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Placing your own code between a program and the libraries it is linked against is easy when you use the LD_PRELOAD environment variable.

Singapore's Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) has large-scale plans for deploying OpenOffice.org on Windows PCs, a MINDEF spokeswoman told ZDNet UK on Tuesday. "MINDEF has already installed the OpenOffice productivity suite on 5,000 desktop computers," said the spokeswoman. "We hope to deploy OpenOffice on 20,000 desktop computers by the end of March 2006."

A change in the voting weights of EU members means that the EU Council members which supported controversial changes to the EU Software Patents directive no longer have a majority vote, prompting some campaigners to call for a recount.

The conference "Open Standards and Libre Software in Government" is organised by MERIT in coordination with the Dutch Presidency of the European Union, on November 18, 2004 in The Hague, The Netherlands. It is supported by the European Commission, Dutch Ministries of Economic Affairs and of the Interior, and the Dutch Government's OSOSS Programma.

In what it's calling the largest technology release in its history, Wind River today announced a new development suite, three market-specific platforms (MSP), one general-purpose platform and its first Linux platform.

Linuxlookup.com is reporting on how Transgaming released a time limited demo of its flagship Linux product, Cedega. The Cedega Time Limited Demo will be available only for a two week period, from November 2nd to November 15th and can be downloaded at www.transgaming.com. Cedega allows hundreds of the top triple ‘A’ PC titles to run on the Linux operating system, seamlessly, transparently, and out-of-the-box with equivalent game-play and performance as the original PC version. Some of the blockbuster video games supported by Cedega include the yet unreleased and highly anticipated Blizzard’s® World of WarCraft®, Electronic Arts’™ Battlefield 1942™, NCsoft’s™ City of Heroes®, UbiSoft’s™ Far Cry™ and Edios’™ Hitman: Contracts™, among hundreds of others; Cedega also supported id Software’s DOOM 3™ the same day as its commercial release.

Microsoft's lead in the browser market may still be huge, but it is being chipped away by open-source rivals

At this year's Linux World Expo & Conference Europe, taking place in Frankfurt, Germany, KDE's mail application KMail received the Linux New Media Award in the "Best Mail Client" category. The prize was awarded to "Kontact/KMail" to honor the groupware integration efforts made by the KMail developers. KMail maintainer Ingo Klöcker was the one to receive the award. The Linux New Media Awards are among the most significant international prizes for Linux- and Open Source products. The jury consisted of 100 Linux- and IT experts, among them Linux kernel hacker Alan Cox and Knoppix inventor Klaus Knopper.

The two years leading up to today's U.S. presidential election have not been good for electronic voting, which is estimated to tally, or at least attempt to tally, about 30 percent of all U.S. votes, or an estimated 50 million ballots. The failures of voting machines and the software they run has been rivaled only by inadequate federal and state election certification procedures that allowed questionable technology to be carrying, or possibly corrupting, American votes. However, after all of the frozen voting terminals, lost software loads, mysteriously found machines, and vendors' efforts to keep it all hushed, there is some good news on e-voting.

The SCO Group Inc. is reconsidering its plans to launch an alternative to the Groklaw.net Web site that had been scheduled to go live this week, a company spokeswoman said Monday.

According to Gartner, the two distributors have different strategies, skill sets, target markets and foundation technologies, and may design their support contracts in very different ways, advised an analyst from Gartner. By evaluating both distributors and by including Dell as a server option, enterprises may also realize higher cost savings from Linux subscription support and competitive pricing on hardware.

Novell has hit back strongly against Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer's letter, in which the CEO of the largest proprietary software firm in the world trashed Linux completely.

Last Saturday The Mozilla Foundation announced that it was 300% over its target of garnering $75,000 in donations so that it could place a full page ad in the New York Times. Kelly McNeill's osRadio broadcast shows that this strategy has the potential to exceed most paid software company's advertising budgets if extended to more projects and be allowed to go beyond the 10 day time limit that The Mozilla Foundation set.

Last time we talked about Unicode and its benefits. If you've decided you want to reap those benefits yourself, here's how to convert a Linux system from another encoding system to Unicode.

Microsoft says its IP indemnification provides better protection than that offered by rivals Red Hat and Novell - but not all lawyers agree. In a email, sent to Microsoft customers and partners on Wednesday, Steve Ballmer claimed that Windows was a better choice than Linux. His reasons included Microsoft's old favourites of total cost of ownership and security, but also included a relatively new weapon, IP indemnification.

Contending that it’s just too difficult to build applications that respond to events in the real world using current programming languages, iSpheres Corp. is offering an open-source, copyright-free SQL-like language for processing these kinds of requests.

Hardware Acceleration Delivers Wire Speed Performance to Award-Winning Security Software Provided to Systems Integrators and Network Equipment Vendors

NSW Commerce Minister John Della Bosca has ruled out umpiring government contracts in an effort to promote open source, saying individual agencies would choose their own software.

And this comes straight from the horse’s mouth! Software giant Microsoft has finally acknowledged Linux as its strongest competitor, much to the delight of Australia’s open source industry association (OSIA).

Computer Associates International on Monday plans to widen the field for open source alternatives to commercial databases with the general release of the Ingres r3 database on the Linux and Windows platforms.