Tux Watch

The results of Linuxquestion.org’s Voting for its Members Choice Awards [here] have finally been announced [here] with Ubuntu taking the lead again on the Linux Distribution of the Year Choice by the website’s users with KDE being the dominant Desktop Environment. Knoppix still leads the show for Live Distros and Firefox continues to be the king of web browsers. Mysql continues to the bag Mr. Favorite choice while GIMP is the best Graphics App of the year. Cheers to Linuxquestion.org users, great going!

Here are the official results for the 2006 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards:

• Distribution of the Year - Ubuntu (26.44%)
• Live Distribution of the Year - Knoppix (26.22%)
• Browser of the Year - Firefox (74.61%)
• Database of the Year - MySQL (61.68%)
• Office Suite of the Year - OpenOffice.org (89.79%)
• Desktop Environment of the Year - KDE (56.58%)
• Video Media Player Application of the Year - mplayer (41.93%)
• Video Authoring Application of the Year - Kino (27.81%)
• Audio Media Player Application of the Year - amaroK (57.07%)
• Audio Authoring Application of the Year - Audacity (67.07%)
• Multimedia Utility of the Year - K3b (69.51%)
• Messaging Application of the Year - Gaim (51.52%)
• Window Manager of the Year - Fluxbox (21.44%)
• IDE of the Year - Eclipse (34.47%)
• Mail Client of the Year - Thunderbird (52.74%)
• Text Editor of the Year - vi/vim (38.42%)
• Graphics Application of the Year - GIMP (65.60%)
• Security Application of the Year - nmap (20.94%)
• Windows on Linux Application of the Year - Wine (50.10%)
• Web Development Editor of the Year - Quanta (36.34%)
• Shell of the Year - bash (89.45%)

Its full gear for Google Summer of Code 2007 [here] in the upcomming month of March when Google begins accepting applications. According to the Google website [here], the program offers student developers stipends to write code for various FOSS projects. Google works with a several FOSS and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month-period.

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SpamAssassin is a computer program released freely under the Apache License 2.0 used for e-mail spam filtering based on content-matching rules, which also supports DNS-based, checksum-based and statistical filtering, supported by external programs and online databases.

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Postfix is a free software / open source mail transfer agent (MTA), a computer program for the routing and delivery of email. It is intended as a fast, easy-to-administer, and secure alternative to the widely-used Sendmail MTA.

The Courier Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) is an integrated mail/groupware server based on open commodityT protocols, such as ESMTP, IMAP, POP3, LDAP, SSL, and HTTP. Courier provides ESMTP, IMAP, POP3, webmail, and mailing list services within a single, consistent, framework. Individual components can be enabled or disabled at will. Courier now implements basic web-based calendaring and scheduling services integrated in the webmail module. Advanced groupware calendaring services will follow soon. It works together with Evolution and Kmail.

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KMail is the e-mail client of the KDE desktop environment. It supports folders, filtering, viewing HTML mail, and international character sets. It can handle IMAP, POP3 and local mailboxes for incoming mail. It can send mail via SMTP or sendmail. It has features such as support for powerful filters, PGP/GnuPG privacy, inline attachments, drag and drop support of messages and attachments, support for multiple POP3 and IMAP accounts, and integration into the Kontact personal information management suite.

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Thanks to our friends from the UNDP-APDIP-IOSN International Open Source Network’s ASEAN+3 Node in the Philippines [here] who only recently organized the Asia Source 2 FOSS Camp in Indonesia [here] have produced a CD Package, filled with useful FOSS based free business applications titled SME-in-a-Box. I was lucky enough to be there and recieve a copy of the CD the content of which I will now be sharing through TuxWatch.org exclusively for our readers.

“SME-in-a-Box�? is a toolkit designed to meet the specialized needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) based on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The aim is to provide a selection of peer-reviewed software and material, which help businesses to grow. SME-in-a-Box leverages the power of FOSS for social and economic development. The collection comprises of software and manuals for general use of SMEs in their daily operations and management. Online links for each application will be conveniently included on this website directing the end-user to relevant websites and thus, gaining quick access to both downloades and advanced technical documentations and case studies.

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The Vancouver PHP conference is wrapping up with a free event open to the public. The event’s panelists will be discussing, amongst other things, choosing a license, GPL3, common misconceptions about the GPL, growth in GPL, winning over new converts to FOSS, reasons why businesses choose FOSS, the current state of FOSS in North America, and encouraging the growth of FOSS in Vancouver and across North America.

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According to the Red Hat Website [here], the Swedish Armed Forces have made the decision to migrate their servers from Windows NT to Red Hat Enterprise Linux thus replacing Windows NT with Red Hat Enterprise Linux across its core IT infrastructure. The decision by Swedish authorities is driven by security considerations.

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Asterisk [here] is a complete IP PBX in software created by Mark Spencer of Digium, Inc in 1999. Asterisk runs on a wide variety of operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Sun Solaris providing all the features of a PBX advanced features of high end/cost proprietary PBXs. It supports Voice over IP and is interoperable with almost all standards-based telephony equipment and the best part of it, it uses relatively inexpensive hardware.

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According to NetCraft [here], in the February 2007 survey, NetCraft received responses from 108,810,358 sites, an increase of 1.93 million from last month. Apache has a decline of 442K sites this month, and sees its share of the web server market slip by 1.47 percent to 58.7 percent. This is the first time Apache’s market share has been below 60 percent since September 2002.

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Alright guys, the Linux 2.6.20 Kernel has been released after two months of development and includes two different virtualization implementations. KVM gives full-virtualization capabilities using Intel/AMD virtualization extensions and a paravirtualization implementation usable by different hypervisors. Additionally, 2.6.20 includes PS3 support, a fault injection debugging feature, UDP-lite support, better per-process IO accounting, relative atime, relocatable x86 kernel, some x86 micro optimizations, lockless radix-tree readside, shared page tables for hugetbl, and many other things. For more information on the list of changes, visit [here].

Jim Finkle reports [here] from Boston (Reuters) that the Free Software Foundation is reviewing Novell Inc.’s right to sell new versions of Linux operating system software after the open-source community criticized Novell for teaming up with Microsoft Corp. According to Eben Moglen, FSF’s General Counsel, “The community of people wants to do anything they can to interfere with this deal and all deals like it. They have every reason to be deeply concerned that this is the beginning of a significant patent aggression by Microsoft”. The foundation controls intellectual property rights to key parts of the open-source Linux operating system.

I would also definitely agree with the FSF since on one side, Novell took the contributions of the FOSS community to build its Operating System offerings and on the other side opted to bring on Microsoft that in originality has always taken Linux as a threat, to protect those contributions which in its own is a pretty silly way to manage IPR.