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Every year around this time, we begin to see the Linux pundits foretelling that "this year will be the year". The year that Linux takes over the desktop market or something like that. A long-time Linux user, open source community member and code contributor takes a realistic look at why 2006 is NOT the year that Linux supplants other consumer desktop environment choices.

There are several advantages to using open platforms to build communications devices: flexibility and scalability, standard interfaces, and leveraging the open source community. This article discusses the building of routers using open software platforms and components via leveraging these advantages.

The South Africa-developed Cubit accounting application is now available in a a range of indigenous languages including Xhosa, Zulu and Afrikaans and can be run concurrently in various languages across a company network.

Jeff Garzik offered an interesting status summary on the current state of Wireless drivers in the Linux Kernel. He begins, "another banner year has passed, with Linux once again proving its superiority in the area of crappy wireless (WiFi) support. Linux oldsters love the current state of wireless, because it hearkens back to the heady days of Yuri Gagarin, Sputnik and Linux kernel 0.99, when getting hardware to work under Linux required either engineering knowledge or luck (or both)."

Jeff pointed out that there's still a need for an official wireless maintainer, "I'm just the defacto guy, with no interest in the job." He also noted the importance of finally picking a stack [story] and sticking with it, rather than continually coming up with new stacks. He continued on to suggest that this stack and all the wireless drivers should be maintained in the kernel tree, rather than externally as is common now, "the whole point of working in-tree, the whole point of this open source thing is that everybody works on the same code, and the entire Internet is your test bed. Quality improves the more people work together." He concluded that while things are rough now, there's still hope for the future.

Can't think of anything worthwhile to shoot with that new video camera Santa left you? If you make a Firefox commercial, you could wind up fending off offers from advertising agencies.

The computer giant says it's working with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the Open Source Development Labs and others to strengthen patent applications.

The Free Software Foundation yesterday announced Gnash, a GPL-licenced replacement for the proprietary Flash player widely used to produce multimedia content. A compatible, high quality Flash replacement has been one of the FSF's high priority projects for a number of years and Gnash is available as a standalone application as well as Mozilla plugin.

LIRC is basically a small server which can decode or transmit infra-red signals. This is a tutorial about how to set up the LIRC server and how to use it in order to control your system or specific LIRC-enabled applications with a remote control. Examples of simple or more complicated setups are also provided.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or AJAX, a technique for creating interactive Web applications, has exploded onto the Web development scene, gaining popularity so quickly that some developers are lagging behind in their skills. To address the need for faster AJAX development, lots of companies and developer communities are coming up with Rapid Application Development (RAD) platforms for AJAX. One of those platforms, ThinkCAP JX Framework, combines more than two dozen open source libraries, and the "framework" portion of the application has just been released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Despite my misgivings about the Mozilla Foundation's lack of support for Mozilla, I've bit the bullet and downloaded Firefox with the Google Toolbar, and downloaded Mozilla Thunderbird. I still dislike the fact that I have to start these applications separately - the Mozilla Suite was one button.

Enhanced cyber security cited as a key attribute of open source leader Linux

User level: Beginner After the holidays, you might need to find a spot to get away from everyone in order to just chill out a bit. The RPG (role playing game) simulation Miller's Quest is perfect for such an occasion. You'll need to have the Ruby language installed on your system -- not to worry, it's included in most modern distributions -- but other than that, it's simply download, decompress, and go.

MozillaQuest Magazine (MozillaQuest.Com) reports: "Live Knoppix is very nice Desktop Linux." But it can use some tweaks, which are easy to do using Knoppix cheat codes. "The Knoppix cheat-codes discussions and tutorials in this article should be applicable to most any computer with which you can use the Knoppix live Linux CD or live Linux DVD."

The first draft of GNU General Public License Version 3 will be unveiled next week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., but that milestone is likely to be more of a beginning than an ending.

Jim Ready, CEO of the embedded Linux specialist, will step down from his post to become chief technology officer.

Obsidian Systems has announced the availability of the international OpenICDL course in South Africa, which skills users in basic computer literacy for Linux, OpenOffice.org, Evolution and Firefox.

All the Power and Functionality of ISE Foundation Now Available in WebPACK - With up to 70% Performance Advantage Over Competing Solutions

Introduced in ATI's v8.19.10 proprietary display drivers for their RADEON series was support for PowerPlay. For the uninitiated, ATI's PowerPlay allows the user to specify various "power-states", or rather various frequencies and voltages at which the card can operate. The purpose for these various performance levels is ultimately to allow mobile users to save on battery life through running at reduced speeds when not performing strenuous 3D tasks.

Linux for enterprise applications is among the 6 hot technologies for 2006.

IBM has joined with three other technology companies, seven universities and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to adopt guiding principles to speed collaborative research for open source software. These 12 enterprises believe the principles will speed innovation and contribute to open source software research, thus enabling the development of related industry standards and greater interoperability, while managing intellectual property in a more balanced manner.