. One approach was to use open source software. Basically, this is software that is freely available – so long as all additions to the software is also made free.

Two reports over the past week, plus one in the previous two weeks, add to the growing recognition that the internet browser space is the theatre upon whose stage the battle for IT marketshare will be fought in future.