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As a free software maintainer, I get to read lots of email messages by people who want to contribute to the projects I am responsible for. Most of them know little about the Free/Libre/Open Source Software culture. Here are some tips that every aspiring developer should know about the customs and techniques prevalent in FLOSS culture and about contributing to FLOSS projects.

Private branch exchanges (PBXs) with open source telephony software cost less than voice products from major manufacturers, and allow integrators to customize telecom installations, according to vendors who sell the technology.

Since version 7, PowerPC versions of SUSE Linux have been conspicuously absent from the SUSE desktop lineup. Instead, SUSE and Novell have focused on x86 (and x86_64) versions of their desktop Linux distribution. With version 10.0, PowerPC support returned to SUSE, but Novell has quite a few kinks that need to be worked out before this distro hums like its x86 counterpart, starting with some killer problems with installation.

Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.17 Linux kernel this past weekend, following the previous stable kernel release by three months [story]. He noted, "not a lot of changes since the last -rc, the bulk is actually some last-minute MIPS updates and s390 futex changes, the rest tend to be various very small fixes that trickled in over the last week. Have fun with it". The latest kernel source can be downloaded from your nearest Linux Kernel Archivemirror [story]. You can browse through all the changes using thegitweb interface.

Database competitors say Oracle is taking its eye off the ball as it develops a bigger applications business, even as open source database programs, including MySQL and Ingres, loom as a future threat. "They really haven't been innovating as much as they could," said Paul Rivot, a director of information management in IBM's database business. "We are doing very much the opposite."

Among the most important new features of this version dubbed "Crazed Snow-Weasel" are the possible extension while in operation of a software RAID-5 array by additional data carriers, a Userspace interface for Software-Suspend, changed export functions for future APIs approved for GPL code only, as well as support for the Niagara processor architecture of the Ultra SPARC T1.

FIT is a general-purpose, open-ended framework that you can easily extend for expressing various sorts of tests. This article shows you how to use FIT in conjunction with Eclipse to solve several problems in software development. It provides a look at what FIT does to solve the problems inherent in software engineering.

This is the 'philipsu' blog entry on why Vista is late (and more) and commentary that surfaced by last Thursday, June 15, 2006

Last week, LinuxPlanet provided a brief overview of Nagios, and explained how it can make your infrastructure monitoring fun and easy. As promised, here is a closer examination of the configuration files, because that's the biggest hurdle to setting up a lean, mean monitoring machine with Nagios.

In this issue, we have following articles:

1. Red Hat Magazine Issue 20 June 2006
2. Looking for a few good women (and men)
3. Interview with Max Spevack from the Fedora project
4. Distrowatch: Still undecided? Then install Fedora Core 5!
5. Google Earth 4 Beta for Linux
6. Red Hat Fedora 5 Unleashed Book
7. IT Reviews: Fedora Core 5 Review
8. Open Video Contest goes live this week
9. Fedora Weekly Reports 2006-06-12
10. Fedora Core 4 and 5 Updates
11. Contributing to Fedora Weekly News
12. Editor's Blog

If Microsoft Corp. investors are concerned about the company's lacklustre shares, they must be downright terrified by the legions of computer programmers who want to drive the technology behemoth into the ground.

Fourteen centres for orphaned and vulnerable children received computers, open source software and Internet access on South Africa's Youth Day, June 16, as part of the Tuxlabs initiative. The 26 PCs and two laptops will be used by The Heartbeat Centre for Community Development's 5 000 students countrywide.

Three New Models Added to Telco Server Family

Linux v2.6.17 has just been released.

But there aren't a lot of changes, says Linus Torvalds. In fact, "the bulk is actually some last-minute MIPS updates and s390 futex changes," he says on LKML,org, "the rest tend to be various very small fixes that trickled in over the last week."

Stratus Technologies, Inc. and Red Hat today announced the coming availability of 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) AS 4 across six server models, serving both the telecommunications and enterprise markets. Stratus's Director of Product Management Denny Lane and Public Relations Director Ken Donoghue briefed NewsForge last week on today's announcement.

Linux vendor Xandros will this week ship version 4.0 of its desktop distribution, Xandros Desktop OS. The new package is expected to include better support for wireless networking, an integrated security suite, plus the ability to read and write to a Windows NTFS partition – features that may attract firms looking for an alternative to Windows on some systems.

Does the world need another browser, even when Microsoft's grip on the sector has weakened? Yes, says Flock, whose eponymous browser has been called "Firefox with some extensions" by critics.

One of a series of "In Easy Steps" books this Linux beginners guide may hold a few snippets that novice Linux users will value but most will want to move quickly on to something a little more detailed or challenging.

New 4.0 Release Offers Testbench for Up-coming PCI Express Gen 2 Standard

Two significant events occurred this week that have relevance to the implementation of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) by Massachusetts, one of which was little noticed, and one of which was duly noted in the press. The question is whether or not these two dots are connected - and whether there's a back story that no one has yet noticed at all. (Here's a hint on the back story: it's harder to connect dots, when they can be removed from the public eye.)