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KDE’s Appeal Project, which has been brewing for some time now, looks to a different set of issues that need solving and has some very smart minds at work on solving those problems. In a few words, KDE’s got some of “that vision thing” too.

LAMP installations (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) are a staple of many intranet and Internet open source applications. The "L" component in LAMP is perhaps less important than the other components, since many LAMP applications will run just as happily on a Windows platform as they will on Linux. Consider, for instance, EasyPHP, an "out of the box" Apache, MySQL, and PHP installation for Windows.

The trade press is at it again. Australian companies are not being charged $5,000 dollars for running Linux, as The Inquirer and others are currently misreporting. There is no fee for running Linux in your business. There is a charge, however, for using the Linux trademark in your business name.

Both OpenOffice.org 2.0, and its commercial big-brother StarOffice 8, were expected to be available this summer, but both office-suite arrivals have been delayed. Last February, Sun Microsystems Inc. released the beta of its office-suite, StarOffice 8. It was then slated for a mid-year release.At the same time, OO.o (OpenOffice.org) 2.0, the open-source office-suite, which is the foundation for StarOffice, was nearing completion. By late May, it was in late beta. OpenOffice development ran into some problems with the open-source development community with its use of features that would only work with Sun's proprietary implementation of Java. This disagreement was, however, quickly smoothed over. Subsequently, many observers thought that OpenOffice.org 2.0 would appear in early summer and that StarOffice 8 would arrive in July. That hasn't happened. So, why the delays?

Blake Ross is sprawled in a chair at a coffee shop near Stanford University, his long legs, clad in baggy Tommy Hilfiger jeans, stretched underneath the table. He looks like any other college student who happened to stroll off campus. Yet as much as Ross blends in with the Stanford scene, the 20-year-old has also become a standout in the technology industry. At 17, he helped create the Firefox Web browser, which has since grown into the biggest threat to Microsoft's Internet Explorer since the Redmond, Wash., company battled and defeated the Netscape browser for Internet supremacy. Now three years later, Ross has dropped out of college to build an Internet software company — just as Bill Gates, whom Ross is often compared to, did to start Microsoft Corp. His goal is modest, motivated by his mother and 81-year-old grandfather: to make software less clunky, more people-friendly. And it's clear he possesses at least the vision and technical skill to pull it off.

Trolltech has released the first bugfix release for Qt 4, the major release on which KDE 4 development is based on. Among the over 450 bug fixes and optimizations are numerous improvements to raster engine, X11 engine and QPainterPath, significantly speeding a range of drawing processes and introduction of top-level window transparency on X11.

In a weblog posting, Yahoo! employee Jeremy Zawodny has revealed that Yahoo! is looking to hire some XUL hackers. The job description appeals to candidates who have experience in cross-platform C/C++ development in addition to Mozilla technologies like XUL, JavaScript and XPCOM. "Hopefully, you've already written your own XUL application and used an XPCOM extension as a part of that application," the job description says. "If you've ever submitted a patch to the Mozilla code base that's a huge plus." Yahoo! currently uses XUL and related technologies for its Yahoo! Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox. According to a May post at SiliconBeat (a technology weblog run by the San Jose Mercury News), Yahoo! is "exploring using XUL to build a Firefox version" of Yahoo! PhotoMail, which currently only works with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Launched earlier this year, Yahoo! PhotoMail (the PhotoMail site is pretty useless if you're not using Internet Explorer) aims to make it easier to send photographs via Yahoo! Mail.

In the parts one and two of this series on using Linux in a small office, we covered what to look for in hardware and the operating system, security concerns, and choosing an Internet service provider. In this final installment, we'll talk about protecting the data on your hard drive.

Will podcasting meet the same fate as Webcasting? Doc goes back to territory he covered extensively the last time the record industry successfully throttled a business that threatened it. And we're not talking about Napster, either.

Microsoft seems to have been the main beneficiary of the UK government's drive to put council services online. Research from the Society of IT Managers (Socitm) reveals that local authorities are increasingly opting to use Microsoft Windows applications, particularly in new installations. The research also revealed that contracts for applications specific to local government are concentrated in the hands of a select circle of companies. (Editors Note: Local governments have not responded to policy changes made at higher levels of government. However, the author has ignored major Linux wins throughout the globe at local government levels.)

Rather than just making machines that run Linux for every type of customer, IBM is taking a vertical-market approach, with new product offerings that focus on For the automotive industry, IBM is offering something it calls Infrastructure for Automotive Common Environment (ACE), which includes Linux technologies geared at automotive design and production. For retail, its Total Store Solutions - a package that includes Linux PCs and servers built for point-of-sale, self-checkout and store inventory management tasks, with third-party wireless and other technologies included. In the finance realm, IBM is offering Front Office Optimization for Banking. This package includes Linux-based server and PC applications that cover all aspects of running a bank, from teller position machines to customer service call centers and other areas.

The Linux enviroment offers two major packages for creating and editing digital media. Cinelerra is a media powerhouse, while Kino works well for beginners who need to create simple digital video. It's a speedy editor, lightweight, and it seldom crashes. Its simplicity, ease of use, and small learning curve make it an excellent alternative for creating and editing digital media in the Linux enviroment.

Lxer, mmelchert wrote in a comment " Just came across an English version of a presentation about the Linux migration project in Munich. You also might be interested to learn about its current status."..

A Chinese mobile phone hardware vendor and a Singaporean smartphone and PDA phone designer will jointly develop a Linux "PDA phone

Sun Microsystems on Wednesday night launched an office dedicated to open-source matters, signaling a new elevation of the collaborative programming philosophy within the server and software company

Dell made inroads into the Linux server space last week at LinuxWorld in San Francisco.

A Web browser that's in step with all World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) standards doesn't exist, but the noticeable shortcomings of one has led to grumbling in the Web development space

Nope. It's not a garden garnish. GNOME is a desktop software project designed to look familiar to anyone who has ever used a computer. Aaron Weber distills what the GNOME desktop is, what apps users will find as well as what platform development tools developers will find, and the resources to help you get started using it. Aaron is a coauthor of Linux in a Nutshell, 5th Edition.

Linux and open source software is traditionally good for developers and system administrators, and recently good for business users. When will it be good for multimedia users? A handful of projects are making video production and editing possible (and useful)--PiTiVi and GStreamer among them. Jono Bacon examines the present and future of video production with Linux and open source software.

inux developer Red Hat (redhat.com)will finance outside programmers' efforts to obtain patents that may be used freely by open source developers, the firm announced Tuesday at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Open Source Developer Labs has simultaneously launched a patent commons project, providing a central list of patents that have been donated to the collaborative programming community. The threat of patent-infringement lawsuits has caused many open source programming advocates to turn against the patent system altogether. The initiatives show a new proactive stance on the part of the open source community to combat the threat of patent-infringement lawsuits. "We're watching a groundswell of alternative ideas coming forward to try to counteract some of the patent terrorism that's coming up in industry," says Steve Mills, general