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Open source support still worries Asian users, low-cost laptops took off against the odds, and India is still on top for outsourcing.

As the Writers Guild of America's strike enters its fourth month, one of its key issues -- the sharing of profits from online distribution -- is encouraging the rise of new production companies that are exploring alternative methods of production and distribution. Along with Hollywood Disrupted and Founders Media Group, these new companies include Virtual Artists, whose goal is to bring free software developers and Hollywood writers together to experiment.

Anin-depth article on F/OSS EHR's including comparisons and contrasts of the front-runners has been published by California Healthcare Foundation:Open-source electronic health record (EHR) systems, have proliferated in recent years. This executive summary presents the findings from an evaluation designed to determine whether these systems, commonly referred to as free and open-source software (FOSS), are suitable as ambulatory EHRs.

The long awaited SimplyMEPIS 7.0 was finally released just before Christmas, and it was worth the wait. In this mature and sometimes underrated operating system, everything looks good and works well. Because I was familiar with previous MEPIS versions, the first thing I noticed in 7.0 was the lovely new artwork. The tasteful theme begins at the live CD boot screen and continues through the boot splash and login screen to the desktop.

OpenOffice.org has dismissed an analyst report from Burton Group which claims that Microsoft's OOXML document format is preferable to the ODF.

Setting up a file server doesn't need to be complicated. With three desktop machines (Kubuntu, Win XP and a testbed, which is currently running ReactOS) and a laptop (Xubuntu) in use at home, our IT is reaching small office proportions, and like many small offices, we run into file sharing problems. Peer-to-peer networking is fine when all the machines are on, but inevitably it happens that the file I want is on a PC that isn't running. Even worse, it be on my testbed machine that is currently in pieces or undergoing yet another upgrade. So, we need an always-on server that any of us can access any time, but if it is always on, it needs to be quiet, reliable and cheap to run.

In Part 1 we set up a simple anonymous Samba file and printer server. Now we're going to share it across subnets. Both Windows and Linux clients will be able to use this server.

Choices abound for reading Usenet messages in Linux. Many email clients can deliver news. Several standalone clients are also around, including Knode/Kontact, Pan, and several text-based choices. Some require you to be online when accessing news, others permit offline reading. Of course, there's also gnus for Emacs.

Since its debut in March of 2001, Mac OS® X® has been a very attractive operating system for many Linux® and Unix™ enthusiasts. The operating system brings the interface design Apple is known for to Unix and builds on the previous efforts of A/UX® and especially NeXT®. This article will introduce the reader to a technique for configuring a Fedora® 8 server and corresponding workstation running Mac OS X Tiger (10.4). I will discuss ways to provide three key services: authorization, authentication, and file sharing.

Curtis Knight, Isak Savo, and Taj Morton are the lead maintainers and developers of autopackage, a set of tools designed to let developers build and distribute distribution-neutral installation packages. In this interview, they share their vision of the project and where Linux packaging in general is going.

The evolution of computing is characterized by a vertiginous acceleration of speed and capacity. As we install sophisticated applications and make use of computers in more creative ways, storage needs are pushed even further. You can improve your disk performance by using a RAID-enabled desktop system running common OSS applications.

Not content with mounting a serious challenge to Asus' elfin Eee PC, US manufacturer Everex this week said it will follow up its 7in CloudBook sub-notebook with larger models later in the year. To be fair, these are all enhancements Asus has already pledged to make to the Eee PC line-up. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), it announced it would release 8in and 9in notebooks Eees later this year. In November 2007, it promised this year will see a desktop version.

This morning Sun Microsystems announced that it was purchasing MySQL AB for $1 billion, $800 million of which is supposed to be paid in cash. This is a huge deal in the open source community. Two minutes after I heard the news, I begged an invitation to the "no press" MySQL company meeting at which the announcement had been made, drove two hours to Orlando, and sat down for lunch with Sun vice president (and Java creator) James Gosling and MySQL AB cofounder David Axmark.

Is it possible to have the performance of C and C++ and the programmer productivity of modern programming languages such as Ruby and Python in a single language? That is the question Walter Bright, the author of the Zortech C++ compiler and the Digital Mars C/C++ compiler, asked himself when creating a successor to C++: Digital Mars D, a practical programming language first released exactly one year ago that helps you get the job done quickly.

Mandriva and TurboLinux have mounted a continent-crossing charge on the Linux market. The software makers have formed a development collective dubbed Manbo-Labs dedicated to peace, harmony and a common base for their respective flavors of the Linux operating system.

The yum-security package is a new feature of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 update. If installed, the yum module provided by this package can be used to limit yum to retrieve only security-related updates. It can also be used to provide information about which Red Hat advisory, bug in Red Hat’s Bugzilla database, or CVE number from MITRE’s Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures directory is addressed by a package update.

Value-priced - after $100 mail-in rebate - Linux PC features an Intel Celeron 1.6GHz Intel Celeron processor, 1GB memory, 80GB hard drive, Freespire 2.0, free CNR software delivery service and more

Last year, Linspire announced that it was opening its software distribution service, CNR (short for Click 'n' Run), to users of the Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu distributions. A month ago, it announced a beta version of CNR that includes support for Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10 (the two most recent versions), with versions for the other systems on the way. Alas, after trying it on my Ubuntu system, I think it needs work.

Annvix is a distribution aimed at providing a secure, stable, and fast base for servers. Be warned, however: Annvix is not for everyone. When you boot the Annvix netinstall CD, you're greeted with a shell and informed that the root password is "root" and should be changed. It also advises that you set up your network and use lynx on another terminal to browse the documentation for the install. Already I could tell that this was not going to be your average user-friendly GUI installer.

Most analysts agree it all depends on what Sun does with MySQL, the leading open-source database management system. So will this move give Sun the software stack its customers need? Will it prove an expensive, badly managed merger? The ultimate answer lies in Sun's hands.