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Trolltech has updated its Qtopia Phone platform for Linux handsets, adding a voice over IP (VoIP) client and better support for wireless messaging. The move will make it easier for handset makers to build Linux phones with VoIP capability, but such models are unlikely to be released in Europe for at least a year.

[ED- Covered earlier but it is important that Linux does well in the Mobile area -bstadil]

IBM is adopting OpenDocument Format (ODF) for the first generally available release of its network-based collaboration and office productivity suite. IBM said Sunday its Workplace Managed Client 2.6, due in early 2006, would adopt ODF so users could easily share files and information. The Workplace Managed Client is currently available on a limited capacity, with more than one million deployed seats.

A summary of free software news and events occurring in the month of November 2005.

When Gary Mauldin, CEO of La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries, died from complications from an accident on Sept. 19, 2002, Kevin Mauldin inherited his brother's job -- as well as an outdated computer network.

"I'm a retailer, not a techie," Kevin Mauldin said. The younger sibling was adept at both retail and technology, increasing his company's sales by 35 percent in 2001 and virtually building the Denver-based furniture retailer's Unix-based operating system from the ground up.

THE non-profit Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of its free, and impressive, Firefox web browser.

Among other things, it offers faster browsing, automatic updates, better pop-up blocking - and bless you Mozilla - good security.

Firefox, which uses open-source software, is the world's second most popular browser after Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which comes installed on most PCs.

More than 106 million copies of Firefox have been downloaded since it was introduced a little more than a year ago, giving Mozilla about 15 per cent of the market.

When it released the source code to its Solaris operating system, Sun Microsystems bet that people would pick it up and run. Sun said it wanted to see a community form around the OpenSolaris code, and take it beyond what the company had done with it in its more than 25 years of development of the OS. Today the community Sun was looking for seems to be coming to life.

On Saturday, December 3rd 2005 the Chicago Area Ruby Group and the Chicago Python Users Group presented Snakes and Rubies, talks by Adrian Holovaty, one of the creators of the Django framework for Python, and David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails framework. The talks were given at DePaul University. These web development frameworks are shining examples of web 2.0 technology brought to life. The DePaul Linux Users Group and the Depaul Computer Science Society (ACM) were also instrumental in sponsoring this event.

After a two year labour of love, coffee and coding, Alistair Carruthers unveils South Africa's biggest search engine. Carruthers marries open source technologies like Lucene with Microsoft's proprietary .Net framework for a truly inspiring result.

Two public financial institutions will start the first Linux-based Internet banking services this month as the government tries to end Microsoft Windows' long-running monopoly in online banking systems.

The state-owned Korea Post said on Wednesday (Nov. 30) that it will launch an online banking service for Linux operating system users in mid-December, as a part of the open-source software fostering projects of the Ministry of Information and Communication.

LXer Day Desk: 12-05-2005

Has Microsoft repeated history in its fight against Linux? We wonder if the Redmond company has confused the proposed implementation of the Open Document Format as part of the fight against Linux. One only has to look back at anti-trust litigation from 1968 to shed light on the question. Have the people who are supposed to represent the interests of we, the people, failed? You must answer that question for yourself and so should the government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The other day my friend Bob came to me with a question. He'd written a Java program to copy 100MB data files from his Windows XP computer at his office in Sunnyvale, California, to a Linux server at his company's East Coast office in Reston, Virginia. He knew both offices had 100Mbps Ethernet networks that connected over a 155Mbps Virtual Private Network (VPN). When he measured the speed of the transfers, he found out that his files were transferring at less than 4Mbps, and wondered if I had any idea why.

I wrote this article to explain why this is the case, and what Bob needs to do to achieve the maximum network throughput.

Welcome to this year's 49th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. New major releases of KDE, Firefox and Apache have prompted us to take a closer look at the major distribution's handling of package updates, the availability of backports and other related issues. Does your distribution provide backports for popular new software? Or do you have to wait for the next version bump to enjoy recently released packages? Also in this issue: an introduction to a GNOME-based Windows XP clone from Russia and a quick look at the excellent Archie Live CD. Finally, our November 2005 donation goes to the often-nominated KANOTIX project. Happy reading! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

Winpooch acts as a powerful anti spyware and anti trojans, and if you have ClamWin installed Winpooch is a Windows watchdog, free and open source.

[Ed.- I love when FOSS rescues poor olde Windows. -tuxchick]

Six weeks after Oracle bought Finnish software developer Innobase, MySQL is working to provide its customers with an alternative to the open-source InnoDB database engine often used at the heart of its product, a MySQL executive says.

PROPRIETARY software often spawns proprietary training, with only one official route to certification. In the Linux world, there are three main certification tracks to choose from: that of Red Hat, the Linux Professional Institute or Novell. Picking a winner no simple task.

If ...you don’t mind splashing out with a little cash, you can put a stop to the dual-booting and run your games in Linux by using Transgaming Technologies’ Cedega, a subscription-based application that implements a Windows compatibility layer on top of Linux. A fork of the open-source Wine project, it’s been optimised for gaming and focuses on DirectX compatibility.

Once upon a time, there was a security hole. (This is not your standard fairy tale. Stay with me.) Greasemonkey's architecture has changed substantially since it was first written. Version 0.3, the first version to gain wide popularity, had a fundamental security flaw: it trusted the remote page too much when it injected and executed user scripts.

End user licence agreements (EULA) are nobody's favorite reading. Users of free and open source software (FOSS), who are accustomed to licences that give no warranty and admit no liability, may be even less inclined to read EULAs than most computer users. Perhaps, though, we should start. Over the last few years, commercial GNU/Linux distributions have been wrestling with the question of whether users should be indemnified in the event that a third party patent is upheld -- and, in some cases, their answers are starting to appear in their EULAs. However, whether these varying answers offer better protection than the GNU General Public License remains unproven.

How hot is the new Xbox 360? Some people offered hundreds of dollars just to buy the cardboard box in which it's packed. One person even bid $630 merely for a picture of the machine. But then reality hit.

We've covered SSH before in CLI Magic, but this week let's look at some additional SSH features that new users might not be aware of. For the purpose of this article, we'll be looking specifically at OpenSSH, but many of these features apply to other SSH variants as well.