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All 130,000 desktop PCs at the Directorate General of Public Finance (DGPF) in Paris are to be switched to using the open source Mozilla Thunderbird email client, its Lightning calendar and the open source groupware application OBM, the French IT news site 01.net reports, citing a source familiar with the project.

D2X-XL is an OpenGL mod for the classic 3D game Descent 2. D2X-XL is based on D2X 0.2.6, has all bugs from D2X 0.2.6 fixed and has restored all features from the original D2_3dfx (official Voodoo graphics version). D2X-XL is free and runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. Descent is a 3D first-person shooter video game which has a strong following due to its unique 6DOF gameplay.

TurnKey Linux, an Ubuntu based project, recently announced its largest release to date, which includes 25 new additions to its free virtual appliance library featuring some of the world's best open source software. Support has been added for Amazon EC2 cloud and the OVF virtual appliance format.

Novell Chief Marketing Officer John Dragoon popped up in a surprising location this week. Dragoon, who also serves as Novell’s channel chief, wrote a column on Forbes.com. In it, Dragoon declares consumers will be the big winners in the operating system battles between Apple, Google, Microsoft and Linux. Is Dragoon dropping hints about an expanded Novell desktop Linux push? Here's the scoop.

The better question to ask is why Microsoft decided to set the price point where they did? And the answer to that one is quite simple: Microsoft doesn’t actually want you to upgrade to Windows 7 at all.

Ubuntu's CEO, Mark Shuttleworth fired one over Microsoft's bow with a statement that the soon to be released Ubuntu 9.10 is ready to go head-to-head with Windows 7 on Netbooks. He also said that Windows XP is still hanging around on some Netbooks as a "ghost." Shuttleworth wants another shot at the U.S. market with his new Ubuntu 9.10 and Ubuntu One offering. Ubuntu One is a file backup and sharing service where registered users receive 2GB of free storage and 50GB of storage for $10 per month.

Linux users deserve gaming love too. Linux users are often given the cold shoulder by gaming companies, and have to resort to running emulators to play most titles. There are however numerous examples of successful mainstream titles that have found a happy home with Linux gamers.

A lot of open source advocates like to rage against the machine at Microsoft, but when a former Microsoft Research employee says that Windows 7 won't stop Linux from market domination, that's an opinion to note. Keith Curtis, author of the book After the Software Wars, says just that. But he goes further. He thinks Microsoft and its customers would be better off if the company ditched Windows and instead built its own version of the Linux operating system.

Novell wants the US Supreme Court to review its seemingly-never-ending legal tete-a-tete with SCO over the famous UNIX and UNIXware copyrights. As noticed by Groklaw, Novell has filed a motion with a federal appeals court asking for a 90-day stay in the SCO case so it can file a writ of certori petition with the Supremes. This would ask the Supremes to review the lower court's decision that SCO can take its copyright crusade to trial.

In late September there was a call by Peter Hutterer for a new X.Org release process that consisted of a six-month release cycle for the X Server, all development work to be done in feature branches and not Git master, and a three-stage development cycle. The agreed upon version was pretty much the same as Peter's version, but it also called for the X.Org drivers to be pulled back into the X Server (around version 1.10)...

Good news for the funs of Bisigi themes , the themes are actually available also for Ubuntu 9.10 karmic koala , and you can install them by adding repositories to your karmic koala repositories.

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, announced its next Embedded and Real-Time Linux Development class to be held in San Francisco Bay Area from November 4th - 6th, 2009.

With the availability high performance interconnects like InfiniBand, one has to ask why do people still use Ethernet for Linux HPC clusters? The answer may not be what you think!

It's always so difficult to make a "top" anything list. There are so many good candidates and you know that no matter which ones you choose, you're going to make somebody unhappy, but here's my shot at the top five open source content management systems.

This week at the Eclipse Summit Europe held in Ludwigsburg, Germany, Microsoft has announced new initiatives and projects. In one initiative, Microsoft plans to assist Eclipse developers with utilising the new functionality offered by Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Another initiative sees Microsoft wanting to enable Java and PHP developers who use Eclipse as a development environment to build applications that are suitable for Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. Support for Silverlight, Microsoft's RIA (Rich Internet Applications) technology, is also planned.

I've never done a follow up post on a topic before, but I think this is a topic worth further discussion. Yesterday I posted a rather pointed article focused on Intel and what I consider to be a very poor business decision regarding the GMA500 GPU.

After years of development since 2006, the SeaMonkey Project has finally released Seamonky 2.0 and now available for free download.

Freescale Semiconductor says it is now accepting orders for a hardware/software platform for developing Android applications on Power Architecture PowerQUICC and QorIQ processors. The initial MPC8536E-ADK Android platform, which combines an Android runtime developed by Mentor Graphics and a board based on the PowerQUICC III MPC8536E, appears to be the first Android port to the PowerPC.

On 23 October, 2009 it was announced on MacOSForge that Apple had decided to discontinue any and all development on the porting of the ZFS file system. I know that I am not the only one to say this but I am not surprised. Supposedly there were legal reasons behind this action but in the end, who cares? They are the ones losing out to continue with an out dated and still limiting file system.

Open source word processing program AbiWord has a new release this week that sports several new features and a slew of bugfixes. AbiWord, long overshadowed by OpenOffice.org, is a fine multi-platform application in its own right and the new goodies in version 2.8.0 bring even more to the table. These days, collaboration is king and AbiWord 2.8.0's new collaborative capabilities are pretty spiffy. Now, when multiple authors edit the same document, AbiWord can tell the writers apart. Each author's text appears in a different color, making it easy to distinguish who's writing what. Collaboration is even easier now, thanks to the new Web service, AbiCollab, which lets users store and share documents online.