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Clarkson University may not be the first institute of higher learning that comes up when you're discussing sports, science, or stature, but the Potsdam, New York-based university is at the top of its class for bringing Linux learning to real-world data centers. The 3,000-student university took top honors at the first-ever TuxMasters Invitational coding competition, which awarded Clarkson both first and second place in the intercollegiate contest.

The DebCentral team is proud to announce the official launch of DebCentral.org, the first online community dedicated to both Debian GNU/Linux, and the many derivative distributions it has spawned.

NIKLAS Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype, which distributes software that lets people make free calls from their computers to other Skype users anywhere in the world, don't usually travel to America. Legally, they probably could. But they prefer to avoid that jurisdiction, since they also founded (and subsequently sold) KaZaA, a peer-to-peer software company whose product many people use to share copyrighted songs. So setting foot in America could invite some legal trouble. This does not mean, however, that they cannot appear at conferences in Silicon Valley, where Skype—which uses the same basic idea of KaZaA, but applies it mainly to voice communication—is considered the next big thing.

DCC 3.0 is an LSB 3.0 compliant, Debian 3.1 ("sarge") based core distribution designed to serve as the basis for custom Debian distributions. It is produced by the DCC Alliance, a diverse group of Linux vendors and nonprofits with strong Debian ties that have partnered to assemble a common, standards-based core for Debian-based distributions.

Citing two unnamed sources familiar with the matter, the Post said the talks concern Microsoft acquiring an AOL stake and then combining it with Microsoft's Web unit MSN. Microsoft would pay Time Warner for the AOL stake, leaving the two companies approximately equal partners in the venture, the Post said. A Time Warner spokeswoman declined to comment. Microsoft was not immediately available for comment. Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Fulcrum Global Partners who said he himself was not aware of the talks, said that he thought any such deal could be premature for Time Warner, even if a combination could reduce costs.

From details about beta 2 of IE 7 that Microsoft recently revealed at the Professional Developers Conference, it looks as if IE 7 has the chance to be a Firefox killer. The beta appears to have enough new features that it may stop people from flocking to Firefox. A new Quick Tabs feature, for example, will let you better manage tabs, and gives you a thumbnail view of all of your tabs -- something that Firefox doesn't do. Page Zoom will let you zoom in on text and graphics on Web pages. There's bigger news on the security front. "ActiveX Opt-in," will disable most ActiveX controls by default. You'll have to selective enable those controls you want to work. This is a very big deal and a big surprise. ActiveX is one of the browser's biggest security holes, and one that Microsoft, up until now, has been reluctant to plug. Let's hope this spells the ultimate death knell for ActiveX. (Have fun with this one -ED)

SA-developed open source document management system KnowledgeTree is among the most active projects on Sourceforge and is now being deployed around the world by organisations of all sizes. Jam Warehouse, the company that developed the software, said the decision to make KnowledgeTree open source has paid off in many ways for the company.

In 1995, Dr. Giovanni Orlando wrote FTLinuxCourse, a detailed training course written in HTML for some of his clients who were using Caldera OpenLinux. Last month, Orlando released the current version for free download at FTLinuxCourse.com.

On virtually any street in Shanghai or Beijing, you can buy a Hollywood DVD or hot new CD for $1 or less. Vendors peddle Microsoft Office, Windows XP, and every other popular software applications out of cardboard boxes jammed full of discs. Entire markets in the major cities are dedicated to selling knock-offs of designer goods for pennies on the dollar.

"Open source should be promoted to compete with the other software and I am trying to see if we can have some government departments migrating to use both proprietary and open-source software," Mangena said.

The success of Linux, the free computer operating system created in the early 1990s by Linus Torvalds and developers around the world, has paved the way for a growing open-source ecosystem. "The technology is evolving very rapidly," said Dan Kusnetzky, an analyst with research firm IDC.

South Africa-developed Linux distribution OpenLab, which is used extensively throughout Africa, will announce its next major release later this month. Richard Frank spoke to chief developer AJ Venter to find out what makes the distribution so unique.

The second Slackware release of 2005, Slackware Linux 10.2 continues the long Slackware tradition of simplicity, stability, and security.

The penguins were on the streets of Kanata yesterday, searching for scarce Linux software developers. In a sign of the recovering technology industry, recruiters from Liquid Computing dressed up as penguins

The debate continues regarding the removal of the kernel spacedevfs in favor of the user spaceudev, though less people seem concerned about the idea. Linux devfs was written by Richard Gooch and merged into the 2.3.46 kernel in February of 2000. Greg KH began developing udev in 2001 [story], working to implement the same functionality as devfs, but in userspace.

As announced a couple of months ago [story], theLinux Kernel Performance Project continues to run a large set of benchmarks on each kernel release. In a brief summary, Kenneth Chen began, "kernel-build bench are fairly stable over the last 14 kernel versions or so. It was consistently 3-5% better on x86_64 over baseline 2.6.9 kernel. It showed a lot smaller gain on ia64 though." He went on to summarize mixed results from several other benchmarks.

Since I started using email in 1995, I've been on a (seemingly) never-ending quest for the perfect email client. I've used text-based, Web-based, and GUI email clients, on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS, and have yet to find one mail user agent (MUA) that I'd consider "perfect." There are some really, really good MUAs -- such as Mutt and Mozilla Thunderbird -- but I haven't found the perfect mailer just yet. Sylpheed 2.0, however, is getting close.

The Mandriva Linux team has released the first -- and most likely final -- Mandriva Linux 2006 Release Candidate 1, following three beta editions. The most significant improvement is that RC1 should now boot properly on Intel and AMD dual-core processors

Welcome to this year's 37th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community.

The Firemonger project has announced the release of the Firemonger 1.5 Public Beta. The Firemonger project produces a multilingual downloadable CD image of the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird, together with some selected plugins, extensions, themes, utilities and a beginner's guide. Tech-savvy users are encouraged to download this CD image, burn it to disc and distribute it to friends and family.