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This Saturday (2006-03-25) between 13:00 - 21:00 UTC, the debian.org machines hosted by HP are going down due to maintenance in their cage on the power systems.

DistroWatch reports - AliXe is a French Canadian Linux live CD based on SLAX. The new version 0.04, released yesterday, is derived from SLAX 5.0.7b with a number of newly updated packages; these include Linux kernel 2.6.15, X.Org 6.9.0, KDE 3.5.0, OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 (replaces KOffice), GIMP 2.2.10, Firefox 1.5.0.1 and Thunderbird 1.5.

OSDir had a look at this new distro in their latest Screenshot Tour. O'lala!

"A culture of entitlement is starting to damage the open source community," Theo de Raadt, the founder and lead developer of the OpenBSD open source operating system, declared this week.

Theo de Raadt of OpenSSH fame brings up a question we'll be taking a closer look at in coming weeks. Pointedly, who pays for open source?

While it's great that companies save obscene amounts of money by selling their customers open source solutions sometimes they don't reciprocate to the people providing the work. An OpenSSH dev ML post by Theo de Raadt follows illustrating the issue.

Even five years back, the very thought of "browsing the net" gave us a visual of the Internet Explorer. The situation has changed recently with the replacement of the Internet Explorer (IE) by various browsers like Maxthon, Opera, Firefox and a number of others.

Thomas Nagy's kdissert is an application referred to as a mind mapping tool. Its purpose is to help you create complex documents such as a thesis, or a dissertation, or a presentation.

Venezuela's science and technology ministry on Friday began the Latin American Free Software Installation Fair, an event promoting the use of the open-source Linux operating system and other nonproprietary programs over Windows by Microsoft.

A codec specialist in Bangalore, India is shipping an IP videophone reference design based on Linux and a Texas Instruments Davinci TMS320DM6446 RISC/DSP SoC (system-on-chip). The IPVP6446 design targets home and enterprise video phones, media centers with videophone capabilities, and video conferencing equipment for SMBs (small- and medium-sized businesses).

LAMP is at the heart of Emergency Response Network Systems and is saving lives. But recently, Microsoft maneuvered into taking the system away from a Free Software vendor. As Jim Lytle put it:

It concerns some information about the deployment of our product which looks like they are trying to replace it with Microsoft solution at DHS. In violation of many FARs (Federal Acquisition Regulations) in regards to COTS, commercial-off-the-shelf, technology etc. They have awarded a contract to an existing vender to "develop" a copy of our product. In addition to the utter disregard for the "Small Business" set-aside programs and other directives they are going ahead at the risk of providing a developmental system. This system is not tested and has no proven track record and doesn't currently exist.

Keep in mind, this is the Emergency Response Network System that worked so well during 911. I believe the failure to deploy since 911 has put our nation at risk and harmed such efforts as advanced hurricane notification that battered Florida, the Gulf and New Orleans: All because it's Linux and Microsoft can't have that.

With LinuxWorld Expo 2006 in Boston just two weeks away, here's a look at some highlights of the upcoming event.

Supposedly "Bill Hiff, Microsoft's director of technical platform strategy will keynote on Thursday" along with Nicholas Negroponte MIT giving the main talk. In addition, the user community is represented by Bob Gatewood, CTO of AthenaHealth.

Novell has introduced its first workgroup suite running on Linux. The Novell Open Workgroup Suite includes server and desktop components with management tools, e-mail and collaboration, office products.

Brisbane’s University of Queensland has decided to deploy an Asterisk-based VoIP system over it’s multi-campus fibre network.

The Uni also plans to investigate the possibility of making the service available over its recently installed wireless network. According to a report in ComputerWorld the University has successfully integrated an Asterisk server with its traditional DM PCS and is now investigating the systems’ presense functionality.

A day in the life of a developer can be fun. In this one there were accusations of website hijacking, threats of FBI reports and other such nonsense ... all because someone could grasp the concept of a webserver and service provider. Life is stranger than fiction.

New computers make recovering the precise settings for Thunderbird and Firefox a pain. This tool is your cure.

Last month Nairobi, Kenya, hosted the Idlelo2 Conference, a major African free and open source software (FOSS) symposium sponsored by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), InWEnt Capacity Building International, Germany, and the eGovernment Directorate of Kenya. We spoke with one of the organizers of this year's conference, Milton Aineruhanga, program officer for Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET).

While 2005 saw the adoption of Linux by the enterprise segment in the mission-critical space, 2006 will see an increased acceptance of open source software, predicts Shivani Shinde

“It is no longer relevant to ask if IT organisations will shift to a strategy of maximising the value of open source. Organisations and vendors that ignore the potential threats and opportunities of OSS will increasingly find themselves at a competitive disadvantage,” predicts Dion Wiggins, Vice-president and Research Director at Gartner.

A further nine schools are set to benefit from Engen's support of Tuxlabs, bringing open source computer laboratories to South Africa's impoverished Eastern Cape province. The Eastern Cape currently has less than five percent ICT penetration in its 6 000 schools.

PostgreSQL is a fully featured object-relational database management system. It supports a large part of the SQL standard and is designed to be extensible by users in many aspects. Some of the features are: ACID transactions, foreign keys, views, sequences, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions, outer joins, multiversion concurrency control. Graphical user interfaces and bindings for many programming languages are available as well.

A combined interview of the LaTeX Project director

FLOSS is behind an Indian Web site that brings together farmers and agricultural experts to exchange ideas and information.