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Company plans new division, software release aimed at luring government users

my ears perked up when I heard that the live-CD Mepis Linux distribution was built on Debian. That meant that all the slick things that my friends raved about in Debian are rolled into Mepis. And Mepis is a breeze to install. Once Mepis is running from the CD you have the option of installing it on the hard drive, which took about 20 minutes on one of my prehistoric 266-MHz laptops.

Ross, now 19, a sophomore computer science major at Stanford University, has an even more impressive resume than most of his peers. Before graduating high school, he helped develop Firefox.

Last week unbridled joy entered your life when you got coLinux running on your Windows PC without any kind of virtual machine monitor and without the aid of a safety net. Several of you have already written in to tell of your coLinux exploits, and this week - can you believe it? - it gets better!

Patch management vendor New Boundary Technologies is expanding the range of its software beyond Windows to answer user demands for cross-platform support that will address vulnerabilities, regardless of where they exist on the network.

No one wants to spend money on something they can get for free. If you're building your own computer, or upgrading an old one, a major expense is going to be Windows itself. This can cost upwards of £100 and, if you want to add other programs, you'll find that the project can become rather expensive. There are alternatives to Windows and its compatible programs, however, and we're not talking about illegal copies of software.

On November 9th, the highly anticipated Firefox 1.0 arrived. If you'd been using Firefox Preview Release or a Release Candidate there was no news at all feature-wise, since most changes were related to bug fixes or under the hood improvements.

When you have 20 or more windows open across nine virtual desktops, the complexity of window management can become overwhelming. A number of new tools are now available to facilitate effective window management.

Today dawns a new era of discussion. In the past, Paul Ferris and Dean Pannell (FeriCyde and DinoTrac) sparred impromptu in the talkbacks of many a respectable (and otherwise :) website. Today, for the first time, they make it official. The format is called Penguin Counter Penguin, and the subject random. Today the debate is on the slighter side of the Linux Desktop. Is the Linux desktop really ready for prime-time? Who knows for sure, but you can bet that Paul and Dean have their flamethrowers tuned for the finer points of the debate!

Employees at about 4,800 desks of Vienna's Municipal Authority, the department heads included, from this year on will be given the choice of using a special Linux distribution named Wienux in place of the hitherto exclusively used Microsoft platform Windows 2000 with Office 2000.

The Navy's Program Executive Office for Information Technology is giving open-source software a look.

As a consultant to small businesses and non-profit organizations that are too small to have any IT staff of their own, I need to be able to support a diverse array of desktops and servers, platforms and file formats. I've been able to do it exclusively with Linux since 1998. Here are my must-have Linux desktop applications.

Ben Goodger has posted some screenshots of the new Mozilla Firefox Options/Preferences window, which is currently under development.

IBM is about to announce a new lower-end Power server designed to run Linux. IBM has put the two-processor OpenPower 710 up for sale in the UK. (IBM kindly pulled the linked web site down about an hour after this story first appeared. Thankfully, there is still a cached version here.) The sample configuration for the rackmount system shows it running on 1.65GHz Power5 chips. The new box will fit in below the four-processor OpenPower 720 released last September.

many enterprises are relunctant to switch to Mozilla Firefox. Reasons cited include deployment difficulties, conservative IT policies and the fact that Web browsers are not considered core corporate tools.

Sun has gotten the blessing of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for its new Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL say "Cuddle"), the royalty-free license it is reportedly supposed to use in open sourcing Solaris 10.

KDE 3.4 Beta 1, christened Krokodile, was released not too long ago. For those of you who have not yet taken the plunge, Eudpytula Minor has announced some Krokodile screenshots for your viewing pleasure.

The International Open Source Network, an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme, has produced a 48-page primer on Free and Open Source Software and Education, which is now available for free public download. According to the IOSN the primer is intended to help policy-makers and decision-makers understand the potential use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in education. The primer is released under a Creative Commons licence.

We are glad to announce the release of FlameRobin 0.2.0 ALPHA, now with property sheets and editors for most database objects, brand new background backup & restore features and a MacOS X port. Not to mention the new program logo, new home on sf.net.

Safeguards against phishing have been checked in to Mozilla Thunderbird. In builds with this feature, Thunderbird will display a confirmation dialogue when the user follows a link in an email to a site that looks like it might be part of a phishing scam. The dialogue is currently triggered when visiting a URL with a numeric IP address instead of a domain name or a URL that does not match the address displayed in the message's link text.