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Welcome to our issue number 36 of Fedora Weekly News.

Open source software has become an integral part of an array of network and IT products, but making a business out of a free Linux-like WAN router operating system and commodity PC hardware will be a challenge, observers and experts say.

Build a Linux cluster for under $2500. That is crazy -- or maybe not. Join Doug and Jeff as they undertake this outrageous project.

In reality, the report itself found that open source software is being used on a massive scale by universities. According to the study results, 57 percent of all American higher education institutions are using open source software products somewhere within their infrastructure. 53 percent of all American higher education institutions use Apache, 51 percent use Linux, 38 percent use MySQL, and 35 percent use Firefox. Those numbers clearly show that open source software is widely used by American universities.

Eclipse-based software aims to unite development community with new application programming interface and IBM multimodal tools that build on the Voice Tools Project.

Ben Chelf, CTO ofCoverity Inc., offered access to the bugs discovered by the Coverity tool, previously known as the Stanford Checker, to a select few interested developers.

With the recent aquisition of Netfrastructure by MySQL AB, also bringing Jim Starkey (InterBase creator) to work for the company, the Firebird database got a lot of exposition in the media.

Jason is excited to know that Mozilla Corporation has made $72M last year from the popular Firefox browser, I clearly remember I read about that last year somewhere.

A BBC report last month suggested the Home Office was in talks with Microsoft over ways to overcome any obstacles Windows Vista's wider use of encryption might pose to criminal investigations. Vista is due to feature hardware-based encryption, called BitLocker Drive Encryption, which acts as a repository to protect sensitive data in the event of a PC being either lost or stolen.

Speaking before a Commons home affairs select committee hearing, Professor Ross Anderson reportedly urged the government "to look at establishing 'back door' ways of getting around encryptions". Provactive stuff but, as previously reported, a careful review of the rest of Anderson's comments reveal he has talking about the challenge posed to police forensic investigations by hard disk encryption. Not too much should be read into one particular phrase.

A teenage blogger claims to have discovered a flaw in Google's Gmail service that allows JavaScript to run, potentially allowing a malicious hacker to gather e-mail addresses or compromise an account. The supposed flaw may already have been fixed, however.

Monday, March 06, 2006: New Delhi: If the recommendations of the National Knowledge Commission (NKC) are accepted, India will surely be on its way to adopt a `free software community’ model for its country-wide e-governance programmes. According to Economic Times, open source is all set to usher in a real IT revolution in the country. The NKC has sent in a list of 10 recommendations of the special group on e-governance to the prime minister, Manmohan Singh.

With the Free Software Foundation beginning to take an active role in prosecution of Microsoft, perhaps they should look at the new guy in charge of appropriations for the Justice Department, the FBI, FTC and Intellectual Property Enforcement and possibly the future of GNU/Linux.

I've been running the retail version on SUSE Linux 10.0 as my production desktop machine since early November. I like its online update facility; it's a great way to keep the system refreshed with the latest security and bug fixes, and I'm not the only one who feels this way. But I've found a few things in SUSE 10 that I'm not too fond of, and that make me start thinking about changing distros. (I can understand why he feels this way, then again I use KDE so I missed out on most of what he doesn't like. - Scott)

HP and Novell have announced a specially priced software bundle for customers deploying Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers.

The Redhat Certified Engineer qualification trounced Microsoft and Cisco to be voted the expected fastest grower of certifications for 2006 by Certcities.com. The LPI's level two exam managed to take position 10.

I started out on this project to create the ultimate multimedia server using all opensource tools and applications. Some of you may be thinking along the lines of a TIVO device, no this was to create a hosting server on my business broadband connection so that I can have access to and listen to my MP3's from anywhere that had an Internet connection while keeping it all secure as possible.

Sun Microsystems Inc. is changing the way it produces a secure version of its Solaris operating system, a decision that will mark the end of the product known as the Trusted Solaris Operating Environment. Developed for governmental agencies that require a certain level of security certification, Trusted Solaris had developed separately from its flagship Solaris product. But starting this August, Sun will instead offer Solaris Trusted Extensions as an add-on to its standard Solaris product, said Chris Ratcliffe, Sun's director of Solaris marketing.

One of South Africa's top open source exports, KnowledgeTree, just keeps getting better. The document management system has added new workflow features, integration with Microsoft Office, and can help companies meet legislative and best practice compliance requirements.

Welcome to this year's 10th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. As more and more distributions provide bootable disks containing a complete operating system, it is clear that these "live CDs", as they are often referred to, are having a huge impact on our daily computing lives; today we report on Debian Live and Mandriva One, as well as on several efforts to accelerate the boot process of KNOPPIX. Having trouble with finding all the interesting software sources for your Ubuntu installation? Then worry not, the new Ubuntu source-o-matic makes it easy. Also in this issue: Click-N-Run for Ubuntu, a new Linux web site with podcasts for Linux beginners, a couple of entertaining links for Monday laughs, and a first look at the brand new Rubix Linux 1.0. Finally, we are pleased to inform that the February 2006 DistroWatch donation has gone to FreeBSD Foundation. Happy reading! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

Virtualization is a hot trend, but that doesn't mean every IT shop has to jump on the bandwagon just yet. There are some shops that just won't need this technology no matter how big the hype becomes this year. For those shops that decide virtualization is the right move for them, there has to be a complete understanding of existing resources, hardware and applications before they take action.