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PDFedit is not the first tool for editing PDF files on the GNU/Linux desktop, but it does have a strong claim to being the first truly practical one. Although only at version 0.2.5, PDFedit is already a practical solution for manipulating pages and text in PDF files, as well as for salvaging content in usable formats. It suffers only from an eccentric interface and some of the instability typical of an early release.

Red Hat hopes its latest release will lock in its position as the Linux leader as more companies vie for a piece of the competitive market.

Crypto guru Phil Zimmermann speaks to us about the potential loss of our heritage to digital rights management. Tomorrow's archaeologists will have plenty of DVDs from our era, and no way of reading them.

South Africa's first Open Tuesday was held on Tuesday night, drawing a mixed crowd of OSS developers and potential investors. The first of what should become an important monthly event on many people's calendars, it started people talking about the possibility for OSS in South Africa to reach its full potential.

British-based banking and financial services group HSBC is standardizing its thousands of Linux servers on Novell's SUSE Linux, a direct result of the recent cooperation agreement between Microsoft and Novell.

There are several tasks to which we must attend before actually making use of our freshly installed FreeBSD system. Immediately upon reboot, you will find yourself in the console. While it is possible to setup and use the graphical login managers -- kdm, gdm or others -- it is important to note that this uses extra resources. One of our assumptions is that you might not have all that excess horsepower, so we'll stick with the console login for now.

France's National Assembly is staging a revolution of its own: it's moving from Windows to open source. When the Assembly meets next in June 2007, its members will be working on 1,154 new computers running Ubuntu Linux.

SkinnyCorp.com has built a group of community-based sites on a traditional LAMP stack -- Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. SkinnyCorp software engineer Harper Reed credits the open source infrastructure with keeping the business agile. He says the licensing costs of proprietary software would have strangled a business that's growing as quickly as his.

Welcome to this year's 4th issue of DWN, the newsletter for the Debian community. The Debian listmaster determined as part of the spring cleaning effort several unused and obsolete lists that will be closed down. Tony Mobily noted that the last GIF patent has finally expired. Gustavo Franco reported that Second Life runs on Debian servers because it is suited to scaling massively with a small IT staff.

Simple file encryption is useful, but sometimes it's more useful to encrypt a complete filesystem or disk, such as when you need to protect a large set of files. Or you may need not only to protect, but to completely hide the presence of sensitive data from prying eyes. For these cases, here are several options for securing your systems.

One of the best ways you can participate in the free and open source software (FOSS) revolution is by helping to test software and reporting bugs and issues to project developers to help them improve their code. Even in the wild and woolly, sometimes undisciplined approach to development that we see in FOSS projects, there are ways to test more effectively. Here are more than a dozen tips suggested by testing gurus and developers that can help you become a successful tester.

Tuomo Valkonen, who you may know as the author of the Ion window manager has a rant about the brokenness of the megafreeze development model, where a Linux distribution attempts to stabilize the entire system. As an upstream contributor, I find it highly frustrating to release a new version of my software and have users contact me for about ancient versions I no longer want to support.

In a bid to promote the mainstream adoption of Linux, Canonical and Linspire announced a technology partnership. Linspire will start to base Linspire/Freespire on Ubuntu, while Canonical will in turn use Linspire's CNR application delivery service.

Given a copy of the Linux- based educational software package tuXlab to review, James Archibald revisits school days and gives it a run through.

Hello readers, and welcome once again to Free Software Magazine’s fortnightly newsletter, keeping you up to date with all things free software! Enjoy!

LynuxWorks has launched a new version of its commercially supported embedded Linux operating system aimed specifically at Xilinx FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays). BlueCat Linux Micro Edtion (BlueCat-ME) supports Xilinx FPGAs with embedded PowerPC cores, and those that use their programmable logic elements to run Xilinx's 32-bit MicroBlaze softcore.

Once again, the Debian project is gearing up to elect a new project leader, with voting set to begin late this month. As we did last year, we asked the DPL candidates to sound off on some of the issues that will face the Debian Project in the next year.

Mandriva on March 8 announced the launch of the beta version of Corporate Desktop 4.0, its enterprise-dedicated Linux desktop. While best known for its home user Linux desktops, Mandriva (formerly Mandrakesoft) has long been angling for the business market with both its server and desktop offerings.

Welcome to our issue number 80 of Fedora Weekly News. In this issue, we have following articles:

1 2 Million Fedora Core 6 Installs
2 Fedora Core 6 Linux Eclipses 2M User Mark
3 Talking points for Fedora 7 release
4 Fedora Infrastructure needs your help!
5 Fedora 7 and the wireless world
6 Ambassadors Report: Chemnitz LinuxTag
7 Review: Fedora 7 Test 2
8 Security Week in Review 2007-03-04
9 Fedora Weekly Reports 2007-03-05
10 Fedora Core 5 and 6 Updates
11 Contributing to Fedora Weekly News
12 Editor's Blog

Scott Handy started with IBM in 1983 as a systems engineer and went on to sales, marketing, and strategy positions covering large accounts, channels, small and medium business, and IBM products for Windows NT, Sun Solaris, and OS/2 Warp. Now, as vice president for Linux and open source, he is one of the main public faces articulating IBM's open-source strategy. IDG News Service Senior Writer Elizabeth Montalbano caught up with Handy at the sidelines of the recent LinuxWorld Open Solutions Summit in New York. He talked about how the industry giant manages to support a vast product portfolio for Linux and open-source initiatives.