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Welcome to this year's 13th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. James Troup announced the addition of two developers to the ftpmaster team, who will work on new packages in particular. Rob Bradford eventually announced the founding of a an Debian UK society that will deal with donations in the UK.

The Linux version of the PDF reader, now with increased security and collaboration features, can be downloaded from the company's Web site.

Too many advocates of open source don't understand that business support trumps technical excellence every time.

It's nice to be able to listen to a net radio station directly on your computer. But wouldn't it be great if you could record it on your hard disk? Better yet, what if you could schedule recordings, so you don't miss your favourite programmes? Using VLC Player and a simple batch file you can turn your computer into a radio recorder.

Ahmed Masud encountered Linux for the first time 15 years ago and immediately thought the open source technology would soon be a useful tool in providing services for his government clients.

Two weeks after Novell Inc. released software that lets users run its stack of computing services on either the NetWare or Linux kernel, members of the NetWare faithful cited widely varying plans for migrating their servers to Linux.

In a message posted to the OSI license-discuss email list on March 29, Intel attorney McCoy Smith wrote, "Intel has been studying internally the issue of license proliferation. One step Intel would like to take to reduce license proliferation (both internally, and externally, to Intel) is to have the "Intel Open Source License" (aka "BSD License with Export Notice") removed from future use as an approved OSI open source license."

Memory Reviews When building any modern computer, the choice of which memory to use is a major consideration. After all, why spend a mint on the latest CPU and motherboard, only to slow it down a bit with anything but the best memory available? This was definitely a big consideration when we began work on our Ultimate Linux Workstation. So, the question before us was, “Which memory should we buy and would the expense of the lower latency memory be worth it?” To answer this question, we went in search of the three standard CAS latencies that you will find for DDR memory and we put them to the test on our new Opteron testbed.

It's hard to imagine that yoga, the 5,000-year-old discipline of exercise, diet and meditation, would have anything in common with the modern software industry. But a group of loosely affiliated yoga instructors based in California have embraced the philosophy of the open-source software movement in fighting a campaign by a richly successful yoga master to use copyright law to bar competitors from practicing any part of his exercise routines without authorization.

The needle, or data, in the heterogeneous IT haystack will soon be easier to find for users of IBM's DB2 database. Thanks to the very recent acquisition of Ascential Software, IBM is giving its database advanced query powers, according to Jeff Jones, director of strategy, IBM Information Management Solutions. Joes says that two partnerships with Zend Technologies and The Apache Foundation will make it easier for developers to create and for SMBs to find IBM-flavored open source databases. In this interview, Jones discusses the capabilities that Ascential and Zend bring to the table, as well as the initiative aimed at developing IBM/Apache Derby database code

The hobbyist days where Linux was taught in back rooms populated with ‘geeks only’ is history, with Linux making a headway into the deepest, most critical areas of the enterprise. Today, we see a different classroom culture with people belonging to diverse backgrounds filling up seats for learning Linux.

The Brazilian government has plans to help millions of low-income people buy their first computers. Looking to save millions of dollars in royalties and licensing fees, Mr. da Silva has instructed government ministries and state-run companies to gradually switch from costly operating systems made by Microsoft and others to free operating systems, like Linux. (Free registration required)

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- So what was the bottom line from the PyCON 2005 conference, held here last week? Python is an open-source technology whose use in enterprise IT operations will only grow for the foreseeable future. Mission-critical development organizations often regard only a handful of languages -- C#, Java, XML, SQL, and few others -- as safe enough for serious projects. From this perspective, Python has been traditionally lumped with "experimental" or "toy" languages. Over and over, however, speakers at this conference presented evidence to the contrary.

"As a new small publisher," says Gil Student, president of Yashar Books,"we see our mission as disseminators of ideas. In that spirit, we have decided to supplement--and circumvent--conventional marketing methods to give open access to Torah scholarship in new, exciting ways."

In June 2001, Progeny Linux Systems was in crisis. Looking around, co-founder and CEO Ian Murdock realized that the company needed fundamental changes to survive. Four years later, Progeny is back up to its former staffing levels and showing modest profits. It is also one of the few Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)-based companies from that era to survive. Murdock's assessment of where the company went wrong and his story of how it reinvented itself offer some practical suggestions for other start-ups, especially FOSS-based ones.

For the second time since 2001, the US Navy is looking to increase its use of open-source software through a research and development programme with the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI) and a growing group of IT vendors.

Peter Harrison, author of the Linux Quick Fix Notebook, discusses the Web site hosting decision making process and shares his thoughts concerning the future of Linux, what is holding it back, and what can be done about it.

How can you quickly produce a professional-looking report? If you're using KDE, you can turn to KOffice's KSpread spreadsheet and KWord word processor.

LinuxForce, a provider of Debian GNU Linux outsourced systems administration services, announced last week that it had signed an agreement to acquire the assets of Web hosting provider Cyber Loft. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The HASE (Human Aspects of Software Engineering) group at the University of Maryland Baltimore County is conducting two online surveys for KDE users. They expect to obtain results that will lead to useful discussions about the overall usability of KDE. The results of this research will be shared with the KDE community. The surveys take about 15 minutes to complete.