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Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony was pretty gung-ho about the company's upcoming release back in June. He said it would "fill some key holes in our current offering." Unfortunately Linspire 6, released last week, lacks the refinements you'd expect in a distro you pay $50 to download. It drops some key distinguishing features, and in return gains only some Microsoft technology as spelled out in the Microsoft patent covenants Linspire agreed to. This release seems to be about deferring to Microsoft.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, will announce its third annual desktop Linux survey on Oct. 17. This survey is not designed to measure how popular the Linux desktop is or how popular one desktop distribution is over another, although it will also measure some of that kind of information. What the survey is really designed to do is to pinpoint areas of user need in order to focus development efforts and accelerate the global adoption of Linux desktops and clients.

Linux vendor Novell is heading off after the small business sector now with its latest release, the Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition (say that in one breath). The suite is a desktop-to-server setup that the company says is tailored to meet the needs of small businesses.

Theoretically, search engines should find all the best Web sites and rank them at the top of their search results. Unfortunately, due to the gap between artificial and human intelligence, this doesn't always happen. Users have the ability to alter the rankings by doing search engine optimization (SEO) -- a two-edged sword that can either be beneficial or harmful, depending on whose hands it's in. You can improve your site's search-engine rankings by using free or open source software (FOSS) tools for SEO.

In a surprising announcement, which will no doubt stir up the open source community, the Open Source Initiative said that it had approved two of Microsoft's licences as being fit for open source software.

In this guest column, technology marketing consultant Kim Brebach, who last month published an essay titled "13 Reasons why Linux won't make it to a desktop near you," discovers why desktop Linux has thrived despite what he terms its "troubled childhood."

Openads, formerly known as phpAdsNew, is one of the more successful open source development projects. Its online advertising software is used by many thousands of domain owners who want to make a profit on their Web content by selling advertisements. Scott Switzer, the project leader, recently went commercial with the project, securing $5 million in venture capital and a new CEO straight from Skype. The key to the company's success? "I have really seen the value in what a community can give to a software project," he says.

The KDE community today released KDE 3.5.8. While the developers' main focus lies on finishing KDE 4.0, the stable 3.5 series remains the desktop of choice for the time being. It is proven, stable and well supported. The 3.5.8 release with its literally hundreds of bugfixes has again improved the users' experience.

Welcome to a new blog here atLinuxJournal.com,"Linux Products Insider". I'm James Gray, Products Editor atLinux Journal. After the spam has been deencrusted and hucksters repelled, I'll use this space to update you on the latest and greatest products and services that I find using my secret channels. This week, I had the chance to take part in a press conference with Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu. Read on to learn why Shuttleworth's is so fired up about the new Ubuntu 7.10"Gutsy Gibbon" (available this week), as well as why he thinks Ubuntu is so darned successful.

The folks at Canonical have started to prepare their servers for downloads of the latest Ubuntu release - 7.10 or "Gutsy Gibbon." Past Ubuntu releases have been marred by downed servers, as the Umbongo faithful rush to get their fresh code injection. So, this time around, Mark Shuttleworth and crew are doing their outreach early. They've started talking up the OS before it's available on Thursday, hoping to spread out demand a bit. With 7.10, Umbongo users will find fresh additions for the client and the server.

Prizes up for grabs as awards encourage students to get involved with free and open source projects and make a difference.

O3Spaces is a proprietary integrated collaboration and document management application for workgroups and businesses. Almost a year after its launch, the company behind the software has released version 2.2 beta. While the new version doesn't offer any earth-shattering new features, O3Spaces 2.2 sports a wealth of improvements aimed at solidifying its position as a viable alternative to Microsoft SharePoint.

rr -- short for retain and recall -- is a small utility that's both simple and useful. When you need to work on a config file buried deep in the bowels of your system and don't want to type its full path name to do so, rr is just the thing.

Development of native Linux audio plugins and softsynths may not be so relentlessly rapid as it is in the Windows and Mac sound software worlds, but new things do appear. This week I profile a cool new (well, relatively new) Linux softsynth, William Weston's Phase Harmonic Advanced Synthesis EXperiment, also known asPhasex.

For several years Puppy Linux has been breathing life into old and dated hardware, but instead of being just another minimalistic distribution, Puppy boasts smart features that save resources without cutting down the number of applications. The latest major Puppy release, Puppy 3.00, continues this trend by making the less than 100MB distro binary-compatible with Slackware 12 and providing other enhancements.

After trying out a number of Linux photo-management applications, I have settled on Digikam. It has some great tools for managing vast photo archives, wonderful RAW support, and an array of good photo-editing-and-fixing features.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Replacement of the "toolbox", and a new KRunner in Plasma, with many applets moving from playground into extragear in KDE SVN. SuperKaramba is now fully integrated into Plasma. A move away from KDEPrint facilities, towards more basic functionality for KDE 4.0. More work on restoring the functionality of the Klipper applet. Basic sound support in Parley. General work on KHTML, with more specific work on image loading and testcases. More work on KDE colour scheme handling...

Eclipse has released Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) 1.0 for developing and deploying rich Internet applications (RIAs) using the Eclipse development model, plug-ins with the Eclipse workbench extension points and a widget toolkit.

LXer Feature: 16-Oct-2007

Sunday was the second day of T-DOSE in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, a technical open source event aimed at developers. See our previous article for the coverage of the first day. Today's topics: Search Engine development with AdvaS, A GNU Edu overview, Sebastian Kügler about KDE 4.0 and an overview of Free Software events in Europe. I was also able to talk in person with a few people, such as Olivier Cleynen, who's presentation from yesterday about FOSS marketing is also covered in today's article.

The first-ever Ontario LinuxFest, unapologetically modeled on Ohio's conference of the same name, took place on Saturday at the Toronto Congress Centre near the end of runway 24R at Toronto's international airport. With only a few sessions and a lot of quality speakers, the organisers kept the signal-to-noise ratio at this conference as good as it gets. The charismatic Marcel Gagné gave the first talk I attended. Gagné started his talk on what's coming in KDE 4.0, which is expected to be released in mid-December, by stating that KDE 4.0 is a radical departure from existing desktop environments, including current versions of KDE.