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Most of the desktop computers in the UK's Department for Work and Pensions were paralysed for four days on Monday, when a failed upgrade took them offline. The outage, covering 75-80 per cent of the DWP's 80,000 PCs, is one of the largest in the UK Government's not entirely impressive IT history.

In the past week at OSDir our screenshot tour list included OpenOffice.org 1.1 Calc, SAM Mini Live Linux 1.1, Progeny Debian 2.0 RC1, and Damn Small Linux 0.8.4. Head over and check it out.

A complete listing of our Linux and Open Source screenshot tours is here.

All of the contents in an OpenOffice.org Writer document is one of three things: text characters, fields or objects. Objects is a large category that includes formulas, drawing objects and so-called OLE Objects, but it is represented most often by graphics. All objects are added to Writer using a frame, and most of the time, it is the frame that you are editing. The object itself sits sublimely above your changes, its appearance in the document altering but not the object itself.

What do you want from a desktop operating system? Of course programs for everyday use (a Web browser, office tools, games, etc.), but those programs are not the main criteria, especially with GNU/Linux, since you can use almost any Linux application easily on your distribution of choice. The real criteria are stability, package management, hardware compatibility, and the people behind the software, the community. For its superiority in those areas, I made Debian my workstation OS.

Clockwork has launched what it claims is the UK's first open-source payroll system, which it says will be cheaper than existing software from Sage and Northgate

The company running the German railway system has moved half of its servers to Linux, and expects to have more than 300 Linux servers in operation by the end of this year

Daffodil Software (http://www.daffodildb.com) has formally announced the Open Source release of Daffodil Replicator, a powerful data replication tool supporting heterogeneous databases, at SourceForge.net (http://sourceforge.net/projects/daffodilreplica/).

No longer merely on its way up, the platform now boasts converts from governments to small and large businesses—and it's only getting bigger.

Open source fan and South Australian upper house MP Ian Gilfillan has blasted his own parliament's decision to stick with Microsoft for its web site redevelopment, accusing the State Government of hiding behind "pious platitudes" on software choice.

Red Flag Desktop will ship with the award-winning Opera browser, which is focused on user experience. The program is known for being faster, smaller and more standards-compliant than other Internet browsers. Opera also includes an e-mail client and IRC-compatible chat.

South Australian upper house MP Ian Gilfillan today chastised his fellow members for choosing to stick with Microsoft software for their web site and intranet projects. "There is .. a growth of open source content management systems, used to manage internet and intranet content, systems like MySource, Zope and PostNuke," he told Parliament this afternoon.

Happy Thanksgiving! NewsForge will be on a reduced posting schedule from today through the rest of the weekend. We'll be back to business as usual on Monday. If you are someplace where Thanksgiving is celebrated, we hope you enjoy the holiday. If not, we'll enjoy it for you, and later you can enjoy some of your holidays for us while we work. :)

The latest survey from OneStat.com shows what was expected. Firefox is gaining on Internet Explorer and pretty rapidly. As per the reports, Mozilla Foundation has taken a 7.4% market share gaining more than 5% since May. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has dropped down to 88.9%

Long-time Microsoft partner Intel Corp. is working to help Asian PC manufacturers install Linux on new machines rolling off the assembly lines.

A South African organisation has produced what it claims is the first television series dedicated to promoting open-source software

The main SCO Group web site (sco.com) has been intermittently accessible on Tuesday and Wednesday, having been down on Monday, displaying characteristic patterns seen during a protracted Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Several related domains have also been off - and on-line over the last 72 hours.

VA Linux Systems Japan K.K. today announced it will release 'VA Directory', a new LDAP directory service server software for large-scale enterprise systems. Advance sales of the VA Directory solution will begin immediately, while delivery and full customer support for the system will be available from January, 2005.

This is a story about AMD's Opteron but some interesting Linux information can be gleamed from it. Look at the Volume growth vs. Value growth below and you can see that Linux is not only growing very fast but moving up the food chain. Windows is increasingly relegated to the low end.

This is a fairy tale, a dream I had last night. Any similarity between real kingdoms, and real kings, and real journalists, is purely coincidental. Obviously the things depicted here could never happen in real life, or in real journalism. We are much too fair and balanced for that.

In the aftermath of our last interview with Tom Lord, regardless of personalities, it became apparent that the idea of decentralizing CVS is a big deal. Many mentioned darcs as an alternative to Arch. Mark Strosberg has interviewed project head-hancho David Roundy about darcs, his "theory of patches", what's next, and on using Haskell for the project.