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This is a public beta. Feel free to forward this announcement to anyone who may be interested in testing this beta release.

It’s been a fairly slow news week (at least as far as items I have commentary on) and time is a bit short, so we may not have a podcast available this week (although a short one over the weekend is a possibility). I’d like to take this time out to get some feedback on the podcast though. What are we doing right? What could be improved and what would you like to see more of? Post your feedback in the comments of this thread. Thanks.

Not only were HP board members' phone records accessed in the leak probe, now comes the extraordinary news that so were CNET reporter Dawn Kawamoto's, who wrote the article that angered HP's chairwoman Patricia Dunn.

The open source document management system developed in South Africa by Jam Warehouse has been downloaded over more than 200 000 times from SourceForge.Net.

There was some interesting buzz about the state of open source going around ApacheCon in Dublin. On one hand, Apache is - and is widely seen as - a moderate, pragmatic voice in the FOSS world: the Apache license is explicitly business-friendly, and the conference was very happy to welcome the arch-enemy of more dogmatic FOSS advocates, Microsoft, among us.

IT managers are accustomed to having an abundance of options for managing servers at the software or operating system level. These applications typically comes at a high purchase and operational expense and cannot cover every operational scenario. Their lack of integration within the overall management system is also relatively poor. To fill such gaps, industry organizations have created open management standards that can offer some help.

Linux Networx has enjoyed record revenue growth over the last several quarters. In Q2, the company enjoyed its fifth consecutive record quarter in a row. Over the last six years, Linux Networx has refined its HPC offerings and grown its customer base to the point where it is now considered one of the premier supercomputer vendors. But some changes are afoot.

Red Hat is leading an initiative allowing software companies to brief users of a US government-backed security database on how far vulnerabilities affect their products. The Linux vendor has asked that companies can now comment on security holes listed by the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), in order to provide deeper analysis and explanation of the impact problems might have on their products.

TimeSys will offer a series of educational webinars on Linux board bring-up and Linux real-time requirements and options, this fall. Additionally, the company will also offer several webinars aimed at documenting the LinuxLink sevices it offers to embedded Linux developers.

Distro maintainer Andrea Jaeger on Sept. 7 announced the availability of the fourth alpha release of openSUSE 10.2, which uses an updated Linux kernel and offers a choice between the GNOME 2.16 Beta (2.15.92), KDE 3.5.4 or Xfce 4.2.3 desktop environments. "We've made a number of significant changes [including] switching to kernel 2.6.18rc5 -- and we use only the SMP kernel," Jaeger wrote in the release announcement.

A forthcoming portable media player (PMP) from Archos will be based on embedded Linux, confirms Opera Software, which will supply its Opera Web browser for the device. The Archos 604 WiFi will probably resemble Archos's currently available 604 model, but with added wireless networking and possibly a higher-resolution screen.

Open source software vendor Red Hat has announced a new initiative, implemented by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), that enables members of the software industry to officially and publicly comment on vulnerabilities that may affect their software.

This EDC whitepaper was commissioned by PalmSource. It overviews the progress and prospects of Linux in the mobile phone market, looking at major stack vendors, geographic trends, drivers, and inhibitors. It also includes research data from EDC's surveys of mobile application developers.

The GNOME project released version 2.16 of its popular Linux desktop on Sept. 6. In many ways, this is just a minor release. In others, however, it's a significant step forward for the Linux desktop. The first change old GNOME hands will notice is that, most, but not all of the default icon theme has been changed. It's now based on Tango. The Tango Desktop Project is an effort to create a consistent graphical user interface across all Linux desktops.

Many people collect things as a hobby. I collect computers. Over the years, as my collection grew, my living room began to look like a data center. As soon as VMware Server became freely (as in beer) available I knew I had to migrate my servers and development boxes to virtual machines (VM). The problem is that most of my servers run OpenBSD, which is not officially supported by VMware. Out of the box, VMware can't properly shut down OpenBSD VMs; it just powers VMs off, causing data corruption. With a little bit of hacking, I managed to eliminate this issue. Here's how you can install OpenBSD as a guest OS under VMware Server, and possibly other VMware products.

Many observers expect that, although often well entrenched, traditional management tools with license costs could be displaced by open source competitors like GroundWorks. "There are parts of systems management, such as event monitoring and change management, that are mature and ripe to be commoditized," said Jon Collins of analyst firm Macehiter Ward-Dutton.

Encryption products supplier Pointsec Mobile Technologies AB has added single sign-on and remote support features to its endpoint full-disk encryption software for Linux desktops and laptops.

According to the corporate cartels, so-called p2p 'pirates' are the scourge of the Net, "devastating" honest, hard-pressed the entertainment and software companies and forcing helpless support workers into hard times. However, David Choi and Arturo Perez have a somewhat different view, suggesting the phenonmenon of online piracy is a valuable source of innovation to the industries, as well as to entrepreneurs.

The diction and style tools put a GNU face on an old Unix feature. These tools read text input, either from a file or the standard input. diction checks the input at the sentence level, and marks wordy and trite phrases, cliches, and the like, while style works on the overall document, giving a summary of the writing style with a number of readability tests.

Live Linux CDs are popping up all over the place. Mainstream distributions like SimplyMepis let you try before you install, as does Ubuntu and Linspire. There are also specialized distributions like Knoppix and Dynebolic. One Gentoo Linux-based distribution, called Sectoo, might also warrant a "live" look.