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When you have 20 or more windows open across nine virtual desktops, the complexity of window management can become overwhelming. A number of new tools are now available to facilitate effective window management.

Today dawns a new era of discussion. In the past, Paul Ferris and Dean Pannell (FeriCyde and DinoTrac) sparred impromptu in the talkbacks of many a respectable (and otherwise :) website. Today, for the first time, they make it official. The format is called Penguin Counter Penguin, and the subject random. Today the debate is on the slighter side of the Linux Desktop. Is the Linux desktop really ready for prime-time? Who knows for sure, but you can bet that Paul and Dean have their flamethrowers tuned for the finer points of the debate!

Employees at about 4,800 desks of Vienna's Municipal Authority, the department heads included, from this year on will be given the choice of using a special Linux distribution named Wienux in place of the hitherto exclusively used Microsoft platform Windows 2000 with Office 2000.

The Navy's Program Executive Office for Information Technology is giving open-source software a look.

As a consultant to small businesses and non-profit organizations that are too small to have any IT staff of their own, I need to be able to support a diverse array of desktops and servers, platforms and file formats. I've been able to do it exclusively with Linux since 1998. Here are my must-have Linux desktop applications.

Ben Goodger has posted some screenshots of the new Mozilla Firefox Options/Preferences window, which is currently under development.

IBM is about to announce a new lower-end Power server designed to run Linux. IBM has put the two-processor OpenPower 710 up for sale in the UK. (IBM kindly pulled the linked web site down about an hour after this story first appeared. Thankfully, there is still a cached version here.) The sample configuration for the rackmount system shows it running on 1.65GHz Power5 chips. The new box will fit in below the four-processor OpenPower 720 released last September.

many enterprises are relunctant to switch to Mozilla Firefox. Reasons cited include deployment difficulties, conservative IT policies and the fact that Web browsers are not considered core corporate tools.

Sun has gotten the blessing of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for its new Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL say "Cuddle"), the royalty-free license it is reportedly supposed to use in open sourcing Solaris 10.

KDE 3.4 Beta 1, christened Krokodile, was released not too long ago. For those of you who have not yet taken the plunge, Eudpytula Minor has announced some Krokodile screenshots for your viewing pleasure.

The International Open Source Network, an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme, has produced a 48-page primer on Free and Open Source Software and Education, which is now available for free public download. According to the IOSN the primer is intended to help policy-makers and decision-makers understand the potential use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in education. The primer is released under a Creative Commons licence.

We are glad to announce the release of FlameRobin 0.2.0 ALPHA, now with property sheets and editors for most database objects, brand new background backup & restore features and a MacOS X port. Not to mention the new program logo, new home on sf.net.

Safeguards against phishing have been checked in to Mozilla Thunderbird. In builds with this feature, Thunderbird will display a confirmation dialogue when the user follows a link in an email to a site that looks like it might be part of a phishing scam. The dialogue is currently triggered when visiting a URL with a numeric IP address instead of a domain name or a URL that does not match the address displayed in the message's link text.

Sun Microsystems told NewsForge/ITMJ Thursday that it intends to open source a small but important new feature in Solaris 10 -- Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), a new framework for troubleshooting the network and tuning system performance in real time. Sun had asked NewsForge to honor a non-disclosure agreement until Tuesday about this announcement, but CMP's Computer Reseller News (CRN) leaked the story Friday night, citing "sources close" to Sun. CRN had not been briefed on the announcement, a Sun spokeswoman told NewsForge.

The latest attempt by the EU Council to have its position on the EU directive for the patentability of "computer-implemented inventions" approved in the Council for Agriculture and Fisheries has left members of Parliament from the opposition dumbfounded.

The Linux Trace Kit (LTT) and relayfs were merged into Andrew Morton's -mm patchset with the release of 2.6.11-rc1-mm1. At the time, Andrew encouraged a discussion into the merits of both to determine if they should ultimately be merged into the mainline kernel. The feedback to relayfs suggested that while it worked as advertised, it tended to be overly complicated providing more than was necessary.

This article by a PhD student at Shanghai JiaoTong University (SJTU) Research Institute of Robotics describes an RTLinux-powered robot that placed fifth in the most recent RoboCup competition. The robot has two color cameras for visual sensing along with a laser range finder (LRF) for goalkeeper location, and a wireless LAN allows communication among the robots on SJTU's team. The robot's embedded operating system is Red Hat Linux enhanced with the RTLinuxPro real-time extension.

Mozilla, an open-source software foundation formed by Netscape, launched FireFox 1.0 in November. The new browser is gaining power and the company has reported downloads in tune of 10 million. Experts now believe that with introduction with few new features, Mozilla could soon grow at faster pace.

"To push research forward, scientists need to draw from the best data and innovations in their field. Much of the work, however, is patented, leaving many academic and nonprofit researchers hamstrung. But an Australian organization advocating an open-source approach to biology hopes to free up biological data without violating intellectual property rights."

The third issue of Red Hat Magazine has an interview with Chris Blizzard, Red Hat employee and member of the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors. Chris talks about his involvement with Mozilla and Red Hat's future plans for integrating Mozilla Firefox into their Linux desktop.