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Internet services company Netcraft Ltd. invites Firefox users who haven't yet tried the Netcraft Toolbar to install its latest version, which has been updated for compatibility with Firefox 1.5

Inspired by the ideas and work of Hans Kwint, I have decided to try and breathe new life into the OEM/Microsoft Tax survey I started several months ago. In addition to collaborating with Hans, I am looking for assistance from our community.

A new, simplified but detailed tutorial on how to set up a Mandriva 2006 Free Edition-based server for Web and other Internet services has been published on HowtoForge.com. The server offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters (Web server SSL-capable), mail server (with SMTP-AUTH and TLS!), DNS server, FTP server, MySQL server, POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc.), reports author Falko Timme.

To bypass the referring article, you can go diretly to Howto Forge

From the FYI department:

Microsoft Corp. is giving small retailers in the United States free add-in software to integrate Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting 2006 with either Microsoft Point of Sale or Microsoft Retail Management System.

The software allows integration between the Microsoft products that wasn't possible before. "Instead of having to wait for the next full release of the product we're offering it as a module add-in," said Mike Dickstein, director of retail solutions at Microsoft Business Solutions, late Thursday. "It's something customers have asked for."

Calm but determined, Shai Agassi had a message for analysts who gathered earlier this week in Las Vegas: "The database layer as we know it will go through radical shifts."

Agassi, president of SAP‘s product and technology group and a member of its executive board, also sat down with reporters, including TechWeb‘s Laurie Sullivan, to explain the NetWeaver platform, composite applications projects, database commoditization, and the $1-billion-per-quarter for services the German software company expects to generate.

Siemens recently announced that it has joined the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a group of international companies pushing for increased adoption of Linux worldwide. The mobile phone manufacturer will be participating in OSDL’s Carrier Grade Linux (CGL), Mobile Linux Initiative (MLI), and Data Center Linux (DCL) working groups. Linux is a free open-source operating system based on Unix that is quickly making headway into a number of industries, and not just mobile

BANGALORE: "Open all the windows, as he shuts the door,'' chorused a rock group as Microsoft monarch Bill Gates made his entry at Friday night's meeting of developers in Bangalore. It looked as if Microsoft was finally responding with a rock composition of its own to the musical offensive ``Linux Can'' that has been at play at the conferences of it's traditional rival Linux.

Microsoft denies it, but, finally, the battle of technology is being fought to the tune of rock at Bangalore.

While Delhi's rock band Parikrama has performed for Microsoft, Bangalore's Phenom has done the job for Linux. Microsoft, which follows a license-fee-based model where the source code is not given to users and Linux, which works on free open source software, have been at loggerheads. Microsoft may have lost its battle against open source software in Germany and Brazil, but the fight is still on in India.

German publisher Directmedia is taking thousands of Wikipedia entries and images and putting them on DVD and making them available in print. The DVD is available as a free download, a 7.5GB ISO image (which of course you can burn directly to DVD, if you have a dual layer burner and DL media). An earlier DVD version released in spring had just 2.7GB in comparison. That version however, was found to contain over 100 copyrighted articles; when noticed, Directmedia replaced the DVD image.

The popular French Linux distribution has made it back from the financial edge and is now pushing hard into the enterprise and desktop markets.

Jetspeed-2 has passed the TCK (Test Compatibility Kit) suite and is fully certified to the Java Portlet Standard

A group of enthusiastic KDE users and developers met last week at the FOSS.IN conference in Bangalore, one of the largest Free and Open Source Software meetings in the world, to combine their efforts in various regions of the country under a common banner and build a central platform for all things KDE in India. Along with spreading KDE awareness in India, especially in colleges and with local businesses, KDE.in has a few more practical goals. KDE.in will provide Indian KDE developers and users with a community hub to coordinate with and support each other.

"Ok, so you know there is a beta of Google Earth floating on the net. I’m sure you would love to play with it. Wait no longer my children. A VERY MYSTERIOUS person sent an email to our tipline with the download link," UNEASYsilence reports.

MacDailyNews Note: We have run this application on Max OS X 10.4.3. It seemed to work well enough in our brief testing. We did have to hit "Command-." on the first run to stop the application from attempting to connect to the Google server, as it seemed to hang there forever. Subsequent runs of the app. worked without needing to hit "Command-."

The Xen project has released version 3.0 of its virtualization software, its first major release in over a year, and XenSource, the folks that are commercializing the open source VMware competitor, claim that it is now really enterprise-ready - but not without its new XenOptimizer.

Xen 3.0 is a so-called community release that signals that the code base is functionally complete and ready for further testing and validation by the Xen community and qualification by vendors. It's expected to be distributed by Novell and by Red Hat.

In a previous post, I had written how I solved certain problems in Ubuntu like getting support for proprietary file formats. That post may or may not be helpful to many. But for me, it is definitely useful because, in a situation where I want to re-install Ubuntu on my machine, I just have to pull up my blog page and I can come up to date in very little time. The alternative being having to spend valuable time searching on the net or forums all over again.

Having said that, I think credit has to be given where it is due. So here I have put together a collection of sites which are dedicated to Ubuntu Linux and where one can find a wealth of information on general topics or accomplishing a particular task in Ubuntu.

Digg Story

The attack was front page "news" in the Boston Globe. The exoneration of Peter Quinn, whose only "sin" was wanting to use OpenDocument Format instead of Microsoft's solution, is now complete. The bogus investigation is over, and they couldn't find any dirt.

[ED- Covered by Oram earlier today but more details at Groklaw bstadil ]

Red Hat will compete with Spikesource and SourceLabs, who are in the business of validating, integrating, productizing, certifying and supporting LAMP stacks, by early 2006 with three certified open source software stacks through the Red Hat Network that are production-supported.

Each stack will be certified and supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and delivered in a subscription model. Pricing will start at $599 per server.

Three weeks ago I editorialized about a controversy stirred up by the Boston Globe and sources in Massachusetts about the state government's adoption of the OpenDocument format. I'm happy to say the whole matter has blown over, now that the facts are in.

The Globe reports today (not on the front page, but where such news is normally reported--in the City & Region section) that a review of IT director Peter J. Quinn is finished and that no wrong-doing was found. The findings match the analysis I presented in my blog, with minor updates. Quinn was told to finish the paperwork for his trips, which his boss Eric Kriss had waived.

It's nice for the government in Massachusetts to recognize that officials can meet with relevant experts and communities in the course of decision-making.

Andy Oram is an editor for O'Reilly Media, specializing in Linux and free software books, and a member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. His web site is http://www.praxagora.com/andyo.

Digg Story

LXer Day Desk: 12-09-2005

So, everyone one forgot that Mozilla got its code from Netscape. A Press Release back in January 1998 said, "The company plans to post the source code beginning with the first Netscape Communicator 5.0 developer release, expected by the end of the first quarter of 1998. This aggressive move will enable Netscape to harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the Internet by incorporating their best enhancements into future versions of Netscape's software".

So, maybe those folks who say the code endures while companies come and go - have a point. Whatever, Netscape's browser is back.

Mozilla Corp's recent release of its new Firefox 1.5 sparked new user adoption, putting the browser on track to reach the 10% market threshold, according to NetApplications, which tracks these things.

The GStreamer developers have just released version 0.10 of the GStreamer multimedia framework into the wild, and their coders' fingers will never be the same. Thread-safety, RTP/VoIP support, automatic registry maintenance, twice the performance, and a whole lot more...the best just got better. A highly flexible, cross-platform, and GUI-independent multimedia framework, GStreamer takes your media, chews it up, and spits it out into aural and visual paradise. Especially targeted at GNU/Linux and Unix operating systems, the GStreamer team has been working with members of the KDE community for a long time. With this release we have a stable, extendable and robust multimedia solution. Together with KDE MM GStreamer is set to be the multimedia framework for KDE 4.