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Test builds of Mozilla Thunderbird with an updated patch for tabbed message browsing are available.

With all the hoopla surrounding Yahoo RSS Mail, you can be forgiven if you were under the impression that a great technical barricade has been breached. By mating webail with an RSS news reader, Yahoo made a webmail client that also presents RSS news feeds. That's a long, long way from an RSS messaging system.

[ED: This is one perspective on the Yahoo RSS announcement. I think the most important part is that I had not heard about the Yahoo announcement. I think the Yahoo RSS addition to their email system will be useful for lots of people. - ralph}

What is a Black Dog? It's a complete USB-powered Linux server which fits easily in the palm of your hand. Powered by a 400-MHz PowerPC processor, 64 MB of RAM, and either 256 MB or 512 MB of flash, this pint-sized pet packs quite a bite (or is that "byte"?). Russell Pavlicek finds out in this product review.

The DCC Alliance formally released its first standards-based Debian core to serve as the foundation to its members Linux distributions this week.. DCC Alliance members hope to gain the benefits of LSB 3.0 by making it easier for ISVs and IHVs to support their Linux distributions.

HP has more news than it thinks

SAN DIEGO -- My first day at the 19th Large Installation System Administration (LISA) Conference in sunny San Diego was kind of like Disneyland for geeks. There are no rides, but there are plenty of attractions, and far too much to do in one visit.

Intel is so generous to provide Debian with ten notebooks (besides some server hardware), which we would like to give to developers in developing countries who

What's the US Government doing in S. Korea defending an abusive monopolist? Interfering in another country's system of justice, that's what. Instead of prosecuting Microsoft ourselves, our current administration is backing them. -Ed.

gardion writes: Well here is why I choose ubuntu. Some of these things Mepis may have but it is the combination of these things that really impressed me with Ubuntu.

Related to:
Debian Stabilizing the Linux Landscape

You could be forgiven for not knowing about the storm of activity in the database market this season. You would have to have read several dozen articles, press releases, and have followed the right bloggers to track all the strategic acquisitions, new releases, and defensive posturing . And even so you might still be wondering what it all means. But help is here in the form of a guide to open source database companies and what they've been up to.

The modern mobile phone is a powerful device that you can use to store contacts, manage calendars, check email, and even browse the Web. But that's not all: install floAt's Mobile Agent (FMA) on your laptop or PC, connect it to your handset, and you can use the combo as a versatile communication tool. This article introduces you to FMA's features and shows you how to get started with the application.

It's been a busy week in the ODF/XML neighborhood

Fujitsu and open source software company Red Hat have announced that, under their global agreement to provide Linux solutions, they will collaborate in porting applications to Fujitsu mission-critical Primequest Intel Architecture servers running Red Hat enterprise Linux.

SA-made accounting application Cubit has released version 2.6 of the suite and is extending its reach into two new international markets.

Hard drive vendor LaCie has teamed up with Mandriva on a bus-powered USB 2.0 harddrive preloaded with desktop Linux. The "GlobeTrotter" boots Mandriva Linux LE 2005, and is available in 40GB and 80GB models priced at $140 and $199, respectively.

Turbolinux, recovered and prospering in its new incarnation as an Osaka Securities Exchange-listed company, is looking to achieve success in Asian markets beyond Japan and China. The company, now a subsidiary of booming Japanese portal operator Livedoor, has announced plans to double its percentage of income from exports to neighboring countries to 20% within the next couple of years. The latest venture for Turbolinux is into the relatively untapped Vietnamese market, where it has started to conduct market research under a contract with Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

Sun Microsystems is to make the designs of its new UltraSparc T1 server processors open source in an attempt to win greater support for its hardware in the developer community.

Specifications for the Sparc chip family have previously been available to those who pay a licensing fee to the company, but Sun now plans to release both the specs and the designs, written in the Verilog hardware description language, for free.

It's been talked about for years, and now there are well-endowed and well-researched organizations claiming to offer open source software some protection from patent lawsuits. The very announcement of these efforts--even before they have a chance to prove successful--are an historical watershed for open source and free software. For the first time you get back something tangible for open-sourcing. And this leads to another key change in the terrain: it now becomes critical how "open source" is defined, and who has the power to define it.

Diggable

There is a program called service which can be used on multiple UNIX systems to control Operating System services. One of the problems faced in the design of the service utility was the path to where system startup scripts (or rc scripts) resided. This series examines how using sed can easily mitigate multi-platform scripting problems. The first part will look at how the utility program works.

The companies will initially focus on using the Linux operating system for 3G (third-generation) smart phones with a particular focus on the user interface.