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Free Software Magazine's Issue 9 contains philosophical, technical and other articles about free software in full colour high resolution PDF format. It is free to subscribe and free to download.

Linux and the Free Software movement are slowly but constantly getting closer to the general public in Italy. More confirmation came last Thursday, when the home page of La Repubblica, one of the biggest national newspapers, displayed a smiling penguin linking to a full-blown article presenting the "Fifth Edition of the National Day of Linux and Free Software, celebrated with 97 events in 94 cities from Agrigento (Southern Sicily) to Aosta (in the Alps)."

RubyForge, the hosting repository for open source applications written using the object-oriented programming language Ruby, added its thousandth project last week. The language has exploded in popularity in the year since the release of the Ruby on Rails (RoR) framework. The addition of developer Joseph Tremblay's Rolling Gemstone, planned to be an e-zine engine powered on RoR, pushed the Web site's project count up to 1,000 on November 7. RubyForge adds four projects a day on average, according to Richard Kilmer, one of two administrators for the site

Cluster computing is great, or so it’s said. Cobble together a few thousand commodity servers, wire the machines together with Ethernet, grab some freely-available software, and with comparatively little expense, you can assemble a machine capable of calculating the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Or choose a problem that remains unsolved.

CGA has already deployed a four-teraflop HP supercomputer running the Linux operating system to advance its life sciences computational biology research

Microsoft admitted censoring a document (link to PDF), known as the Vienna Conclusions, presented at the recent UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) conference from any references to FOSS (Free and Open Source Software).

Don't you hate it when the word completion feature wants to finish your words for you? Or do you love it? Learn how to customize (or kill) Autocorrect in OOo and live in word-processing peace.

Here be a whole gaggle of Linux tips, including an easy way to mass-kill processes, simple version control, and a KDE app that browses the TV guides of several countries.

Varun Dubey writes: "The Linux community was left stunned when Windows Server software outsold Linux in the server market. Gartner, Inc. recently reported that sales of Windows systems accounted for nearly 37 percent of all server revenue in the last quarter while Linux accounted for 31.7 percent. Windows has a 5+ percent lead over Linux, which should be the cause for celebration at Microsoft. Is this the downfall or, as they say, the beginning of the end of Linux? Most definitely not. Before the folks at Redmond rejoice too much, there are some things they need to consider."

[Ed: Gee, just when I was planning to write an article about how Microsoft could save themselves from obsolescence. You should still look forward to that one. - dcparris]

Japanese vendor NEC has signed a 10-year deal with US firm Stratus Technologies establishing a joint product development alliance and a long-term hardware purchasing arrangement for the development of fault-tolerant Linux and Windows servers to be used in critical uptime systems.

Mozilla vice-president of products Christopher Beard announced last week that there is a "strong likelihood that the newest version of Firefox 1.5 will be available on November 29.

Damn Small Linux is a distribution built for small size (under 50 MB) but with powerful features. DSL is useful. What I mean by that is, much of the fluff that actually wastes CPU cycles and RAM is left out of this system so what you get is a ground level, fast operating system that can revitalize old hardware and perform almost every task you throw at it.

Like a number of industry analysts over the years, I have been suggesting to Big Blue that the company build a small OS/400 server that can compete against Windows. Yet, even I have not yet asked IBM to build the International Business Desktop, which might sound strange for a company that just exited the PC business. Today, I start to ask.

If IBM goes along with this little guy, this i5 in its smallest form factor yet is just the ticket to bring the i5 product and IBM well over the top in the small to very small business community

How do you run video to four different video rooms at an anime convention without having a staff member change tapes or DVDs at regular intervals? How do you run a video room where viewers can choose what to watch and when to watch it? You hire an open source developer to code a video keg and video jukebox.

Too many cooks may spoil the broth, but too many programmers just makes software better. For a multibillion-dollar company that's spent decades protecting its code with the rigor of Fort Knox, that's a radical notion. But open source is fast gaining converts, shattering traditional business models, and, in the process, transforming Portland into one of the world's open source hubs.

The project aims to port open source operating systems like GNU/Linux and Darwin to the Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming console.

Working on the project for two weeks, the two are confirming American writer Thomas Friedman's belief that innovation is no longer confined to the realm of big companies. Deva explains, "We are building an open source hardware/software Linux-based cell phone.

Download a free trial version of Lotus Domino. Lotus Domino server software provides enterprise-class messaging and collaborative capabilities in a robust platform on a wide variety of operating systems.

A three-node cluster using Oracle Real Application Clusters on two-way HP ProLiant DL 380 servers with Intel Xeon processors running Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3 powers Ohio Savings Bank's mortgage system. This clustered Oracle Database is fully integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 applications running on Windows.

Texas family suing Microsoft. It's not the new Xbox that created the problem, just the old one. Microsoft was in the process of recalling the units due to a known power supply problem. This time MS is going to have some serious legal difficulties. If they decide to fight, because unlike software EULA is not sufficient protection. With what may only be incipient evidence, it appears the MS fails to learn the lessons of their past errors:

It seems the recent failures on the new 360 Xboxes may be mostly attributable to overheating of the power supplies. One fix described is to hang the box above the floor with string to allow cooling from below. Hey, do you think I could patent the idea that some stray pieces of Lego blocks (or knock offs) at strategic corners can efficiently cool defective Microsoft game machines? Sounds reasonable to me. Talk to Tom on where to send the checks, it's just a numbered account in Switzerland so that I can properly credit your account for using my IP. Warning to MS - IT'S MINE, BACK OFF!!