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Dreaming about a free software competitor for Skype? Maybe your wait is over

A new, full-featured free software application pops its head into the VoIP world, and it nominates itself as the most serious competitor of Skype. It’s name is Wengophone.

Managing your identity in the Internet of 2006 is a complex Web that requires multiple identities and passwords for multiple sites and services. Enter the open source Bandit project from Novell.

Debian has issued an update for horde3. This fixes some vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct cross-site scripting attacks.

The first version of a bilingual open source Persian-English Linux operating system, called Sharif Linux 2, has been released by Sharif FarsiWeb Inc. It has been developed for the requirements of the Persian language and is one of the results of the research made by the FarsiWeb Project and Sharif FarsiWeb Inc. since early 1999.

As Microsoft servers shuddered under the onslaught from anxious users downloading Windows Vista Beta 2, reviewers report that the corpulent code gobbles laptop batteries, hogs memory, and waddles through its chores. A Windows development team manager explains why this outcome for the "largest software project in history" was entirely predictable.

So there you are, dutifully wading through the documentation for whatever gnarly Linux application you're rassling into submission. You're running commands and editing configuration files and things are working and life is good. Until--yes, you knew the good times weren't going to last--until you hit the dreaded "send the process a SIGHUP" instruction.

GNOME is not just software, but also a community. But what’s this? A Community? Vincent Untz takes a closer look, starting with end users in this issue.

The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server for SUN Sparc 64bit architecture.

The GNOME Foundation received 181 applications for the Google Summer of Code (SoC) program, but not a single application was from a female developer. The lack of women participating in GNOME, and free software in general, has spurred the GNOME foundation to start a summer program to reach out to female developers.

Lucas Rocha interviews Emmanuele Bassi, co-maintainer of gnome-utils and author of the GTK+ recently used resources support. Emmanuele talks about “desktop 2.0” and other GNOME things and shows his geek code to everyone.

Smart Trade Rolls Out Java Open Source FIX Engine, SunGard and TradingScreen Integrate OMS and EMS Offerings, Ryan Beck Selects Archive Systems to Boost Operational Efficiency

Securtex International is shipping a line of Linux-powered DVRs (digital video recorders) for security and surveillance applications. The Network Advanced Video Surveillance - Embedded (NAVS-E) DVRs support 4, 8, or 16 cameras, and offer simultaneous remote recording/playback/monitoring through Windows client and management software.

The State Ministry for Research and Technology is leading a national drive for government departments, local administrations and businesses to use legal, open-source programs on office computers instead of pirated software.

Opinion: Times of change are times of opportunity. Can Linux make the most of its shot?

Last year there had been much chatter about abandoning any format that did not comply with open-source document standards. This pretty much would have meant that Microsoft's Office wouldn't occupy any of the desktops in State offices.

[I think the author is a bit confused about what "open-source" and "open standards" are. -- grouch]

Red Hat Fedora 5 Unleashed, a new IT volume from Addison-Wesley Professional, includes new and additional material based on the latest release of Red Hat's Fedora Core Linux distribution, according to the book's publisher.

One of the PostgreSQL's most sophisticated features is so called Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), a standard technique for avoiding conflicts between reads and writes of the same object in database. Unfortunately, there is one downside to MVCC, the databases tend to grow over time. This article shows two ways to get your space back!

The new Google Earth for Linux is both a great tool and a great toy, writes DesktopLinux.com columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. Find the TV dish on your roof, discover a new route to grandma's house, or simply be an eye in the sky.

An embedded software house in St. Petersburg, Russia, is offering a high-reliability, small-footprint embedded Linux implementation that supports several 668-based CompuLab SBCs (single-board computers). Intrasoft's "IS Linux G686" OS uses JFS to minimize the risk of unrecoverable data loss, compared with ext3, according to the company.

I think that if people want to jump out of airplanes, down cliffs, or free-climb El Capitan, like Captain Kirk, they should be allowed to do that -- even though it's very clear that they may be stupid things to do that are likely to get them killed. One of the more powerful and hard to refute arguments for Digital Rights/Restrictions Management (DRM), though, is that it can be used in life-critical systems to prevent failures due to users' own modifications -- and it seems to me that this is a sticky case of balancing the right to be stupid with the right to be ignorant.