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Where can I find Linux hardware drivers for my USB wireless network adapter?

Sita, the South African government's technology procurement agency, last week issued a request for bid calling for potential suppliers of open source solutions to government. The bid request is for the "procurement of an open source distribution(operating system and applications) and related software support services fro personal computers for a period of three years."

Sun Microsystems is hoping to steal market share from Microsoft Corp. with the release on Tuesday of a new version of its business software collection, StarOffice, with improved compatibility with Microsoft Office.

Linus Torvalds' deputy has claimed that the development of the Linux kernel is slowing down, with noticeably less features and bug fixes planned for a future version. Andrew Morton, the lead maintainer of the Linux production kernel, said last week that although the next version of the kernel is due for final release soon, few features have been planned for the subsequent release.

Company Extends Support for Open Source

Once a curiosity of computer rooms, open-source software applications are now giving commercial programs a run for their money in public-sector information technology shops. In fact, public-sector IT managers say free licensing isn't necessarily the most attractive characteristic of the best open-source products today. Many stand out for their stable programming code and array of useful features or, conversely, their stripped-down feature sets that eliminate unnecessary bells and whistles.

Often, this will actually involve a diverse group of interested parties, raising an interesting Babel-like challenge: how to communicate effectively. The common tongue that will bind collaborators will not be English, French, Spanish or Chinese — it will be standards, open business standards not controlled by any one participant. This has been the fuel behind the successful emergence of technologies like the internet and the open software movement as exemplified by Linux.

Welcome to this year's 39th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. A slow start of the past week was followed by much activity during the weekend, with a new KNOPPIX live CD and DVD, an updated Ubuntu Colony CD set, and a number of other interesting development and final releases (but still no Mandriva 2006). Our featured distribution of the week is a little-known project called Hedinux GNU/Linux, while several new distributions have been added to the site's database, including Kororaa, a promising Gentoo variant with automated installation method. Plenty of news, comments, updated upcoming releases list and other regular columns complement this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. Enjoy! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

The University wasted a whopping $2.7 million recently by purchasing licenses of Microsoft Office and Windows XP Pro for each registered student as Don Parris pointed out in his Sept. 15 letter. The opportunity existed for the University to distribute free software which would have liberated students from the endless cycle of increasingly expensive upgrades of proprietary software, but they chose not to take advantage of the deal

StarOffice is a suite of interoperable "office" programs that use the same software shell as their basis. The programs include a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing application, presentation creation program, and database front end. All are feature-rich and capable of providing adequate desktop functionality for business and home use. The latest version, StarOffice 8, is not perfect, but it is an excellent value for businesses that do not depend on proprietary Microsoft formats for production work.

What a difference a year and $2.6 billion makes. The renegade cool that once surrounded Skype Technologies SA among its peers in the Internet telephone industry has been replaced by mockery and awe.

The personal computer is a relic, said Jonathan Schwartz, president of server and software maker Sun Microsystems.

This week's CLI Magic will be a little different from the norm. It's still about magic happening at the command line, but this time it's magic from the dark side. P0f is a passive OS fingerprint tool written by The Evil Twin, a.k.a. Michal Zalewski. Don't worry, we won't be doing anything illegal, just making our own personal version of Netcraft's "What's that site running?" survey.

As the largest iSeries user group and certainly the one that is most heavily attended by IBM and the iSeries business partner community, the semi-annual COMMON iSeries user group gathering has always been a place where IBM gets to tell the OS/400 community where the platform is going and where it has been, and vocal end users get to tell Big Blue a thing or two. The latest COMMON in Orlando, Fla., was no different, and the top brass in the iSeries Division as well as some guests from other IBM divisions were on hand to talk up the iSeries.

3D System consists of Sourcefire Intrusion Sensors and Agents, Real Network Awareness (RNA) Sensors, and Sourcefire Defense Center. Built on Snort, an open-source rules-based detection engine, the intrusion sensors use signature-, protocol- and anomaly-based inspection methods to detect threats. The technology comes as easy-to-deploy security appliances.

Much of the Firefox bashing is the result of Symantec's most recent Internet Security Threat Report (registration required). Symantec found that during the first six months of 2005, the volume and the severity of Firefox's reported vulnerabilities was greater than that reported for Internet Explorer. Much greater. On the surface, that sounds pretty bad, and it gives the Firefox naysayers fresh ammo, but I have a copy of the Symantec report myself. Does it give me pause to rethink our Editors' Choice for Firefox? Hell no.

The end of the world is near. At last that of the Unix world. That’s the prediction of Donald Feinberg, vice-president of Gartner. “Linux is coming, Unix is dead.” But there’s no need to panic. Not just yet. The end is not going to come overnight or even in next week or year, but it is certain, or as he puts it, “an absolute”.

You know, its fascinating watching people approach Open Source in so many different directions. Some people are engulfed by the ethical advantages, some by the technical prowess, and some because it is just interesting and strange. Irrespective of the basis for the attraction, it can also be fun to observe those who think they understand Open Source.

Though down four positions from last year, Linus Torvalds for the first time ranks above rival Bill Gates on the Agenda Setters list

Content is the lifeblood of any organisation that relies on information. If documents are lost in filing cabinets or hidden away on hard drives, the knowledge they carry is buried. But when content is organised and searchable that information lives on. It does useful work over and over again as it is referenced, consulted and combined with other information. The two CMSes (content management systems) in this review create organised and searchable repositories of digital documents. At first glance, both products appear similar and, fundamentally, they are. Both, for example, make extensive use of XML. Closer inspection, however, reveals that each is designed for somewhat different uses of content.