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Calling herself a KDE hacker chick, she is known as the woman behind This Month in SVN and as the maintainer of the KDE FAQ

Email is a pretty mundane topic these days. Since it's so pervasive, the subject is rarely brought up at social gatherings. And, if other email systems work the same, why switch to anything new? Rob Reilly finds that one new system, Zimbra, may get the conversation started again.

VMware continues to step up pressure against rivals by maturing its partitioning play at a quick clip. The company this week hit out against Microsoft and Xen by releasing a free tool for running virtual machines on Windows and Linux PCs.

It wasn’t a bird, nor was it a plane. It was a 3,000-gram white weather balloon satellite, soaring over the trees in the MU Quad Saturday, the Mozilla Firefox logo affixed to its transparent frame.

A team, comprised of the Oregon State Linux Users Group, the OSU Open Source Lab and the NASA Space Grant Consortium launched the satellite balloon to commemorate the 100 millionth download of Firefox, the Mozilla Web browser that has computer enthusiasts, students and companies alike talking.

Open source software developer and musician Richard Bown wanted to make Rosegarden, a popular MIDI sequencer for Linux, available to all people, even if they weren't fortunate enough to be using an open source platform. That was the genesis of Studio to Go, a Knoppix-based CD that allows Windows users to access a wealth of open source music creation and notation software without installing Linux.

Linux is proving increasingly popular with governments across the world, with New Zealand's Inland Revenue becoming the latest government department to test the open source operating system.

When Laurence Millar, Deputy Commissioner for information and communication technologies at the State Services Commission, last week celebrated the negotiation of an all-of-government license agreement between the Department of Inland Revenue and Novell, hardly an eyebrow was raised -- except in the Green camp, which exploded in a fit of irrational exuberance.

NEW YORK - For the past two years, as its simple database program has grown more and more popular, MySQL AB has been careful to insist that its software did not pose a threat to database giants like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.

Those days are over. Today, the Uppsala, Sweden-based company rolls out an upgraded version of its program with high-end features that will let MySQL go toe-to-toe with its bigger rivals.

Editor's note: Daniel Steinberg reports on some of the sessions and keynotes that spanned the first two days of O'Reilly's first-ever European Open Source Convention, taking place in Amsterdam. In one way or another, these sessions--by Jeff Waugh, Alan Cox, and Simon Phipps--focused on the user. For more news items, press releases, blogs, and photos about the convention, check out our EuroOSCON Conference Coverage page.

A deal has been struck to allow agencies throughout government access to open-source software and support from Novell at preferential rates.

The arrangement is a syndicated procurement contract, according to which a lead agency does the main deal and others are allowed access to the same products and services on the same terms.

Incorporate a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) framework and connect to various interface types. Learn how to integrate the RFID framework with back-end applications and implement business logic. This article provides the answers to getting it all done.

Beginning with a review of the growth and size of the global and Chinese Linux software markets in 2004, the report analyzes competition situation in China’s Linux software market in the respects of product structure, market structure and brand competition structure. It takes a look at the characteristics of supply and demand in the market in 2004, and presents comprehensive evaluation of leading vendors’ competitiveness. Research findings show that in 2004,

If you’ve ever had to write a portable application in C, you’ve likely run into the same problem faced by countless other programmers: no matter how much you try to stick to a well-defined application programming interface (API), the program just doesn’t work the same on every platform.

While POSIX does a passable job of providing a portable API for most Unix and Unix-like platforms, POSIX either doesn’t exist on other operating systems or is so full of bugs as to be unusable. Moreover, POSIX isn’t always the best choice. Non-Unix platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, have their own APIs that are better mantained and perform better on that platform.

When faced with a pay-now or wait-for-functionality choice, several companies that use PostgreSQL recently pooled their resources and paid for development of faster, deeper indexing capabilities in the open source database.

Partnership Brings HPC Capability and 10GbE Interoperability to Embedded Cluster Computing

Google may be taking the Internet by storm, but in the process they are raining on the Linux parade. Google has clearly presented The Community a middle finger salute. The technology that paved their streets with gold is now being cast away like a pock-marked leper.

Since the last Bug Squashing Party (BSP) we managed to keep the number of release critical bugs from growing which is better than we did after the one before but certainly not good enough.

Welcome to this year's 43rd issue of DistroWatch Weekly. Several interesting new distribution releases appeared during the past week. LG3D LiveCD deserves a more detailed look due to its unusual desktop and amazing 3D visual effects, while the newly renamed RR4 Linux live DVD is probably the easiest way yet to install Gentoo Linux on a hard disk. Also in this issue: a brief history of Red Hat prompted by the resignation of the company's co-founder Bob Young, a comment about the unusual Internet security guidelines published by a local government in the state of New York, and a few signs that our readers do love and appreciate DistroWatch. Happy reading! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

Despite its recent announcement of servers based on AMD64 CPUs, Sun Microsystems is still gung-ho about its 64-bit UltraSPARC computers. The newest addition to Sun's workstation array is the portable Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation. At first glance you might think it's a fancy-looking notebook system, but on closer inspection you'll discover that it's got all the power of a Sun Blade workstation in a fraction of the size.

Last week's CLI Magic column was about Trojan Scan, a useful tool -- still in alpha development phase -- for warding off the bad guys. I noted then that the utility was based on the lsof command -- actually, based on just one of the hundreds of combinations of arguments used to tell lsof exactly what it is you want from it. This week we're going to take a longer look at lsof, and see a few of the other mysteries it can solve.