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The Holy Grail of Linux is to be so easy to install and use that the technologically illiterate can do it. The penguin community is working feverishly to this goal, which would give Microsoft's Windows a run for its money.

Security expert Packetstorm's claim to have found a potential denial of service attack in the latest Firefox browser turns out to be a slight over-exaggeration.

With the release of the new version 1.5 of Firefox, there's never been a better time to download the open-source browser, take it for a drive, kick the tires and see what it can do. In the case of a browser, mainly what it can do is show you web pages, hopefully quickly. So the real satisfaction comes from finding enhancements and add-ons, because you can only have so much fun timing page loads with a stopwatch.

Fortunately, Firefox is famous for its pluggable extensions architecture, which allows you to download little snippets of code that act as the software equivalent of small consumer electronics devices, only they are free.

The Secretary of State of Massachusetts thinks it would be a great idea for a task force of political appointees to tell 2000 IT professionals what they can and can't do. How's that again?

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This is a practical selection of the commands we use most often. Press to see the listing of all available command (on your PATH). On my small home system, it says there are 2595 executables on my PATH. Many of these "commands" can be accessed from your favourite GUI front-end (probably KDE or Gnome) by clicking on the right menu or button. They can all be run from the command line. Programs that require GUI have to be run from a terminal opened under a GUI.

Alfresco Software has released the first version of its open-source enterprise content management (ECM) software aimed at small to midsize businesses (SMBs).

The 13-person UK startup's coming-out party was at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) East in Newton, Massachusetts, recently. At the event, Alfresco was one of 16 startups focusing on the open-source market chosen to exhibit at the event's Emerging Elite Showcase, according to the show's organisers.

Intalio, Inc., The Open Source BPMS Company, announced that it has acquired FiveSight Technologies, a privately held company based in Chicago, Illinois. FiveSight is the company that brought to market the first open source implementation of the BPEL 2.0 specification, developed to address the growing need for Business Process Management (BPM) as a core competency for companies large and small.

Comment Away with sound-bite principles. It is entirely possible to write applications as a monolithic slab of undifferentiated code. Indeed, for some this appears to approach an art form, with a stream-of-consciousness code style not dissimilar to Jack Kerouac's spontaneous, amphetamine-fuelled writing style.

Welcome to this year's 50th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. This issue covers a variety of interesting topics, including a call to protest against introducing a DMCA-style law in France, Linux migration efforts by Berlin, Prague and Cape Town, and an insider's feedback to our last week's feature on backporting newly released applications to existing distributions. In the news section we'll introduce Security Enhanced SUSE, congratulate Patrick Volkerding, and draw your attention to a newly compiled list of FreeBSD projects for volunteer programmers. Finally, we'll take a brief look at the new Ark Linux 2005.2. Happy reading! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

Typically, software companies are given a window of between one and a number of months to examine and release patches for the problem, before the finer details are released to the public. But fearwall is understood to have said in his auction description: "Since I was unable to find any use for this by-product of Microsoft developers, it is now available for you at the low starting price of $0.01 - a fair value estimation for any Microsoft product." The seller even offered Microsoft employees a discount: “To qualify, you must provide @microsoft.com email address and must mention discount code LINUXRULZ during checkout," he said.

FOSS.in, India’s largest Free and Open Source Software conference, was held in India’s IT capital, Bangalore, from November 29th to December 2nd this year. The event attracted over 2700 attendees indicating the coming of age of the open source, free software movement in India.

FOSS.In — known in its earlier four editions as Linux Bangalore — itself was sponsored by the Ministry of Information and Technology. The event saw four days of ideological debates, tech exchange workshops and interactions with some of the who’s who of the free and open source world. The event covered a wide range of topics related to FOSS technologies, products and initiatives.

If you spend any time working at the shell, you probably use many GNU utilities. One thing that distinguishes the GNU versions from the classic Unix versions is that the GNU programs are rife with additional options. Some of these options are so useful you may want to create an alias so you can use them all the time without needing to do all the extra typing.

Optimized for PC, MAC, Linux Based Video Editing and Post-Production, Apace Systems Network Storage Equipped With 10GbE Connectivity and in Partnership With Fujitsu Ultra-Low Latency 10GbE Switch Fabric Offer End-to-End High Performance Multi-Stream HDV, SD and HD Workgroup Video Editing Access, Playback and Archive Over 10GbE LAN

With the recent release of Firefox 1.5, many people are eagerly awaiting the new version of its email client counterpart, Thunderbird. Thunderbird 1.5 is slated to be officially released in January 2006 and its Release Candidate 1 had been available for a few weeks now. The enormously effective Spread FireFox has sparked interest in Thunderbird and no doubt had a positive effect on its growth so this is an important step for Mozilla and its supporters. This article take a brief look at Thunderbird 1.5 RC1, looks into what to expect from 1.5, and what the future holds for this email client.

Panasonic Mobile have announced that they are to cease production of GSM handsets from January 2006 and concentrate on 3G handsets. Also, they will cease development on the Symbian platform and concentrate on a Linux-based solution for their phones.

TAIPEI, TAIWAN – Taiwan Commate Computer has launched a new embeded Mini-ITX mainboard, the LV-675. LV-675 is a Mini-ITX Motherboard with support for the Intel Pentium M / Celeron M processor. The board comes with 2 x Mini-PCI expansion and high performance display functions for DVI or LVDS application.

A FINAL THOUGHT: Do you really need to pay extra for Microsoft Office? Choose the free OpenOffice, at http://www.openoffice.org, and put the money you save into more memory.

The head of a US tax-research group has accused software firm Microsoft of “pretending it makes all of its money in Ireland" in order to pay minimal tax. Attention has focused on how some multinational firms use Ireland to book large profits, which are taxed at the Irish corporation-tax rate of 12.5 per cent, rather than 35 per cent in the United States. Microsoft and other multinationals have said they are fully tax compliant. However, Bob McIntyre, the director of Washington-based Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), said his group has had concerns about the tax regime in Ireland for some time. “Everyone knows there is an issue here,” he said. “It doesn't just involve Microsoft and Ireland.

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Firefox 1.5, the first major upgrade to the Mozilla Foundation's popular open-source browser in a year, brings new features and increased speed, making what was a very good product even better.

Mozilla has released an updated patch for Mozilla Thunderbird for tabbed message browsing. Developed by Myk Melez, the feature allows users to right-click a message header and select "Open Message in New Tab" from the context menu.

Users occasionally want to keep a particular message open while browsing their mail, open multiple messages simultaneously for quicker reading of messages over a slow network connection, or otherwise access multiple messages at the same time. Thunderbird currently supports this with its "open message in new window" feature, which displays one or more messages in separate windows.