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Microsoft will no longer offer Linux or Unix versions of its enterprise search products after a wave of releases set to ship in the first half of this year, the company announced in an official blog post Thursday. After Microsoft bought Fast Search & Transfer in 2008, it said it would continue offering and updating standalone versions of the company's ESP platform for Linux and Unix, wrote Bjorn Olstad, CTO for Fast and a Microsoft distinguished engineer. "Over the last two years, we’ve done just that." But the products being released this year will be the last containing a search core compatible with Linux and Unix, he said.

After more than four years at Alfresco, I have joined Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, as its chief operating officer. I am excited, humbled, and, candidly, torn by this opportunity. In late 2005, John Powell and John Newton, the co-founders of Alfresco, took a chance on me, an open-source evangelist at Novell. I was the 13th employee and the company's first U.S. employee. My prior history had been with embedded Linux (Lineo) and semiconductors/silicon (Mitsui), but they gave me the chance to grow as general manager of the Americas and later as vice president of business development.

I don't know if you realize it or not, but you are doing some pretty good things. It took me a while to grasp it...this "global community" thing. It took longer than it should have. But about 3 years ago, I got it. We're all tied together, separated by land and sea; surely, but tied together none the less. I used to see us as individual pockets of people doing stuff, some great stuff...still I didn't see the connection. Silly me.

The last chapter of Sun Microsystems has now been written. It wasn't unexpected but there was still something jarring about typing in Sun.com earlier this week and finding myself on the Oracle website. The deal in which Oracle acquired Sun had been in the pipeline for months but this brought home, with finality, that this was indeed the end of an era.

Norton Ghost and its open source alternative Partition Image have been the software to go to for cloning hard drives for some time now. Today we’re look at a further alternative that the open source world has to offer – Clonezilla…

Since its’ release on January 21st, the newest version of the Firefox web browser has received a great deal of attention. In just a short time it has achieved over 30 million downloads. Adware pushers are capitalizing on the success of Firefox, packing ad serving software in with the program in an effort to increase their reach. Purveyors of spyware and adware will try to take advantage of well known programs, illegitimately bundling their software into the install of the popular software. These programs are also commonly referred to as Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs) whose content is not necessarily malicious, but is almost never wanted by the user. These types of software are often used to collect information about the user without the users’ knowledge or consent. The latest example is found on the fake Firefox download site below.

There are a few desktop applications out there that can help you to keep track of your personal finances, but if you are a freelancer or a small business owner, you might need something more powerful like Tonido Money.

By using my Network Monitoring Appliance we noticed a link in MRTG always under heavy load. On this link a lot of different traffic aggregates, so we decided to analyze of what quantities of protocols and therefore applications the cumulative traffic consists.

Horizons Regional Council "would be remiss not to investigate alternatives" to Microsoft on the desktop, as it has a responsibility to the ratepayers that fund it to spend their money wisely, says William Gordon, IT team leader at the council.

DotNetNuke, which makes an open source content management system, seems to be gaining traction with channel partners. The company, which supports Microsoft .NET environments, has gone from zero to about 800 software partners in the past year. Here's how.

The 2010 edition of linux.conf.au was held on January 18 to 22 in Wellington, New Zealand. A number of the talks from this event have been covered elsewhere on LWN, with more to come; this article will talk about several other sessions and your editor's impressions of the conference as a whole. In brief: it was a highly successful event which easily lived up to the high standards set by LCA.

The Gloobus devs have been working on a Gloobus Flow integration with Nautilus with looks amazing! This tutorial will explain how to install it in Ubuntu (Clutter, Gloobus Flow and a patched Nautilus).

Announced today the release of Openoffice3.2 RC5, this is the 5TH release candidate of openoffice.org3.2 and the first RC under Oracle logo. The final release of Openoffice 3.2 was planned for XX January 2010.

LXer Feature: 05-Feb-2010

Tonight FOSDEM 2010 starts with the beer event, and tomorrow the main conference starts. It's held again at the University 'ULB' in Brussels south-east (near the embassies) in Belgium.

Just like last year, LXer will be there. I will try to go both days to cover some talks for you. The schedule promises some interesting talks like that of Greg Koah Hartman, another talk about the RepRap 'cheap' 3D printer that prints its own parts. There's also a Mozilla-room, a distro-room, an embedded room. a KDE and a Gnome room, the Drupal room, the 20-minute Lightning talks which could be about anything and many more.

Registration is open to the public for Texas Linux Fest 2010, to be held at the Monarch Event Center in Austin Texas.

Nokia, the new steward of Qt, and Linux kernel contributor, says it has has completed the largest transition from proprietary code to open source in software history.

Markdown is a formatting "language"1 like HTML that you can use to specify the final appearance of text. When you use a "word processor" like Microsoft Word or Openoffice.org Writer, the text you generate is "marked up" (or "marked down" as it were) with formatting codes that determine how the text looks on a screen or when printed out. If you were to look inside a PDF file you would find commands that do this as well. And, a web page is rendered properly in your browser because of formatting codes in HTML. (If you want to see what the HTML guts of this web page look like and you are using Firefox, just hit ctrl-U and a window with the raw HTML coding will pop up and amaze you.)

(Toronto, Canada: February 4, 2010) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) issued a call for volunteers to assist in the development of its world leading Linux certification program (http://www.lpi.org). Volunteers are sought for participation in a Job Task Analysis (JTA) survey for the organization's new specialty exam LPI-304 (High Availability and Virtualization).

One of the things I admire about the FLOSS community is the willingness to dig in and tackle problems facing a project, whether they're technical, structural (hosting, etc.), governance, licensing, and so on. But it would occasionally be a better idea to try to recruit expertise from the outside than to try to re-invent the wheel inside each project. Dave Neary writes about efforts in the GNOME project to raise money. Neary focuses on fund-raising in particular, something that community projects often struggle with.

When we last reviewed Linux Mint, it received high marks for usability and productivity. Does the new release also rate highly? Paul Ferrill takes it for a test drive to find out.