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If you want to play Windows games on your Linux desktop, you'll be glad to learn that Transgaming Technologies has enhanced its enabling software. Cedega version 5.1 adds support for three popular Windows games -- Civilization IV, FIFA 06, and Need for Speed -- among other enhancements.

Cedega, formerly called WineX, is a semi-proprietary program that sprang from the Wine project. Wine, in turn, is an open source program that enables some Windows programs to run on Linux. Unlike Wine, which supports general Windows programs, Cedega is designed expressly for running Windows games. In particular, it's meant to enable DirectX and other Windows graphics-heavy programs to run on Linux.

Once a concept thought to be oxymoronic, the business of open-source software is now working its way through adolescence to full-blown maturity. And the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco this week proved that like the teen years, the transition brings growing pains.

Commercial software giants such as Oracle and IBM are moving deeper into the open source community by snapping up the startups built to provide services around the free software, a trend that means corporate buyers should think carefully about future projects before making deployment decisions, experts say.

Qlusters, which launched in 2001, kicked off its OpenQRM project last month. The software, which includes monitoring and policy-based provisioning and resource management for Linux systems, has been available as a commercial product for four years.

G-Tek has reportedly used Linux in a very basic, simple, dual-mode WiFi/quad-band GSM/GPRS phone that can provide Internet access to PCs and PDAs connected via USB or Bluetooth. The PWG500 can also provide "seamless roaming" between WiFi and mobile networks, when used with LongBoard's FMC software (fixed-mobile convergence), the companies say.

Dave Sifry, ex-Linuxcare, and founder of Technorati, talks about the past, present and future of the world's favorite blog search engine, built using the GNU/Linux, Apache, MySQL, PERL and PHP stack.

Canadian Linux certification body Linux Professional Institute (LPI) expects to certify 4,000 professionals in the use of open source software in Latin America in 2006, LPI's regional director Jos Carlos Gouveia told BNamericas.

Peace, love and information management

At Email Battles, we beat the heck out of Firefox with hundreds of pages daily, 18 extensions, tens of open tabs, and no downtime for days at a stretch. The doggoned thing is addictive. Once you've assembled the combination that fits your individual needs, vanilla browsers feel stultifying.

Firefox's memory problems have been called bugs, nuisances... even features. No matter what you call it, you can manage Firefox memory enough to make the browsing platform more livable. The power users who crank out Email Battles share the extensions and tricks they deploy to keep Firefox running with 20+ over-active tabs loaded, at least 23 hours and 55 minutes per day, seven days a week.

DistroWatch reports - Vector Linux is a small, fast, Intel based Linux operating system for PC style computers. The creators of Vector Linux had a single credo: keep it simple, keep it small and let the end user decide what their operating system is going to be. What has evolved from this concept is perhaps the best little Linux operating system available anywhere. For the casual computer user you have a lightening fast desktop with graphical programs to handle your daily activities from web surfing, sending and receiving email, chatting on ICQ or IRC to running an ftp server. The power user will be pleased because all the tools are there to compile their own programs, use the system as a server or perhaps the gateway for their home or office computer network. Administrators will be equally as pleased because the small size and memory requirements of the operating system can be deployed on older machines maybe long forgotten.

Red Hat Magazine, Issue #16

What lies behind Oracle's open source vendor buying spree? That question was hotly debated at San Francisco's Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) after news broke about Oracle's successful and attempted purchases of two open source database vendors -- Sleepycat Software and MySQL AB, respectively -- during that two-day event.

"Oracle stole the buzz at this show," said Douglas Levin, CEO of Waltham, Mass.-based Black Duck Software in an interview at OSBC. "People are trying to understand Oracle's motivations for buying open source software (OSS) companies like Sleepycat and InnoDB and, possibly in the near future, JBoss."

Levin has been working behind the scenes with prospective open source vendor buyers and sellers, because Black Duck specializes in compliance management and due diligence for software asset sales. In this interview, he offers an insiders' view of the levels of meaning behind Oracle's OSS deals.

Almost two months ago a new Free Software support forum site has been quietly launched with the goal of being completely community driven, exclusively Free Software powered and, as part of Libervis Network, with no contradictory and annoying advertising.

Designers are turning to the Linux operating system to meet the escalating user-interface, networking, and multimedia requirements of today's consumer-electronics products.

After 6 months of development, the KDE Localisation (l10n) website web site has been launched replacing the old i18n.kde.org. It uses the default KDE layout, and its admins hope this site will help the KDE translation process work better than ever. Read on for the details.

Ruby on Rails is an open-source application framework which has won praise for its elegance and high productivity. Its creator, David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals, was in London for the Carson conference on the Future of Web Apps.

Eighty-eight percent of survey respondents reported that they spend less effort managing Linux than Windows. Some 97 percent noted that, at worst, systems management effort is the same whether it's Windows or Linux.

Sanjay Kumar, prosecutors say, reformatted his laptop to run Linux--erasing its hard drive's memory.

Members of the Mactel-Linux effort today announced that they have managed to boot Linux on a 17-inch iMac Core Duo, and devoted special thanks to one user in particular for his efforts.

DesktopLinux.com has reported recently on Novell Inc.'s survey of the "most wanted" Windows/MacOS-only applications among Linux users. As a result of over 14,000 votes and comments that have been registered since the beginning of January, some useful suggestions about good Linux substitutes have come to the fore.