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A public meeting on software patents is to be held next week, but various high-profile anti-patent campaigners seem to have fallen off the guest list

The next time you have a hankerin' to install a new batch of Debian machines, make it easy on yourself and use FAI (Fully Automatic Installation). FAI is a versatile, intelligent installer for performing mass unattended Debian installations. Use it to install clusters, server farms, classroom computer labs, or new LANs.

This week a group of free and open source software developers from around Africa are gathered at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) for the first FLOSS Developer Road Show in Africa. The roadshow is being organised by the CSIR and Aspiration Tech with funding from the Open Society Institute. The roadshow is being hosted by the Free Software Innovation Unit (FSIU) at UWC. The roadshow runs until the end of this week.

De Bortoli Wines is staging a nationwide rollout of Linux terminal replacements and plans to move over to new Linux desktops by the end of 2005. De Bortoli's IT Manager Bill Robertson said there were several reasons for moving much of its application base to open source software, citing ease of deployment, portability, adaptability, avoiding vendor lock-in issues, flexibility and cost savings as key factors.

Sales of servers using Linux will grow faster than the overall market at least through 2008, when customers will spend $9.1 billion for machines using the open-source operating system, market researcher IDC forecast Monday.

The next time someone asks you how to introduce open source into an organization, suggest this book as a starting point.

Stanford University sophomore Blake Ross is the lead architect of the Firefox browser, which hit its long-anticipated 1.0 release in November. In its long preview release stage, Firefox—part of the Mozilla family of open source software—already ate into the dominant market share of Microsoft Internet Explorer. Ross discussed the browser and its implications with Redmond magazine Managing Editor Keith Ward.

Computer geeks have helped make Martin Roesch's kitchen-table startup a $100 million outfit. His secret ingredient: A dash of humility.

Following the launch of its Firefox browser, Mozilla delivers an E-mail client. A calendaring application may be next.

Some Linux fans are tired of reading reports and articles about viruses and attacks for the Linux operating system that would be as bad as malware for Windows if the open source OS was most popular. Why waste your time worrying about a potential threat for which there is little historical or empirical evidence that it even exists, right?

I recently got a chance to interview Greg M. Kurtzer, the head of the Caos Foundation, the people who make cAos and CentOS Linux.

Everyone knows that open source is gaining widespread acceptance in enterprise settings. A recent Forrester report found that 60% of organizations are adopting open source technologies and platforms in one form or another. From Linux to Apache to Sendmail and beyond, open source is fast becoming an enterprise commonplace.

The Mozilla Foundation has released the final version of Thunderbird - the email client which it hopes will rival Microsoft Outlook.

Fashion and Linux -- it's not a familiar combination. You get a mental picture of an open source hacker in an extra large T-shirt and long fuzzy beard on a runway on Seventh Avenue. It's as unlikely as the fashion industry, which is slow, technologically speaking, moving away from tried and true methods of doing business (read: even if it's broke, don't fix it, because at least we're used to it, and what's wrong with AS/400 anyway?). But Ed Foy of Brick, N.J., has made it his business to break all the rules. He's helping celebrities sell clothes -- a lot of clothes -- using only Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl.

Under terms of the agreement Ziff Davis Media has purchased several vertical technology and information websites including LinuxDevices.com, WindowsForDevices.com, DeviceForge.com, and DesktopLinux.com.

Mozilla Foundation announces the release of its open source email software

By now, anyone who has researched replacing Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org knows that Writer is an acceptable, even superior substitute for Word. But word processing is only part of what the average user needs in an office program. What if you need to design a slide show in OOo Impress? Coming from PowerPoint, what can you expect?

With a common goal of providing a more constant, smoother and faster development cycle, new technologies are being put directly into Linux kernel 2.6.x.

Developers have released the first version of OpenOffice.org in the East African language of Swahili, having overcome translation and infrastructure difficulties.

The Open Source Development Labs has integrated into the library of tests that run against new Linux kernel builds the Open Posix Test Suite (OPTS) - an open source project designed to make it easier to port applications from other Posix platforms - Posix being the IEEE portability standard associated mostly with the Unix operating system - to Linux.