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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.

VIA is beginning to ramp up production on the successors to their C3 part, the C7 and C7-M CPU's. Keith Kowal, marketing manager for VIA's chipset platform group, took some time on his promotional tour to talk with us about the new platform.

Codase is a new kind of search service for open source code. Rather than treating code as text, Codase understands programming languages, and treats code as code, the way it's supposed to be. This unique and syntax-aware approach provides the most accurate and detailed search results with fine granularity levels of controls. With Codase, developers can search functions, classes, strings, constants, macros, comments and other programming language constructs.

Cross-platform Competition Challenges .NET Developers to Port ASP.NET Apps to Linux

Proper planning for such migrations is also key, Becknell said. One positive move that Munich's Microsoft-Office-to-OpenOffice migration team made was setting aside time to make sure the entire system worked efficiently. It's better to spend extra time planning than it is to spend extra time fixing mistakes later, she said.

Adobe Systems Inc., Corel, IBM and Sun also weigh in on state's plan to move computer networks onto an open-file format by January 2007.

The Gelato Federation (http://www.gelato.org) has set its sights on Latin America and beyond for its October 2-5, 2005 meeting in Brazil to advance Linux® on the Intel® Itanium® platform.

One would think that corporate IT decisions are made with the utmost care. Think again. In researching two guides to Samba-3, John H. Terpstra found that IT decision makers often choose products without due diligence, and often base their dismissals of Linux and open source software on misinformation.

In this guest column, Mark Rais asserts that enterprise PCs are getting set to go the way of the dinosaur, to be replaced by a client/server approach reminiscent of yesteryear's mainframes and minicomputers. But this time around, the client/server model will have a distinctly 21st Century characteristic: LTSP.

Observers say the companies have ceased their finger pointing and started cooperating because they can improve sales by supporting each other's products.

OptimalGrid is a self-contained middleware designed for developers to create grid-enabled parallel applications without themselves becoming experts in grid or high-performance computing (article). The Linux compatible middleware now includes automatic distribution and provisioning on to Grid nodes.

Winter Corporation Survey Results Show that Oracle is the Only Database Vendor to Produce Leading Customer Results on Linux, UNIX and Windows Platforms

The Firebird Project is pleased to announce builds of Firebird 2.0 Alpha 3 kits are now ready to download and testing.

This version of Firebird 2 is an alpha version, meant for field testing only and not for use in production.

Microsoft Corp. has launched an assault on a Massachusetts government plan to move computer networks at all state agencies onto an open-file format by January 2007. Such a move, if approved, could displace Microsoft's profitable Office software and, if followed by other government bodies across the country and abroad, could threaten Microsoft's dominance on desktop computers in the public sector. The company now holds more than 90 percent of the global market in office productivity software.

If you asked most Linux users which Windows applications they want to be able to use, Microsoft Access would probably come in at the bottom of the list. However, there are also many people who consider it to be a useful and important rapid application development (RAD) tool. Now Linux users have a couple of good Access alternatives -- KDE's Kexi and OpenOffice.org Base Version 2.

With the latest release of his real time kernel patches [story], Ingo Molnar [interview] announced a new feature, "a complete rework of the high-resolution timers framework, from Thomas Gleixner, called 'ktimers'." Ingo explains that the end-effect of the new timer framework is a "much more deterministic HRT engine." He goes on to explain how this works:

"Under the ktimer framework the HR (and posix) timers live in a separate domain, have their own (per-CPU) rbtree to stay scalable and deterministic even with a high number of timers. Another positive effect of the introduction of separate ktimers is that kernel/timer.c is now using preemptible locks again, removing the cascade() worst-case latency. The cleanup factor is high as well: the ktimer framework slashes 1300+ lines off the HRT code. See kernel/ktimer.c for details."

The Gartner Application Development Summit began Tuesday morning with "Breakfast with the Analysts." Event director Pascal Winckel helped me locate the table where Gartner Research Vice President Mark Driver was holding forth. My official track for this conference has become the Mark Driver track, since he is the analyst talking about open source.