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Kate is a lightweight, free GNU/Linux distribution from Poland released with the goal of allowing people to play games, watch movies, listen to music, and surf the Web. While it does do these tasks, it requires a lot of handholding, manual configuration, and knowledge on a user's part. A single-CD install (with an optional second CD) is all it takes to get you up and running with Kate, but you may need to have a computer nerd handy for the setup.

Mad Penguin has announced a new website that will allow people to give away and/or computer parts for free. Currently there are already people posting parts for free on the site so there is a chance it might catch on. The announcement is here

Billionaire Michael S. Dell, founder and chairman of Dell Inc., has placed a $99.5 million bet on Red Hat. Dell invested his own money in the Raleigh Linux software developer, taking the largest single chunk of $600 million in debentures offered by the company in January 2004.

For a company such as Microsoft whose most familiar competitive tactic has been to undercut rivals on price, "free" open source software such as the Linux operating system has represented a new and unusual threat.

An open source demonstration centre which allows free testing of the Linux OS has been put online by the Stuttgart Region Economic Development Corporation.

Linux adoption by small and medium-sized businesses is being held back by the lack of an open source groupware server that's easy to install and configure. SMBs will see little cost advantage from using Linux after adding in the cost an enterprise groupware product. But this problem may soon be a thing of the past, with the recent launch of the Hula project. Hula is an ambitious, open source project jump-started with more than 200,000 lines of code donated from Novell's NetMail product.

I have considered a scenario where Dell takes a commanding lead over Apple in the Educational market. With the release of Red Hat Desktop, Dell's engineers could offer a complete line of desktops and laptops bundled with Dell's consumer products. If I wanted a great return on investment, I would do that.

We've put together a series of side-by-side screen shots of Outlook Express and Thunderbird as a visual comparison of these basic rival e-mail clients.

Excellent open source Outlook Express alternatives are available which provide similar and additional features. Such is the case with Mozilla's Thunderbird, which is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users. Moving away from Outlook Express is a no-brainer, as our screen shots illustrate.

Annvix 1.0-RELEASE is a server-oriented Linux OS. Take a look at some of the features of this secure Linux distribution.

Nothing will make your team look worse than getting a call from an angry boss wondering why he couldn't get into the company email server all weekend. Server and service monitoring provides a way to know at all times which items on your network are up, which are down, what servers are experiencing issues handling load and just about any other type of availability information you could want. By configuring alerts and notifications, you can be the first to know when a problem on your network arises.

Oracle South Africa will host a Linux and Java 'installfest' at the upcoming LinuxWorld conference and exhibition, being held at the Sandton Convention Centre from 17th to 20th May.

The creators of LugRadio, a fortnightly radio programme that takes an irreverent look at Linux and open source, are holding a Linux community event this summer in Wolverhampton. It is aimed at open source fans, rather than corporate IT buyers, and the emphasis is very much on fun, rather than sales pitches.

A leaked report from the British Educational Communications and Technology Association contains bad news for software vendors such as Microsoft

The Mozilla Foundation is aware of two potentially critical Firefox security vulnerabilities as reported publicly Saturday, May 7th. There are currently no known active exploits of these vulnerabilities although a "proof of concept" has been reported. Changes to the Mozilla Update web service have been made to mitigate the risk of an exploit. Mozilla is aggressively working to provide a more comprehensive solution to these potential vulnerabilities and will provide that solution in a forthcoming security update. Users can further protect themselves today by temporarily disabling JavaScript.

Welcome to this year's 19th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Robert Storey has installed Gentoo Linux for the first time and he summarises his impressions in a mini-review. Despite some reports in the media, the FTP edition of SUSE LINUX 9.3 has not been released just yet, but there is much to look forward to in the next few weeks - the 3rd test of Fedora Core 4 should be out this coming Tuesday and, according to a new report, Debian Sarge is not far off either. Also in this issue - focus on Frugalware Linux as our featured distribution of the week. Happy reading!

EXACT, the EXperimental Access Control Thing, is a POP-before-SMTP daemon that integrates with most email systems to control email relaying and thereby potentially reduce spamming. Here's how you can install and configure EXACT to keep spammers from taking advantage of your mail server.

Hidden away in Building 17 — when he's not on the road, working to counteract the impression among open-source backers that Microsoft is the devil personified — is Bill Hilf.

Daniel Robbins, President/CEO of Gentoo Technologies, Inc shows you how to use netfilter to set up a powerful Linux stateful firewall. By completing this tutorial, you will understand how Linux stateful firewalls are put together, and you'll have several example configurations to use in your own projects.

On the Internet there is a tremoundous amount of argument over which operating system is the best for web hosting. There are anti-windows haters, there are FreeBSD fanatics and more. But which is the best? The truth is it depends on what you are doing.

For a company whose most familiar competitive tactic has been to undercut rivals on price, Microsoft has faced a new and unusual threat from "free" open-source software such as the Linux operating system.