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UNDP-intitiative International Open Source Network has released a series of free and open source primer publications. Frederick Noronha takes a look at the first in the series.

Recapping two busy weeks' worth of news, events and releases in the Ruby world.

If you've always admired the Apple OS X desktop theme and layout but aren't ready to drop a load of cash on an Apple machine (or if you want to stick with free software), this article from Jem Matzan will show you how to make GNOME look and feel more like OS X, with some limitations.

Tired of the strangle-hold Microsoft has on the software world? There is a viable alternative that people are turning to: open source software. What do open source applications look like? Download this CD-ROM and install some of the applications on your Windows computer to see. The idea behind the CD-ROM is that all the applications are open source, and they also exist to run on Linux computers. Linux is a ubiquitous operating system that can be found in everything from home electronics to personal computers to some of the world's largest and most powerful computers.

If Windows is a family sedan and basic Linux is an armored car, then Red Hat Linux Desktop is a mainline battle tank.

Using the Security-Enhanced Linux subsystem, this version of Linux looks at security on a program-to-program basis and not a user-to-user one. This means that an admin can set the security levels and permissions of an individual program on the network regardless of who the user is. A word processor, for example, may be able to do basic functions and save and load files to a local disk, but be restricted from accessing network drives or running macros. And default settings can be configured so that if a virus should arrive, it will find itself restricted and unable to do anything outside the security protocols, such as replicating itself throughout the network.

Frank Hecker from the Mozilla Foundation contacted Theo to inform him that the foundation decided to donate $10,000 USD to the OpenSSH project.

...The OpenSSH project truly appreciates this gesture of solidarity from such a respectable open source project.

Besides this sizeable donation we also received hundreds of smaller donations, mostly from individuals and small companies. Thanks everyone for stepping up to keep OpenBSD/OpenSSH ticking.

The two leading Linux desktop development groups have started burying the hatchet by creating a set of common APIs for the GNOME and KDE desktops. (DesktopLinux.com)

To my fellow Fedora community members: As many of you are aware, FUDCon Boston is this Friday. One of the most important topics that we will be discussing there is the future of the Fedora Project, specifically with regard to the Fedora Foundation.

Opinion: Why is virtualization the big early news from LinuxWorld? Because enterprises want to implement it sooner than later and Microsoft is all too aware of this trend.

Linux is gradually gaining acceptance and credibility in Indian enterprises. It has been over a year since UTI Bank set up its call center that handles over 7000 calls per day. The bank was looking for a robust platform that could guarantee it “high availability of services and uninterrupted call traffic”. It had options but finally decided on Linux for its core business applications.

LONDON — Trolltech AS, whose Qtopia platform and Qt framework have helped to develop more than 70 Linux-based embedded devices, has inked separate deals with Wind River and Zi Corporation aimed at simplifying and extending the development of device software on Linux based consumer devices.

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and FreeDesktop.org have launched the Portland project that will let developers create a single application that works on both the KDE and Gnome Linux desktop environments.

Improving the performance of your applications is rarely a wasted effort, but it's not always clear which functions the program is spending most of its execution time on. Learn how to pinpoint performance bottlenecks using gprof for both user-space and system calls on Linux.

RED HAT and Intel have set up a worldwide programme to help corporations and other enterprises plan and optimise Linux deployments.

While Alexa's website Traffic Ranking service is well-known for sporadic updates, its behavior since April Fools Day is best described as nutty. The weekly and quarterly averages of many of the web's biggest sites have plunged by millions, while their graphs displayed minds of their own. Email Battles shares the angst experienced by the traders who stand to lose fantasy fortunes in Alexa's psuedo-stock market.

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla.—In a rare discussion about the severity of the Windows malware scourge, a Microsoft security official said businesses should consider investing in an automated process to wipe hard drives and reinstall operating systems as a practical way to recover from malware infestation

Cement and building materials maker Lafarge has begun rolling out Linux-based firewall Smoothwall throughout its African operations.

Welcome to this year's 14th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Robert Millan [1]reported that he has built a CD installer images for GNU/kFreeBSD on [2]AMD64. Joey Schulze earlier [3]announced that the changelog files have been regenerated on the new [4]packages.debian.org system.

BOSTON - The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who hopes to distribute $100 laptops to the world's children dismissed recent criticisms Tuesday and said his project could begin distributing the computers by early next year. Kicking off the LinuxWorld conference in Boston, Nicholas Negroponte said he was undeterred by skepticism from two of the leading forces in computing, Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. "When you have both Intel and Microsoft on your case, you know you're doing something right," Negroponte said, prompting applause from the audience of several hundred open-source software devotees.

Fedora Core is a distribution developed by a community of developers sponsored by RedHat. Fedora is the descendant, so to speak, of RedHat's distribution for individual users, which they stopped selling a few years ago.

Applying the reverse of the Star Trek curse, I usually skip the even numbered Fedora Core releases. And since Fedora Core 5 was just released, and 5 being an odd number, I give you my customary combination how-to/review of this latest Linux distribution.