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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.

If you're considering adding weblogs to your workgroup's communications arsenal, you're not alone. Many organizations are experimenting with internal, and external, blogs as a way of fostering communication between co-workers and between the organization and its customers. This article focuses on using Blosxom (and its Python-based cousin PyBlosxom) to quickly and easily set up a blogging environment for your team's use.

Yahoo! on Wednesday announced the start of a new beta version of its Yahoo! Mail service. The new beta is getting into the hands of a limited group of users in the United States now; Yahoo! plans to broaden the beta to Yahoo! Mail users worldwide in the coming months. Yahoo! bills the changes to Yahoo! Mail as the most significant enhancement to its service since it debuted in 1997. Yahoo! Mail provides Yahoo! users with free Web-based e-mail access.

Federal agency announces it will make its Web site compatible with non-IE browsers. Meanwhile, Microsoft is also accommodating alternatives to Internet Explorer at some sites.

The government's policy of open source software (OSS) preference that excludes commercial software from consideration may also exclude 85 percent of the information technology (IT) channel business activity, according to a report. The report by the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC), citing the European software market, said the initial annual loss in business opportunity was estimated to be around US$49 billion. "Any decline in government spending would have ripple effects on the economy that might be two to three times greater than the initial direct effect," said ISC in the report which was undertaken in collaboration with Nathan Associates Inc, an international economic consulting firm.

An interview was recently done with Rickford Grant, the author of "Linux for Non-Geeks" and the new "Linux Made Easy".

An invitation to share your experiences as a Linux consultant for customers who may not know what that means.

Axel's main priority will be to improve communication between the multitude of volunteer-run localisation teams and the core Mozilla project management and decision makers. He will represent the interests of the localisation teams in relevant Mozilla project management and release planning meetings and will try to bring the overall Mozilla project and the localisation efforts closer together.

"It took only about three hours and 30 minutes to develop the exploit"

Recent stories about open source technology in government raises the question of whether CIOs of municipalities are serious about moving to Linux and open source technology, or if they are just using the threat of such a switch as a way to either get Microsoft to lower pricing on its software, or to force the dominant desktop software vendor to add new features?

Buffalo Linux is a relatively new GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian and the Linux-Live scripts. It includes many commonly used and essential programs on a live CD with the ability to easily install to hard disk. I ran into a few problems, but found Buffalo is worth looking into.

REALbasic 2005 for Linux is powerful and easy-to-use and it is helping to bring new software to the Linux platform, because it's similar to Visual Basic, for the first time, the more than three million Visual Basic developers around the world can leverage their skills to create software for Linux

Tonight on The Linux Link Tech Show, episode 101
We talk to Aaron Seigo from the KDE project
Sean Pearsons is alive! We'll talk to him about his whereabouts

In the closing of his article What Linux needs to succeed, Paul Murphy writes of Linux devotees:

Stop trying to make Linux look like Windows, don't put those [Windows] people in charge, and don't let anyone pretend that Linux is some kind of cheaper Windows replacement. Linux is what it is: Unix, and it takes different reflexes, different ideas about networks, about the role of the computer, about data storage, and about application management to make it work.

While I agree with a number of his conclusions (such as the relative strengths of Solaris, BSD, and Linux distantly followed by Windows), I think he misses the point.

Workstation 5.5, due out later this year, lets one computer simultaneously run several operating systems.

DistroWatch reports - Edubuntu is a partner project of Ubuntu Linux, a distribution suitable for classroom use. A preview of the project's upcoming release 5.10 "Breezy Badger" has been released for download and testing.

OSDir has some sweet shots of Edubuntu 5.10 Preview.