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An open source solution enabling councils and registered social landlords to deliver video-based interactive eGovernment services is set to be made available through national government procurement frameworks in October.

Update 1 of Pie Box Enterprise Linux 4 was made available today. This update features numerous security and driver updates and is fully compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

A system log is one of the most effective ways to monitor a server's health and underlying problems. Often before a major hardware or application crash takes place there are indicators of impending disaster within the syslog. As a good and attentive administrator, you should be reviewing your logs on a regular basis, but oftentimes these logs are forgotten due to other duties or important data is lost within pages of white noise telling about normal events.

"With the proliferation of free (open-source) software, it was only a matter of time before open-source beer became reality." So stated a spoof news article in 1998 that turned out to be prescient. There now is such a thing as free beer - or at least a free recipe for beer - thanks to a group of Danish artists and university students in Copenhagen. [Free registration required to read.]

You may have *thought* you were using the latest and greatest in open source software, but folks, today we have something really, really exciting for you.

Welcome to this year's 24th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Today's release of Fedora Core 4 marks the end of the current "release season", with only some of the smaller project likely to make any new releases between now and October. What effect will the controversial Apple's switch to Intel have on Linux? Hardly any, we believe. The featured distribution of the week section had to go to Debian GNU/Linux, following its much awaited new stable release early last week. And if you are still struggling to rid your inbox of all the unwanted drug and mortgage offers, Robert Storey provides further tips in the second part of his article on SpamAssassin. Happy reading!

I recently asked Linus Torvalds for his thoughts on the relative strengths and weaknesses of Linux and BSD, and about how much synergy there might be between the Linux kernel and the BSDs.

I tried a whole slew of different Linux systems because I bought a book with a cover-mounted DVD containing five different Linux distributions. All in all, the HP Compaq Presario M2312 comes off quite well as a desktop PC rather than a laptop.

Companies are increasingly considering Linux, but persuading them to buy is a challenge. Resellers have to fight the perception that it's a risk Linux adoption in Canada is growing, in both volume and acceptance. According to a recent survey by IDC Canada, the server market for Linux grew more than 36 per cent here in 2003-2004, beating the Windows server market's growth of about 27 per cent for the same year.

What I started in 1984 was the development of the GNU operating system. All the operating systems for modern computers of the day were proprietary; users were forbidden to share them, and could not get the source code to change them. The only way to use computers in freedom was to replace those systems with a free operating system. That's what GNU was meant to do. The Free Software Foundation was started in late 1985 to raise funds for GNU development, and more generally to promote free software.

Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal has banned the words "democracy" and "freedom" from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid offending Beijing's political censors. [Note from Dave: it's a slow news day so here's something to read. Better than nothing, I say!]

One day I was searching the web and found either a SuSE or Red Hat site that was saying that you could set up your swap in a RAID fashion. They were talking about a large server with a lot of disk drives, and you could put a swap partition on many of them, and set all these swap partitions to the same priority. This way they would work more like they were in a RAID setup, and the speed of swap writing and reading from the disks would be improved.

The GNU General Public Licence version 2 was released in 1991. Since then the software sector and the free software landscape has changed significantly and the Free Software Foundation is working on an updated licence to account for a reflect these changes. Yesterday Richard Stallman and FSF legal adviser Eben Moglen released an article explaining a few of the issues at stake in drafting GPL version 3.

Hey -- did you know that Brazil had become the world's biggest advocate of free/open source software for developing countries? If you've read WorldChanging over the last couple of years, there's no way you could have missed it. But if you need to get up to speed on Brazil's adoption of Linux and the free software philosophy, the BBC has a useful article. It hits all the key points, and does so relatively clearly.

Digital Techniques has used embedded Linux, off-the-shelf mini-ITX parts, and high-end PCI sound cards to build a line of digital home music servers. The Blackbird servers have 80-300GB hard drives, lots of networking options, and a web interface supporting control from a wireless PDA.

It's sometimes easier for a successful volunteer Free Software project to get money than it is to decide how to spend it. While paying developers is easy, it can carry unintended negative consequences. This article explores problems and benefits of paying developers in volunteer free and open source projects and surveys strategies that projects have used to successfully finance development while maintaining their volunteer nature.

ImpiLinux 2005, the homegrown South African Linux distribution making inroads into the SA market is an attractive and usable platform for users. Walter Kruse takes it for a spin to see see what has changed since the last big release seven months ago.

Microsoft has agreed to make it easier for competitors around the world to gain access to detailed technical information about the Windows server operating system as part of its plan to comply with the European Union's March 2004 ruling against the company and its abuse of monopoly power. Microsoft's proposal, which the EU Commission is now checking for compliance, would make Windows compatible with more open source software, but disagreements over licensing and distribution rights remain.

The Korean language Mozilla Web site was hacked and defaced this week, prompting calls from some corners of the open source community to gain control of the independent site.

OSDir.com Weekly Screenshot Tours for June 11, 2005. We had another great week in the screenshot department at OSDir, grabbing nice shots of SLAX 5.0.5 Popcorn Edition, B2D 20050603 PureKDE, Progeny Debian 3.0 Preview 2, Kaella 2.0.1, Kate OS 2.01, Berry Linux 0.58, FoX Linux 0.8, KOffice 1.4 Release Candidate and Klax KDE 3.4.1 Live-CD.