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ASM is a fantastic new feature in Oracle Database 10g that provides the services of a filesystem, logical volume manager, and software RAID in a platform-independent manner. ASM can stripe and mirror your disks, allow disks to be added or removed while the database is under load, and automatically balance I/O to remove "hot spots." It also supports direct and asynchronous I/O and implements the Oracle Data Manager API (simplified I/O system call interface) introduced in Oracle9i.

The scrappy, passionate computer programmers of Mozilla.org say they can feel the momentum that comes from having their new Firefox browser downloaded 5 million times in one month.

Plenty of good news this week, ranging from the release of Portage 2.0.51 via the web contest winner and documentation updates to a reminder of the Gentoo presence at the upcoming German LWE. This week's Gentoo Weekly Newsletter also contains a request for help from the Haskell team, an announcement of the first Gentoo user meeting in Cambridge, UK, and the regular services with community and press coverage, tips and tricks centered around the new Portage release, bugzilla statistics, and three new developers to welcome on the Gentoo team.

The next version of Mandrakesoft's Linux distribution comes with Wi-Fi roaming capabilities, Bluetooth support and improved power management for laptop users.

Thirteen months after taking the "first step" of a stategic shift toward Linux, the world's largest embedded software company is set to ship its inaugural Linux product. "Linux Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition" targets makers of telecommunications equipment who use Linux on the control plane along with Wind River's proprietary VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS) on the data plane, and it includes middleware that lets Linux and VxWorks processes intercommunicate. Additionally, the company has updated its Eclipse-based Workbench development suite to work with 2.6-series kernels and has upgraded the tool to Eclipse 3.0, among other advances.

New Linspire Internet Suite Allows Searching for Every Word in Browser and Email

Unicode, or the Universal Character Set (UCS), was developed to end once and for all the problems associated with the abundance of character sets used for writing text in different languages. It is a single character set whose goal is to be a superset of all others used before, and to contain every character used in writing any language (including many dead languages) as well as other symbols used in mathematics and engineering. Any charset can be losslessly converted to Unicode, as we'll see.

Zack Smith announced that he has been working on an in-kernel 2D GUI for the 2.6 Linux kernel called FBUI. Based on the framebuffer, the project page explains, "FBUI is a small, in-kernel graphical user interface for Linux. It permits you to put windows in each framebuffer-based virtual console, to read keyboard input and track the mouse pointer." The core software measures in at a mere 26k, adding an additional 17k for a graphical library, 30k for a window manager, and 38k for a terminal emulator.

Spread Firefox has announced that at the conclusion of their New York Times advertisement donation drive they have raised $250,000, with roughly 10,000 names to be placed in the ad. The team expects to use roughly $50,000 on the actual ad itself, and the remainder will go towards the Mozilla Foundation, and Firefox 1.0 launch activities. More info is available in the FAQ.

Mike Owens credits a little penguin for reviving his moribund interest in technology. A chemical engineer by degree, programmer by choice, the 33-year-old resident of North Richland Hills, Texas, said he was close to turning his back on computers as a profession five years ago. At the time, he was working and playing exclusively on Microsoft Windows machines.

You've read the recent reviews and you know the newly released SimplyMEPIS is hot. Now check out our 67 great screenshots at OSDir, to see why SimplyMEPIS tops the charts.

K-DEMar is a live CD distribution based on Knoppix and fully translated into Catalan. At OSDir, we try to cover all kinds distros, big and small, in all languages in our screenshot tours of Linux distributions.

AUSTRUMI 0.9.0 has been released and includes many great new features. Have a quick look at these great screenshots of AUSTRUMI 0.9.0.

SLAX (pocket OS) now comes in modded flavors, including Popcorn, Kill-Bill, and Professional. Down the road we'll see Hacker and Frodo mods too. SLAX is based on the Slackware Linux distribution and is downloadable as an ISO image. At OSDir we waffled but finally decided to go with the Professional version for our screenshot tour of this great Linux distribution. See SLAX in action here.

Gnoppix 0.8.1 now appears to be Ubuntu Linux based. At OSDir, we've got over 50 screenshots of the Gnoppix 0.8.1 release, including the controversial Ubuntu desktop background images.

Marketing maverick Rob Davis hit pay dirt with his idea of a consumer-sponsored ad for the open-source browser. Call it Mozilla’s October Revolution.

The Ubuntu developers are already preparing for the next Ubuntu release, due in April 2005. It's codename is "Hoary Hedgehog". It will include the latest from Debian sid, plus some new features. For Ubuntu users, you can start testing it by editing /etc/apt/sources.list and replacing all instances of 'warty' with 'hoary'. Enjoy.

Before the dot-com crash, Eric Raymond became a millionaire instantly when open-source provider VA Linux Systems did an IPO. As a member of the board of directors and a major shareholder, Raymond made $41 million when VA went out on Nasdaq. When the crash came, he lost it all.

What kind of E-mail is landing in Martin Taylor’s in-box right about now? It’s probably not unlike some of the messages I’ve been getting in response to a story I wrote about Steve Ballmer’s Oct. 27 treatise comparing Windows to Linux (and, to a lesser extent, Unix). Microsoft’s CEO ended his note by inviting readers to respond directly to Taylor, the guy in charge of Microsoft’s anti-Linux strategy. Don’t you love it when the boss fires off a salvo, then puts you out in front to absorb the return fire? Then again, Taylor is the same guy who once showed up at a Linux trade show wearing a flak jacket. Maybe it’s time for him to break out the protective gear again.

The Southern California Linux Expo continues to sign distinguished speakers for SCALE 3x, the third annual So Cal Linux Expo.