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PalmSource acquires mobile Linux vendor China MobileSoft and announces plans to implement the Palm operating system on top of Linux.

Everybody seems to be interested in China these days. It represents a rapidly growing, potentially huge market for technology products of all kinds. Our company, China MobileSoft, has been doing business in China in the embedded arena for several years, and we would like to share our view of the opportunities.

This article covers some recent changes in the SELinux kernel code including a performance patch from Kaigai Kohei of NEC and related updates to the selinuxfs API. Currently, these changes are waiting in the -mm tree for merging into Linus' kernel in 2.6.10, and are also available in the development Fedora and RHEL4 Beta kernels. This article should be useful to sysadmins who are looking to understand SELinux performance and generally also to curious people.

The Mozilla Foundation claims to be working with various phone manufacturers, who are already using Minimo, a 'mini-Mozilla' browser for consumer devices

The KDE project announced the availability of KDE 3.3.2, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful Free Software desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. KDE 3.3.2 ships with lot of bug fixes since KDE 3.3.1 and is available in 52 languages (now including Afrikaans and Galician). Sources, build script and contributed packages are linked on the KDE 3.3.2 info page.

Broadens PalmSource product portfolio to include software for mobile phones at all price points - Increases worldwide customer base - Expands R&D, sales and marketing resources in China - Creating Linux-based version of Palm OS, accelerating innovation

PalmSource, which makes software for mobile devices, said Wednesday that it has agreed to acquire China MobileSoft in a deal expected to expand the company's global presence and put Linux applications squarely in its product plans.

Linux-optimized Blade Server for Datacenter Consolidation and Entry-level Clustering

IT spending in the Asia-Pacific is expected to increase in 2005, albeit at a slower rate than before, predicted Gartner on Tuesday.

VA Linux Systems Japan says it will soon release a scalable, open source messaging software suite that targets large enterprises and can handle huge email infrastructures with over a million email accounts. VA FlexMessaging Solution is touted as an "all-in-one messaging solution" that scales to address enterprise requirements for high-availability, high-performance, and extensibility.

Erinn Clark, co-founder of Debian Women, is quick to stress that the group doesn't exist because Debian is particularly woman-unfriendly. Yes, Debian has "a bit of a reputation" for elitism and aggressive discussions on its mailing lists. Some women, too, find the effort needed to form associations in the all-male group -- a necessity for becoming a Debian developer -- intimidating. Yet, if one of Debian Women's goals is to change the Debian project to encourage women's participation, an equally important one is to explain Debian to women and show them ways that they can contribute.

Armed with a new form factor and its clustering management software, Penguin Computing on Wednesday launched an aggressively priced Linux-based blade server targeted at the lower end of the market -- a market recently entered into by Dell Computer.

This router offers a lot of features for its price point and has great potential--potential that won't be realized until the configuration, documentation and support improve.

The EU Council will postpone its decision on making software patentable until 2005, a sign of mounting political pressure against the decision, which could now be pushed back to next March.

The following text was forwarded to us by Bruce Perens as "An open letter from PalmSource to the Linux community." It is reproduced here verbatim aside from minor HTML formatting changes:

The Mozilla Firefox browser has garnered wide attention for its capabilities, compared to its predecessor Mozilla and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. But in addition to its widely covered speed enhancements and robust security, Firefox offers a rich assortment of features that are not so evident upon installation.

The blank document that opens every time you open the OpenOffice Writer application is actually a template. A real-world situation in the story below illustrates the need of some users to open a blank document with unusual or non-standard characteristics. It's a non-intuitive adjustment and offers a launch pad for a demonstration of OpenOffice's rich Templates features. (Applicable to OpenOffice 1.1.3 on Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X.)

Red Hat needs to lower its prices, or risk losing customers to free versions of the open-source operating system, the Dell executive who oversees the partnership with the Linux seller said Tuesday.

Top Dell executives disparaged the "big iron" approach of building large, powerful servers on Tuesday--a dig at rivals IBM, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.

Dell and Sun Microsystems actually agree on something. Both companies think Red Hat's Linux operating system and services are too expensive. A Dell executive struck out at Red Hat today, saying smaller customers might shy away from the price of Red Hat's software. This charge is particularly unusual for Dell, which has been a major Red Hat backer. Dell, in fact, has been a longtime investor in Red Hat and was late to promote SuSE Linux as an option for customers.