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BNamericas.com Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)The United Nations has recommended its members use open source software, particularly in areas related to health, education and international commerce, UN inspector Dominique Ouredrago said during a speech at the II international open source conference in Spain.

The town of Steamboat Springs in Colorado is migrating to Linux. The man behind the move explains the challenges and the motivation behind the move

A recent discussion and series of patches on theLinux Kernel mailing list looked at removingrelayfs [story], moving its functionality into an API using sysfs. Paul Mundt offered the patches summarizing, "this is a small patch set for getting rid of relayfs, and moving the core of its functionality to kernel/relay.c. The API is kept consistent for everything but the relayfs-specific bits, meaning people will have to use other file systems to implement relay channel buffers." The thread offers more explanation as to the benefits of the change, with quite a number of people supporting the patches.

Relayfs is described as "a bunch of per-cpu kernel buffers that can be efficiently written into from kernel code. These buffers are represented as files which can be mmap'ed and directly read from in user space. The purpose of this setup is to provide the simplest possible mechanism allowing potentially large amounts of data to be logged in the kernel and 'relayed' to user space." It was originally merged into Andrew Morton [interview]'s -mm tree in January of 2005 [story], and finally made it into the mainline kernel with the release of 2.6.14.

A number of local government organisations in the US state of Colorado are collaborating on an open source e-government system, with the first site due to go live in the Spring.

MySQL AB, the company behind the popular open source database, has acquired Netfrastructure Inc and gets a database guru in the deal.

Borland recently took another zig-zag in its short but turbulent history, effectively announcing that it was exiting developer tools and focusing on application lifecycle management with the acquisition of Segue Software. The move is another example of how open-source and free software is revolutionising the economics of business IT.

Security experts today warned of a Linux network worm that exploits holes in the Mambo content management system and the PHP XML-RPC library. Dubbed Mare.D, the worm leaves multiple backdoors on infected systems. Two of these are connectback shell backdoors that link to a remote host, while a third allows the malware's writer to access and control infected systems via IRC.

Forty-four years ago, John Hershel Glenn Jr. is successfully launched into space aboard the Friendship 7 spacecraft on the first orbital flight by an American astronaut. Russia had already sent two cosmonauts into orbit at this time. In the many following years Russian and America race each other for space superiority. Much later Russia and America have finally started cooperating in Earth's adventures into space. Competition is good, but collaboration can by so much better.

If you're at home this President's Day, and you want to give some cutting edge Linux a try, this is your lucky day. Both OpenSUSE and Ubuntu have new betas out -- the former, the fourth beta of v10.1; and the latter, the fourth alpha of v6.04.

Working with free and open source software, one frequently hears terms such as bugs, updates, and patches. When developers come across shortcomings in their software, instead of repackaging the software with the changes, they can provide a patchfile that contains details of all required changes. Two important tools used in the process are diff, which creates a patchfile, and patch, which applies it. You can use both tools with text or HTML files. User Level: Intermediate

Quest last week added single sign-on application support to its software that integrates Active Directory with Unix and Linux platforms.

TSX Venture - EPT

SANTA CLARA, CA – Tensilica has introduced the Diamond Standard 232L processor core, the lowest power processor capable of running the Linux operating system on the market. With more features, better performance and lower power dissipation than the ARM926EJ-S, Tensilica’s Diamond Standard 232L stands ready to take over new system-on-chip (SOC) designs requiring Linux support.

FEBRUARY 20, 2006 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - The Minimo Project, the group developing a shrunk-down version of the Mozilla open source browser for handheld devices, released a new version of Minimo on Saturday. The announcement is the latest indication that mobile phones will increasingly be used to access any content that is available on the Internet, analysts say.

Commercial software giants such as Oracle and IBM are moving deeper into and changing the face of the open source community by snapping up start-ups.

The Supreme Court and your local telephone company have decided to hose everyone on the Internet. Meanwhile, Congress is trying to figure out how to stop it. Where's the media? Hey, WAKE UP!

PalmSource has announced its Access Linux Platform, designed to be an integrated, open and flexible Linux-based platform tailored for smart phones and mobile devices.

Speaking to a standing-room only crowd of open source startups, investors and lawyers, Bill Hilf, director of platform technology strategy at the company, outlined why, from a business perspective, Microsoft is involved with open source. Microsoft views open source through the lens of "coopetition from commercial and open-source strategies at the same time," Hilf said.

Coopetition, or simultaneously cooperating and competing with rivals, has long been Microsoft's broader business strategy. But Hilf gave an insight on how open source fits into this plan.

"Making money matters. More importantly, making money sustainably matters. Being a successful commercial software company is very hard ... staying successful is even harder," Hilf said. "Developing coopetition strategies is a great way for growth in this environment and we're seeing that today."

Rackspace Managing Hosting inked a new partnership agreement with JBoss Inc. that will allow Rackspace to create a new managed-hosting service for the Linux operating system.

Welcome to our issue number 34 of Fedora Weekly News.