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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.

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.