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A free and concise 40-page guide to setting up Voice over IP telephone systems using free and open source Asterisk has been released. The book, available as a download, is aimed at the developing world but is just as good for users new to VoIP.

Unix standardization efforts are ongoing. No that's not a misprint. Unix is far from dead, and efforts to provide a degree of standardization for the remaining Unix players may well be a lifeline. Then again, according to at least one analyst, new Unix standards, though important, may not necessarily be everything.

Getting help on issues related to open source projects isn't always like walking a straight line. Sure there are bug reports, mailing lists and discussion forums, but the challenge of actually getting specific local issues addressed is not a sure thing. That's the gap that OpenLogic is attempting to fill with its Expert Community program. OpenLogic is an open source stack vendor that provides certified open source solutions and support for a collection of over 160 projects.

Metropolitan Health Group switches to Asterisk to speed up delivery and saves a healthy packet. "Asterisk makes us master of our own destiny," says thrilled IT manager.

The Flickr Web portal allows people to publish and share online, grouped and tagged by subject, whole galleries of digital pictures. You can use Flickr with several GNU/Linux-based applications. Developers can also use the API published on the Web site to obtain an API_KEY and build new interfaces to download, upload, or process pictures in Flickr. What might be less known is that Flickr already is another place where GNU/Linux users can meet, as well as a potentially very useful advocacy tool.

Terracotta announced that the company is open sourcing its Java clustering product line to accelerate adoption by developers using open source frameworks. Terracotta provides drop-in clustering solutions that enable developers to achieve high availability without rewriting applications. Terracotta will provide open source products free of charge, while offering professional support under a commercial subscription.

Why should an operating system be important for a mobile phone? It shouldn't, but of course mobile phones are no longer simple voice communicators, they are smart devices capable of many methods of communication and other sophisticated applications. Capable and complex, with a high degree of variety required to meet different market and user needs.

The non-profit Linux Information Project, whose duty, it says, it is "to provide high quality, comprehensive and easily accessible information about Linux and other free software," has published a treatise entitled "13 Reasons to Celebrate the New Microsoft-Novell Pact."

Willy Tarreau replaced Marcelo Tosatti as the 2.4 stable Linux kernel maintainer in August of 2006. In response to a series of compilation fixes sent to the lkml by Mariusz Kozlowski, Willy suggested that all patches would be postponed until 2.4.34 is released. He suggested that in the interum the appropriate subsystem maintainers should be contacted to determine whether or not each of the patches should be merged, "we would merge the accepted patches and those without any reply which we consider relevant early in the 35-pre cycle so that people have some time to inform us about the potential conflicts they encounter."

The Linux Professional Institute is updating its recertification policy to ensure that Linux professionals' skills and knowledge are up to date and relevant.

Bastille is a program for improving system security on Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE. Unlike packet sniffers, anti-virus programs, and the majority of security programs available today, Bastille does not wait to react to possible security breaches, but prevents them by removing system vulnerabilities. With many distributions softening security in their default installations in the name of convenience, this approach is enough by itself to make Bastille an essential program.

The first fruit of the recently announced Novell/Microsoft interoperability agreement arrived on Dec. 4, with Novell's announcement that its version of the OpenOffice productivity suite will now support the Microsoft Office Open XML format.

Tensilica is shipping two new processor core families based on its "post-RISC" style Xtensa architecture. The LX2 and Xtensa 7 cores are available with MontaVista Linux, and come with tools aimed at helping designers configure interfaces, memory subsystems, and other components, and even extend the architecture with C/C++ application-specific instructions.

It looks like the education space could be the first, real place where Linux could grab beachhead in the desktop PC market. Take a look at Indiana, for example..

Free of the hustle of the daily work life, Nat Friedman meditated in a Californian Buddhist monastery, clearing his mind of worldly clutter. For 10 days, he opened his consciousness to new ideas, new ways of thinking and new realms of possibility. No code. No e-mails. No meetings. No deadlines or work orders. Just simple serenity.

Having been raised on DOS and the early generations of Windows, I rediscovered that sense of excitement in a pure computing experience when I first tried other Linux versions over the years. However, they required a steep learning curve and caused too much frustration with setup and obscure command-line options. Not so with Ubuntu Linux.

There's been coverage galore of the benefits of the new interface sported by Office 2007, but there are plenty of good reasons not to make the switch to the latest version of Microsoft's best-selling product suite. Here's five of the most compelling.

Novell to support Open XML format to advance document interoperability

The Linux Warehouse has partnered with Scalix to provide the email and group calendaring developer's products in South Africa. The Scalix Collaboration Platform is a Linux-based alternative to Microsoft Exchange.

Support from software partners along with training and technical services promotion will help more customers take advantage of advanced workgroup and networking services on SUSE Linux Enterprise.