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What would you get if you were to combine good graphic programs such as the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), Inkscape, and CinePaint with other open source biggies such as Scribus and Nvu? The answer: Grafpup Linux, a live CD heaven for all graphic designers.

This week, perhaps the most interesting articles include hylafax, hal, poppler, pdftohtml, libpaperl, xpdf, gpdf, and apache2. The distributors include Gentoo and Mandriva.

Best know for its beaches and tourists Durban has been quietly building its Internet and Intranet services using open source tools including Plone and Zope. Now that the project is done developers and managers say it was a challenging task but one well worth the effort.

The US Patent Office is working with open source developers to improve the way patents are applied to software. The US Patent Office is working with open source developers to improve the way patents are applied to software, reports The Register.

This Firefox extension called View Rendered Source Chart will graphically show you sections of defined code in a web page. Really an advanced form of syntax highlighting or intellegent indenting might be a way to think of this extension.

Twelve years of civil war has left the tiny east African country of Burundi with practically no ICT infrastructure. Open source pioneer and chairperson of the East African Center for Open Source Software, Victor van Reijswoud, intends to set up a branch in the capital, Bujumbura, to encourage OSS use in business, government and education.

Jens Axboe began anlkml thread saying, "it does annoy me that any 1G i386 machine will end up with 1/8th of the memory as highmem." He then provided a patch that adds a kernel configuration option to control how memory is divided among kernel space and user space

Oracle has bundled a set of its web-service-enabled middleware to help customers deploy the infrastructure needed for service-oriented architectures (SOAs). The company's SOA Suite consists of Oracle's Fusion Middleware and is designed to support IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and JBoss application servers and messaging buses in addition to its own Oracle application and messaging software.

Buffalo Technology used embedded Linux to build a compact network attached storage device with a capacity of 160 to 450 gigabytes. The LinkStation Home Server features gigabit Ethernet connectivity and the capability of streaming multimedia content to media players that comply with DLNA

The first Technical Working Group for KDE is now being formed, with elections due over the next few weeks. The Group will help the hundreds of KDE contributors come to technical decisions and smooth processes such as major releases. It will also provide technical guidance to KDE contributors. Seven members of the KDE e.V. will be elected for an initial six months. After this period the Group will be evaluated, and if it proves successful elections will take place once every year. All members of the KDE e.V. are invited to take part in the election. If you are a contributor to KDE and you would like to take part in the decision making process, you are welcome to apply for membership. Further details can be found in the Technical Working Group's charter. Read on for a little more background.

Steve Gibson has alleged that the recent WMF vulnerability was not mearly a vulnerability, or even an accident, but a case of malicious software design by a person or persons unknown at some level within Microsoft designed to allow the running of code on machines with security levels set to full.

Conventional wisdom says that powerful individuals drive open source by working against the grain to institute a methodology of sharing that would balance the power between software vendors and users.

While this makes for an entertaining narrative, there is quantitative evidence to the contrary. The reality is that placing too much emphasis on individual players in the open source movement ignores overarching economic trends that drove open source development and adoption.

The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, controlled by ground systems that were among NASA's heaviest use of open source to date when launched in 2003, are still working on the Red Planet, long after their mission was slated to end.

For some solution providers, providing customers with solutions based on open-source software is becoming not only an option to consider when doing development projects, but a primary focus. Cignex Technologies, a solution provider and consulting firm in Santa Clara, Calif., has seen open-source technology projects become a major part of its business since the company opened its doors five years ago.

The movement towards open-source software and standards in South Africa has received another boost from a government project, with the eThekwini (Durban) municipality basing its intranet and internet portal, Durban.gov.za, entirely on open-source tools.

[Ed: From, the "You're Not Kidding This Time, Right?" department we get:]

(BNamericas.com Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)Mexico and Latin America ought to opt for open source software as a means of closing the digital divide, Mexican daily Reforma quoted Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) president and COO Jonathan Schwartz as saying during a recent visit to Mexico.

According to Schwartz, the principal benefit of open source is being able to avoid paying license fees because the software is developed by a community of manufacturers worldwide.

Co-ordinator of the Free Software and Open Source Software Foundation for Africa, Bildad Kagai, is preparing to hand over the reigns of the regional association to the Meraka Institute at Idlelo2. Lunga Madlala caught up with him.

p2p news / p2pnet: Sam Nurmi, founder of Sweden's largest Swedish web hosting operator, Loopia, says he'd like to help Mozilla's Firefox compete with the likes of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. So he's set up a site tagged HelpFirefox.com. The idea is to sell one million pixels on the page for a dollar each and give the money to the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which develops Firefox, says The Local.

Opinion: When comparing Windows and Linux patching, there's a clear winner, and it's not Microsoft.(Linux-Watch)

World-renowned IT visionaries Cory Doctorow, noted author and fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Eben Moglen, chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, will give keynote addresses at the second annual Red Hat Summit in Nashville, Tenn.

The Summit will be held May 30-June 2, 2006 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville. The event will feature a number of well-known industry speakers, hands-on technical workshops, a technology lab, roundtable discussions, and product demonstrations. It also will feature sessions on key open source issues and technologies -- including security, virtualization, and storage, organizers said.