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For small businesses that don't have the tech savvy or the time to tinker with configurations and want to keep their tech really basic, Linspire will pay for itself in the amount of time it saves you. Fast downloads and easy to find-and-install applications — what more could you ask for?

About a third of businesses plan to migrate at least some Windows machines to Linux, according to a recent survey, but adoption will continue to slow and cautious, as companies evaluate a maze of economic factors.

The AbiWord project has announced a new "stable" version of its popular open source word processing suite. The project describes AbiWord as a "no-frills word processor without all the extras that make its competitors such space and memory hogs." Abiword is cross-platform, open source software, and is available under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The open source community today received a contribution from Germany's Netline Internet Service. The software -- Open-xchange -- competes with Microsoft's Exchange email and collaboration server software. Today's release follows word at the recent LinuxWorld conference that the project would be released as open source software by month end.

The latest release of Java aims to make you a more productive programmer.

Currently, metadata is expressed in separate text, Java properties, and XML files, but that poses a serious problem: code is disconnected from configuration, making development, deployment, and maintenance that much more difficult. JDK 1.5 addresses this disparity, capturing critical information where it belongs: right in your code.

With JBoss AOP, provided in JBoss 4, developers can write plain old Java objects (POJOS) and request complex services like transactions, security, and caching with just a few simple annotations.

Riffing on "free as in speech, not free as in beer," critics often quip that Open Source is "free, as in puppy." Yeah, they say, Open Source has floppy ears, a wagging tail, and a price that can't be beat, but beware, they warn, the costs of adopting and keeping it -- expenses such as training, support, and maintenance -- can't be overlooked.

In the old days, disk space cost a pretty penny, so saving space was essential. But now that disk space costs about $0.50 per gigabyte, a lot of folks never worry about deleting files, let alone compressing them. However, if you're administering a large, shared server (such as for email), it seems that you can never have too much space.

If recent events are any indication, open source advocates may be the best informed people in the country about software copyright law (outside of the legal profession). But as a foundation for future discussions, let's take some time this month to review the basics of United States copyright law, discuss the GNU General Public License (GPL), explore how various legal attacks on the GPL might play out, and see how those attacks might be thwarted.

Forbes magazine founder Bertie Charles Forbes once famously said, "If you don't drive your business, you'll be driven out of business." Indeed, many small and medium-sized businesses have floundered not because they offer a poor product or service, but because they're eventually unable to manage their business processes well enough to flourish in often highly competitive industries.

While the title of this month's "Power Tools" is "Execution and Redirection," it's not about about dying and going to heaven. Instead, controlling execution and redirecting input and output is an important part of managing Linux processes.

Suffering eyestrain from looking at a flickering monitor? Can't quite fit everything you want in your display? Ordinarily, problems like these call for a new monitor, or at least switching to a different standard resolution -- say, going down in resolution if the problem is flicker, or going up from 1024x768 to 1280x1024 to get more screen real estate.

Kernel 2.6 is finally here, and it touts several enhancements over the 2.4 series. The press has highlighted changes relevant to systems architects and managers, but there's plenty in 2.6 for application developers, too. This month's column provides an overview of some updates and new features in 2.6, including filesystem support, threading library changes, and the new kernel-level profiler.

In some of my past columns, I've mentioned that my template system of choice is the aptly named Template Toolkit, a marvelous work by Andy Wardley. Although I've demonstrated how I've used the Template Toolkit (TT), I haven't really talked enough about what makes it so wonderfully useful. So, this month, let's take a more in-depth look at the wonders of TT.

April's "API Spy" introduced Python's C API and showed how a Python interpreter can be embedded in a C program. For many tasks where you need to run a Python script from within C code, last month's technique is sufficient. However, as your C programs and Python scripts evolve, you may want or need more advanced interaction between the two languages.

Whether you're an independent web site operator or the manager of a large web serving farm, you must constantly look for ways to optimize your environment to keep costs low and boost overall performance. Indeed, optimization has recently become something of a crusade for businesses, as many search for ways to yield even the slightest improvements in profit.

Much to my surprise, IBM and Sun are at least talking about an open source Java. However, I doubt it'll happen. I mean, Sun won't even agree to play with Eclipse, and, let's face it, Java is a far bigger deal than standards for integrated development environments.

It is unclear whether international workers wearing blue helmets will soon be distributing bootable Linux CDs to the world's population of computer users, but the United Nations has launched a new free and open source software promotion effort dubbed the International Open Source Network (IOSN).