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Welcome to this year's 1st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Martin Michlmayr announced that Jörg Jaspert has been appointed as an additional Debian account manager. The Debian project announced another update of their stable release. Joey Hess published a list of security problems fixed in unstable but pending in sarge.

A new way of thinking about and tagging a document's table of contents and other supporting features makes sense and is more convenient.

Voice over IP (VOIP) and open source technology hold great promise for cost savings, but also threaten traditional ways of doing business. Rather than shy away from the challenges that these disruptive technologies represent, Bell Laboratories, the renowned R&D (research and development) arm of Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, New Jersey, is attempting to bring them into the mainstream.

The enterprise Linux space got a bit more crowded Tuesday with a pair of new releases from Mandrakesoft. The France-based Linux distribution vendor announced a new version of its Corporate Server and a new Corporate Desktop.

IT managers who think that their Microsoft certifications give them all the tenure they need are in for a rude awakening. In fact, says author Robin Miller, their pink slips are only a point-and-click away. Learn to use Linux, he said, or you'll be left behind. To help IT managers and users see how easy it is to use Linux, Miller has written Point & Click Linux: Your Guide to Trouble-Free Computing, which has just been published by Prentice Hall PTR. Miller, who is also editor-in-chief of Open Source Technology Group, offers tips on building Linux skills and easing a company and its users onto Linux desktops in this interview. In part two, he focuses on choosing tools and distributions and supporting Linux.

SpikeSource, a start-up headed by computing industry veteran Kim Polese, has revealed more details of its plan to tap into the growing popularity of open-source software at corporations.

A client recently greeted me with a barrage of complaints about Microsoft, product costs, and so forth. They wondered aloud whether they ought to assemble a strategy for moving to an open source platform to save money. Now, I'm not one to start an argument about the merits of consumer vs. open source. Rather, I took the opportunity to point out the open source route available to .NET connoisseurs.

We began this interview via email, but later had to finish by telephone after Richard Stallman fell and broke his arm. He was kind enough to speak with me at length, discussing his first contact with computers, his time in the AI lab, the current state of the GNU Hurd, his current role in the Free Software Foundation, the problems with non-free software, and much more. The following words offer much insight into how we got here, and what challenges we still face.

First Virtex-4 Device with Embedded PowerPC Delivers 3x Performance Advantage

The Open Source Laboratory at Oregon State University is planning informational outreach boot camps at businesses for staff to learn about open-source software. Open-source software is software available to anyone for free. The software is applied to applications such as word processing, spreadsheets and Web browsing.

Firestarter is a GPL-licensed graphical firewall configuration program for iptables, the powerful firewall included in Linux kernels 2.4 and 2.6. Firestarter supports network address translation for sharing an Internet connection among multiple computers, and port forwarding for redirecting traffic to an internal workstation. Firestarter's clean and easy to use graphical user interface takes the time out of setting up a custom firewall.

In this interview, Martin Michlmayr, the Debian project leader, talks about Sarge, the next release of Debian GNU/Linux. One of the most significant improvements in Sarge over Woody, the last stable Debian release, is in the new user-friendly installer. Others include the addition of Apache 2.0.52, GNOME 2.8, KDE 3.2, and XFree86 4.3.

To the list of reasons you may want to use Linux instead of Windows as your computer’s operating system, add one more: Control over users means control over evil software.

The Linux server platform is becoming more varied -- and more capable, according to a recent report by IDC. The report noted that Linux is already well entrenched as a Web-centric server platform, in IT infrastructure roles and in the high-performance computing arena. In 2005, the report predicted, Linux will take on more workloads in the enterprise, such as hosting independent software vendor applications and databases.

With the open-source movement gaining momentum regionally, software developers from Korea, Japan and China said they are nearing the completion of a compatible open-source operating system that will be promoted as an Asian standard.

I hear this canard over and over: that it takes constant attention to make a Linux installation work right, which means the cost of administering a Linux system is higher than maintaining one running a proprietary operating system. While it's true that you can spend almost every waking hour tweaking a Linux server, network or desktop, most Linux users don't need to do this any more than most car owners need to adjust their tire pressure to meet the demands of every road surface they encounter in the course of a day's driving.

There are 14 ministries covered by Venezuela's first decree, which stipulates that government entities must complete the migration to open source within two years. Ministries can claim exemption if they can show that migrating from proprietary solutions would be impossible.

Ubuntu Linux has expanded their series of international screenshots. In addition to Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and French, they've now added Mandarin, Arabic, and Russian screenshots to their screenshots page.

This post is in response to the various naysayers in these forums who say Linux on the business desktop is either not possible or not worth it.

Choosing small business or personal accounting software seems relatively simple: evaluate features, ease of use, price, support--the usual things. The one factor that can really drive you nuts is migrating away from an existing installation.