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DistroWatch reports - The fourth test release of the upcoming Ubuntu Linux 5.10 Breezy Badger is available for download and testing: Colony CD 4 is ready. This will be the last Colony CD release before the Breezy preview, so any testing you can provide is appreciated. If you test it, be sure to send us a report to ubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com. Significant installer changes since Colony 3 include: many fixes to the live CD, including usplash integration; GRUB tries harder to boot even when the BIOS fails to pass a boot drive; APT configuration when the network is unavailable should now be much faster...

OSDir has put together a screenshot tour of Ubuntu Linux 5.10 Colony 4.

A plan to move 14,000 desktops from Windows has been delayed by a year, partly because of the need for an additional pilot phase.

Ah, the time one could spend bouncing around from blog to blog -- co-workers, customers, competitors -- thoughts from all of them may be just a few clicks away. Co-workers, competitors, and customers? Why not? Yet while some see blogs in business as a growing trend that may become standard enterprise procedure, analysts say there are still hurdles organizations must overcome before blogs can boost productivity.

Among the hundreds of Linux distributions, only a handful get much media attention, and only a small segment of those have become household words in the Linux community. At Distrowatch.com, one of the better known Linux ranking sites, you'll see the same names week after week in the top 20 -- Ubuntu, Mepis, Fedora, Slackware, etc. So who is using the bottom 80? And why?

Andrew Morton [interview] provided an update on the current development status of the Linux kernel. As of his announcement, the latest development release is 2.6.13-git5, with 2.6.14 expected around October 7'th. At this time, Andrew is tracking 144 bugs though he notes, "I haven't culled these yet - some may be fixed." Indeed, a number of replies indicated that several of the listed bugs have been fixed.

As more companies move to open-source platforms, enterprise-application vendors adapt their software for the new environments

Three U.S. think-tanks which campaign against government regulation have asked permission to present arguments in support of Microsoft Corp. as part of its appeal of a European Union antitrust ruling. One of the three organizations, the International Intellectual Property Institute, has a Microsoft employee on its board of directors. The other organizations are the Progress and Freedom Foundation and the Institute for Policy Innovation.

Silveroffice, a startup Goffice.com with a browser-based PDF tool as the first in its planned series of browser-based office products.

Companies trying to establish credibility as open-source enterprise-apps vendors include ComPiere, which installed its first deployment in 2000; OpenMFG; and CRM vendor SugarCRM.

Open source software evolves and matures at a rapid pace because its users are essentially also testers and take co-ownership of the products they like. Walter Kruse looks at some of the tools and techniques that can be used by the open source community to build and test better applications.

Spearheaded by the government, South Korea is making increased use of an open-source operating system called Linux. It is bad news for Microsoft, the world’s foremost software maker that dominates the operating system market with several versions of its Windows program.

Mentor Graphics has announced its support for 64bit Linux platforms by declaring full operational qualification for its analogue/mixed-signal toolset. Mentor's entire line of Eldo and Advance MST analogue and mixed-signal products have been certified for operation on Opteron and EM64 processor architectures using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 platform. 'Linux on X86-64 hardware is proving to be a great performance platform for our products', said Jue-Hsien Chern, Vice President and General Manager of Mentor's Deep Submicron Division.

The City of Munich will not start its migration to Linux on the desktop until 2006, a year later than planned and three years since it decided to migrate to Linux. The first department to migrate to Linux and OpenOffice.org will be that of the Lord Mayor.

Rajesh Setty wrote his first book when he was age 9, a spy novel in the style of Ian Fleming's James Bond adventures. It never occurred to him that trying to get a book published would take a lot of work. "When we are young, we don't know what is not possible," said Mr. Setty, 35, chairman of Cignex Technologies Inc., of Santa Clara. Today, his business model sounds like something from an entrepreneur who doesn't know what's not possible because it is based on selling a product that is free -- open source software.

Novell released its third-quarter financial results a couple of weeks ago (its fiscal year runs ends Oct. 31), and the picture wasn't very pretty.

An Italian province will use Linux rather than Windows XP in its schools for the next academic year

The Sun Industry Standards Source License has been retired, and the OSI wants more licences to follow the same path.

Retiring the SISSL means that the OpenOffice.org software will be covered by just one licence, the LGPL, according to the project's Web site. "Projects currently using the SISSL under a dual-licence scheme, such as OpenOffice.org, are dropping the SISSL and thus simplifying their licence scheme as soon as the development cycle allows," the site said.

Welcome to this year's 36th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The first full week in September should be an exciting one for users and fans of Free Software - GNOME 2.12, Ubuntu 5.10 Preview, and SUSE Linux 10.0 RC1 are all expected to hit the download mirrors later this week. But before that happens we will take a brief look at the "smart" package manager in Mandriva, check out "SUPER", a performance-enhancing subproject of SUSE Linux, and revisit the Linspire versus Freespire controversy. Our featured distribution of the week is Elive, a great live CD featuring the Enlightenment window manager - a project that is also the recipient of our US$250 August 2005 donation. Happy reading!

A 4-year-old company is using open source software as the foundation for an ERP suite targeted at small and midsize manufacturers. OpenMFG this week plans to release Version 1.2 of its software, which goes by the same name as the company and includes some 200 changes from the earlier version. While most of the changes are small, about 25 per cent of them came from the company's network of value-added resellers (VAR) and 20 customers. Those changes reflect the fact that users get the complete source code for the various OpenMFG modules and can make changes that get incorporated into the suite. The suite was designed for manufacturers and can be readily adapted for discrete and process manufacturing, according to Ned Lilly, OpenMFG's CEO and co-founder. Modules include the standard ERP functions, such as part definition for bills of materials, capacity planning, inventory management, purchase orders and a complete set of financial programs.

REAL Software has stated the company will ship REALbasic 2005 for Linux on Sept. 13, 2005. REALbasic 2005 for Linux is a rapid application development (RAD) environment that enables professional and non-professional programmers alike to quickly create software for Linux.