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It looks like Fedora Core 2, a project sponsored by Red Hat, is getting ready to roll. Over this weekend Core 2 is being pushed onto mirror sites and an official announcement may come as soon as this coming week.

Mandrakesoft may be enjoying financial freedom by exiting bankruptcy protection, but at least a few of its loyal users have not been so fortunate this weekend. An apparent glitch in order processing has resulted in some customers being overcharged by thousands of dollars. Early reports indicate that only North American customers that made purchases through Visa in early May are affected.

OSDir.com is taking a closer look at Mozilla's future flagship products Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird in a two part special. In this part they're looking at Firefox and asking whether less really is more. As OSDir.com says, "There are two wildly successful open source projects right now that are sweeping across Windows, Mac & Linux desktops. Firefox and Thunderbird. Both applications have two distinct characteristics. They are stripped down versions of their predecessor - the Mozilla bundle, and both are based on a plugin structure allowing users to include only features they want or need permitting them to remain simple to use. In this first of two installments we take a look at Mozilla's Firefox web browser."

Recently, the Debian Project has lost two members of its community. Manuel Estrada Sainz (ranty) and Andrés García (ErConde) were killed in a tragic car accident while returning from the Free Software conference held at Valencia, Spain.

In 1776, the British economist Adam Smith theorized in the "The Wealth of Nations" that "invisible hand" market forces are the primary influences in a free market economy. Does the economic model of the world, as predicted by Smith over 228 years ago, apply to the modern concept of free and open source software?

NoStarch Press has released "How Linux Works -- What Every Superuser Should Know." The book targets competent Linux users who want to learn more about filesystems, the Linux boot process, system management, networking, shell scripts, and more. Author Brian Ward's previous books include "The Linux Problem Solver" and "The Book of VMware." He also authored the Linux Kernel HOWTO.

Developers needing to build, debug and compile an embedded Linux kernel from a Linux-hosted workstation are the target for Metrowerks’ release this month of an edition of its CodeWarrior Development Studio IDE for ARM-, ColdFire- and PowerPC-based devices. The company demonstrated the new tool at the Smart Networks Developer Forum in Dallas in late April.

Sun Microsystems, once a great enterprise computer company, has been shrinking. Sun is also shrinking in other ways, such as the enterprise-only part, by entering to the consumer markets. Sun has getting slow at some things, such as copying off competitors.

Linux may be free software, but shares of Linux providers have become very expensive as investors bet that the fast-growing operating system can chip away at the dominance of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows. For stock investors looking to hitch their money to Linux, which is being more widely adopted by businesses seeking to lower their technology costs, analysts warned this week that there is no such thing as a free ride.

Linux& Open-Source Center Editor Steven Vaughan-Nichols knows that many Linux fans hate Red Hat. His message to them: Get over it.

This point release from the stable branch of the GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform contains a lot of bugfixes and improvements over the previously released 2.6.0 version.

Red Hat, the top-ranked seller of the Linux operating system, has expanded chip support for its corporate version of the open-source operating system and plans a major change to Fedora, its hobbyist product, in coming days.

Developers got their first view into what may be the future of Java development during last week's TheServerSide Java Symposium. What's in store for Enterprise Java Beans, in fact, may put some long-held Java thinking on its head -- literally.

[ A Linux intro story for automation fans, with a few errors (most notably the author asserting that Linus patented Linux. :) ]

The world's smallest commercially available Linux boards and computers were officially introduced today by gumstix, inc., a start-up that produces and sells high performance Single Board Computers (SBCs) and peripherals. Based on Intel's PXA255 processor with Xscale technology, gumstix tiny boards measure 20mm x 80mm x 8mm. At nearly half the price of and a third the size of competitors, gumstix enables software developers to create smaller and more price conscious embedded devices, applications and products for the growing Linux market

Most modern operating systems provide file monitoring facilities to give applications real-time information about changes to the filesystem. A variety of notification methods are used to tell the application when a change happens, ranging from an asynchronous signal being sent from the kernel through a user space tool printing the name of the changed file on its standard output. We'll take a look at some of the file monitoring facilities available to the Linux developer, starting with the lowest-level mechanism and working up to the highest.