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Asterisk, the open source IP PBX software, has scored a resounding endorsement from one of its resellers, Aspect Software - which claims to be the world's largest company solely focused on the contact centre - is being used for Aspect's new corporate headquarters, with 500 users.

A few weeks ago, I decided to start looking for a new system. After a fair amount of searching, I settled on a Shuttle XPC SN27P2 barebones system that includes the case, motherboard, and power supply. Since it's hard to find information about supported hardware under Linux, I thought I'd share my experience with the XPC. It's a tiny system that can pack a hefty punch, and it's a good system for users who want to run Linux.

kdump and SystemTap Enhancements to Increase Serviceability in Production Systems

Communities in countries such as Sierra Leone will soon be using Linux and the recently released Campcaster 1.1 software to build community broadcasting efforts. Campcaster is free software built on Linux for independent radio stations.

DesktopLinux.com's executive editor recently decided to retire Red Hat 7 after seven years of loyal service as his home LAN's firewall/router OS. This article chronicles his trials and tribulations as he presses "pure Debian" into service, first as a server and then as a Linux desktop.

Last week we flew over the virtualization landscape and got a peek at the lay of the land. Today we'll look at some of the Linux applications for implementing virtualization: Xen, User-Mode Linux, VMWare, chroot jails, and OpenVZ.

Intalio plans to release its business process management tools under an open source license. The Redwood City, Calif., company said Tuesday it plans to offer the BPMS Community Edition under the Mozilla Public License starting in the first quarter of 2007. The suite includes an Eclipse-based business process design tool that supports the business process modeling notation (BPMN) standard.

Belkin is shipping a WiFi phone based on Linux and Skype's proprietary VoIP (voice-over-IP) client. The Belkin WiFi Phone for Skype can use open or encrypted WiFi networks, and connects seamlessly at commercial hotspots and hot zones operated by Boingo, Belkin says.

Back at 3GSM in February, PalmSource (now officially ACCESS Systems) introduced the ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP), a new Linux-based mobile operating system (OS) for smartphones that's intended to be the follow up to the Palm OS. The company said at the time it would get full version of the platform to licensees by the close of 2006.

The 2.6.20 Linux kernel will include a driver aimed at allowing user-space processes to exploit virtualization capabilities in modern 64-bit x86 Intel and AMD processors. The KVM (kernel-based virtual machine) patch was submitted in late October by Avi Kivity, and committed by Linus Torvalds to the 2.6 tree this week.

Want to build a new generation of free software users? Support projects such as Edubuntu. My sister-in-law works at an afterschool program for elementary school students. It’s flexible and inexpensive, which is very nice: these kids wouldn’t have many options for safe adult supervision without it. Of course, that means the program has very little money, especially for luxuries such as a computer. My brother scrounged up an aging eMachine and installed Edubuntu. All of a sudden, a 400 MHz machine without an Internet connection and with no hope of installing legitimately-purchased educational software had plenty of colorful free software and an interface clear enough for my three year old nephew to find his favorite games. (He likes the colors and shapes game with the train.)

Excerpt from the bookConfiguring IPCop Firewalls: Closing Borders with Open Source by Barrie Dempster and James Eaton-Lee. Published by Packt Publishing and reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. IPCop is a firewall for the Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) network, which is extremely easy to use and is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). This excerpt outlines a few common methods of deploying IPCop and the motivation behind these topologies along with descriptions of some of the featrues you can deploy.

The month of October has been, at least to this writer, one of discovery. The technical one was by far the easier of the two: changing Linux distributions. While I've done my best to keep tabs on the literally hundreds of different versions of Linux available, at the end of the day one needs to settle down and pick one for everyday use. Operating systems are (and rightfully should be) the boring means-to-an-end part of one's IT needs. But that doesn't mean that the OS should be taken for granted - some are more useful than others.

It has 10 main predictions for 2007, but numbers nine and 10 affect Microsoft. It reckons Microsoft's anti-piracy efforts on client operating systems will backfire, and that will drive customers towards Linux.

The two companies announced a partnership and support agreement last week to optimize the interaction between MySQL databases and Open-Xchange groupware functions. Open-Xchange customers won't have to pay extra for product support for MySQL, they said.

gvSIG, the Open Source (GNU/GPL license) Geographic Information System developed by the Generalitat Valenciana reaches its version 1.0. With this release, gvSIG presents itself as an integrated GIS + SDI (Spatial Data Infrastructure) client, able to combine data from different local and remote sources (web services) and at the same time include advanced editing, geoprocessing, scripting language support and georeferencing among other features.

Many products are moving from commercial closed-source to open or part-open source. This article looks at a product that has moved from classic open source to more overtly commercial, while remaining open source. In doing so, we look at the licensing nuances that affect its use both as an open source and a commercial product.

In light of the explosion in social networking sites (Myspace, Facebook, Xanga et cetera) and Web 2.0 communities, social network analysis is hotter than ever. A new open source library released today (libSNA) helps social scientists and software developers rapidly create experiments and computer programs to understand emerging social networks.

Fallout from the Microsoft-Novell pact continued last week when the leading Linux group, Open Source Development Labs, cut nine of its staff of 28, including CEO Stuart Cohen, who resigned. OSDL's most famous employee, Linus Torvalds, owner of the Linux trademark and head of Linux kernel development, still works there.

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