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Fresh from its successes rolling out open source software-based information hubs in farming communities, the South African department of agriculture is now looking at its own infrastructure and readying for a shift to open source software. Basheera Khan caught up with the department's Kugan Soobramani during a recent visit to EuroOSCON.

Yes, it's the third birthday of the MEPIS Project and SimplyMEPIS 3.4-1 rc1 is available in the testing subdirectory at the MEPIS Subscriber's Site and public mirrors.

I used Mandrake Linux for years before switching to Fedora Core and then to Ubuntu Linux last spring—around the same time Mandrake, which is based in France, bought a Brazilian Linux distributor called Conectiva and renamed itself Mandriva.

Because Asterisk is both Free Software and free of cost, you can dink around with it in all kinds of ingenious ways. Like building a phone system for your home with all the features of commercial PBXs that cost thousands of dollars. You can have very cheap long distance, internal extensions, transfer calls, and something that I like a whole lot- sophisticated voice mail under my control, and not costing me a monthly fee. Callers will never get a busy signal; they'll either get a human or the voicemail. You can even torture them with complex phone menus with too many options: "To record a compliment, press 1. To leave a complaint, press pi divided by the radius of the Earth's orbit around the sun."

Tuxchick writes:"Since reporters on the tech beats tend to be so unquestioning of the Microsoft party line, pitch it as a political story to higher-up editors".

Related to: other media contacts for 'Microsoft's Monopoly Power

There you are all bright-eyed and eager, ready to roll up your sleeves and go to work in the exciting new world of Free/Open Source software. You have rosy visions of getting paid to do enjoyable, challenging work. Maybe even fat stock options...

You can't count on fat stock options, because they are just as hard to come by as they are in any profession, but getting paid to do enjoyable, challenging work is exciting all by itself, and quite probable in the FOSS world. While the FOSS world is vast and diverse, there are three arenas that I think offer the most opportunities:

Novell has announced it will concentrate its business on key growth opportunities in the Linux and Open Source and Identity and Resource Management markets, resulting in a restructuring of the business that will reduce annual run rate expenses by more than $110 million. Novell anticipates that it will record a restructuring charge in the range of $30-35 million in the fourth fiscal quarter ended Oct. 31, 2005.

I was impressed with the pre-alpha release of Nexenta and suprised that the first official alpha would be so soon to follow. The pre-alpha was slick and clean following the look of the uber popular Ubuntu Linux. The only major complaint with the pre-alpha was the bizarro default screen resolution of 1920x1400.

Read more at DistroReviews.com.

RSS brings great possibilities to content publishers and advertisers, too. Any piece of microcontent can be tagged, then distributed via an RSS feed. RSS is sometimes mistaken for content instead of what it truly is: plumbing that connects users to that content.

An authority on German orthography and grammar now supports OpenOffice.org Writer on Linux. The German publishing house Duden is recognized as one of the authorities on German orthography and grammar. With this release of their "Duden OpenOffice.org Suite," users of OpenOffice.org Writer on both Linux and Windows have access to the "Duden Linguistic Engine." This is a major step for Linux and Open Office gaining in legitimacy among desktop users in German-speaking countries. The article appears in German as "Cool: Duden korrigiert jetzt auch im OOo Writer."

Original Article in German

[Ed: The site is in German translated by Google. Enjoy! - dcparris]

Striking out on your own means entering a whole new exciting, fulfilling world. You'll meet and handle new challenges, and develop self-confidence and poise worthy of a UN diplomat. You'll directly reap the rewards of your creativity and labor. Today we'll talk about how to develop a solid clientele, and finding customers that you enjoy working with.

Related articles:

Survival Guide For Women In FOSS: Striking Out On Your Own
Survival Tactics For Women In FOSS, part 2
Survival Tactics For Women In FOSS, part 1

Diggable

Opinion:How many times does Microsoft have to lie about being open before people get it?

Diggable

LXer Day Desk: 11-22-2005

Does Microsoft's Monopoly Power Extend to Government and Media? That seems like a rhetorical question given their little power play in Massachusetts. Is now the time to share our experience with the rest of the world?

Diggable

The open-source implementation of .Net has been updated to enable a single instance to run multiple Mono applications using the Apache Web server.

[ED: There is some good information in the article, which is oriented to Windows users. But, it needs editing. It is Mono 1.1.10, not 1.1.1]

Both of these guys are trying to draw a parallel between open-source and left wing politics that is just not there. Communism and Socialism are about central planning and imposing a system without property rights on a populace. Open Source is not about a lack of property rights, it's about distributed property rights, distributed responsibility and networked rather than hierarchical processes

Leading Technologist to Be Responsible for Technology Vision and Product Development

We take the new Zalman VF700-AlCu VGA cooler for a spin. It's cool, it's quiet, and it's perfect for the geek who has it all (especially a kicking video card).

[Ed: - This is huge! Office XML will be under a RAND license, and will include a convenant 'Not to sue'. They bent under the pressure, it seems. It may be too little and too late though - hkwint ]

PARIS — Nov. 22, 2005 — Microsoft Corp. today announced it will take steps to offer the file format technology behind billions of documents to customers and the industry as an international standard.

Security architecture is a new concept to many computer users. Users are aware of security threats such as viruses, worms, spyware, and other malware. They have heard of, and most use, anti-virus programs and firewalls. Many use intrusion detection. Architectural security, though, remains a mystery to most computer users.

Welcome to our issue number 23 of Fedora Weekly News.