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Long-time blog readers should know that I don't rely on tools to defend my enterprise. I rely on people first, followed by tools, then processes. However, today I took a moment to consider the myriad of really cool work happening (mainly) in the open source tool community. When I started counting, I found about seven projects that are likely to help you defend your enterprise.

A new version of GLX-Dock (previously known as Cairo Dock) is on the way - 2.3 (currently in beta), which will bing a lot of new applets: MintMenu, Cardapio and Lancelot menus, a translator applet, Thunderbird unread count applet, Transmission, Deluge and Ktorrent applets and more.

Australia's Department of Finance has released a desktop policy that required all agencies to adopt Office Open XML as the standard document format - a move that in the short term ensures Microsoft's Office suite remains embedded in government.

Last Wednesday, Simon Phipps, former open source evangelist at Sun, reported on his blog, on a presentation he had given at a conference in Latvia concerning the Open Document Format (ODF). Speaking before him, a Latvian government official had made the announcement that, from now on, all government departments in Latvia must accept documents in ODF. As confirmed by OSEPA (Open Source software usage by European Public Administrations) figures, Phipps said that the move isn't limited to this small Baltic state, but that it is part of a larger development in progress among public administrations across Europe: nobody wants to force citizens to use a commercial office package when communicating with their public authorities. The Document Foundation's LibreOffice fork of OpenOffice has apparently become very popular, but Phipps stated that "many citizens will want to use software other than LibreOffice to edit ODF documents". He said that he is surprised about the incomplete support for ODF provided by Apple and Google Docs. "It's ironic that the best proprietary ODF support right now is from Microsoft", he concluded.

E-Learning consists of all types of electronically supported teaching and learning. It represents the computer and network-enabled transfer of knowledge, behaviors, and skills

Few days ago, Pardus 2011 was released, Major features in this release are: the latest Linux kernel 2.6.37 provides an up-to-date hardware support; the bootsplash technology used in Pardus 2009.2 is replaced by the new Plymouth engine; YALI, the pardusinstaller of Pardus, gained LVM/RAID and UUID support; Pardus 2011 comes with the latest KDE 4.5.5; Kaptan

This is somehow my personal classification, of Linux distributions. And maybe at the same time of the Linux users. I’m going to classify only those I have used more than just a few hours in a virtual machine.

The latest Opera 11 beta release introduced a slew of new features which included the support for third party extensions. There is nothing new about it though, since Firefox had addons support like for ever. And Opera gradually became the most awesome browser that nobody uses. Let's just hope that the new changes brings in new users as well for Opera. We had already featured top Firefox addons that enhances browser safety and privacy some time ago, now here is a collection of incredible Opera Extensions that matter.

Version 11.0 of Calculate Linux has been released. This release of the Gentoo-based operating system, which we benchmarked last August, brings many improvements to this promising distribution that -- like Sabayon and others -- makes it easier to run Gentoo on desktops and servers.

Jupiter, the light weight power and hardware control applet for Linux now has its own website! Everything you wanted to know about Jupiter is now centrally located at http://www.jupiterapplet.org.

Recovery Mode is a text-based interface to a few quick repair tools that is installed by default with most Ubuntu releases and derivatives. I wrote a few add-ons for it that increase its usefulness in remote repair and diagnostics situations. These were developed and tested on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).

Stephen Spector writes, "With the recent announcement from Apple that Steve Jobs is taking a medical leave and subsequent short-lived stock drop I began to wonder if people really think that the entire company is 100% dependent on Steve Jobs. So, does the Linux community have a similar problem when it comes to Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel?"

I've been thinking about the Liquorix kernels for some time. They've been mentioned to me in the comments of my blog. I've read about them. They are built for Debian.

HTML5, which has been developed by the WHATWG group, is to lose its version number and be referred to only as "HTML". Ian Hickson, the author and editor of the W3C's current HTML5 draft, announced this decision in a blog posting. Hickson said that, when the group announced that the HTML5 specification was progressing to "Last Call" in 2009, the plan at the time was to publish a "snapshot" of HTML5 in 2012. However, due to the high demand for new features, the group has now decided to switch to a different development model.

When it comes to PCI compliance, there's no such thing as "too careful." One of the keys to being careful enough? Isolating and protecting servers that handle cardholder data from the rest of your network. You already know that you need to keep systems holding cardholder data secure and prevent access from outside your network. But there's more to it than that — PCI-compliant systems should be isolated from the rest of the company's systems as well. Businesses have a range of systems and networks, and the access and policies that go with the various systems should reflect their importance and sensitivity of the data held on the systems.

Gökcen Eraslan announced earlier today, January 21st, the immediate availability for download and upgrade of the popular Pardus 2011 Linux-based Turkish operating system.

Florian Mueller has been killing it these past few months with his analysis of various tech patent suits on his FOSSpatents blog, and today he's unearthed a pretty major bombshell: at least 43 Android source files that appear to have been directly copied from Java.

The aftermath of Oracle's purchase of Sun and the subsequent forking of a number of open source projects, has highlighted the necessity to protect the integrity of the commons and to keep commercially sponsored open source projects honest, and true to the principles of free and open source software.

Google is updating its dev-channel version of the Chrome browser this week with an updated JavaScript engine and a long list of bug fixes. Chrome 10.0.642.2 is an update for Windows, Linux and Mac and includes the new V8 version 3.0.7.0 JavaScript engine. The new version of V8 includes performance improvements on the IA32 (x86) platform as well as enhancing the debugger.

Ardesia is a free open source application that turns your Linux device into a digital sketchpad. You can make hand drawn annotations, figures, a quick sketch, do some artwork or just use it for fun. Drawings can be made using many pointing devices like a mouse or a pen/finger on your touch screen device.