At the end of October I attended the Alantejo Linux congress and LAN party, which was held in the city of Évora. Évora is a marvelous UNESCO World Heritage city which has from Roman ruins to 18th century buildings, not to mention the superb food. It is well worth the visit if you happen to travel to Portugal. At this meeting a conference was given by José Antonio León Moreno from the "Center of New Initiatives" in Extremadura (Spain) about the Linex project where he stated mildly that the Spanish region of Extremadura is using Linux on the desktop in the PCs used by the public administration civil servants of the region of Extremadura.

Heise.de reports (English translation) that after talking with its customers, Novell decided that both KDE and GNOME will be equally supported in all its products, even though GNOME will be the default for the enterprise/server line. Opensuse instead will feature KDE (English translation) as the primary desktop. Both will be however developed further in the future.

This article discusses the changed environment since Apple first introduced the clones, what new challenges Apple faces going forward, specifically in the corporate market, and how a targeted Apple clone market could help increase OS X's market share.

Three of the world's biggest electronics companies - IBM, Sony and Philips - have joined forces with the two largest Linux software distributors to create a company for sharing Linux patents, royalty-free. The Open Invention Network, as the new firm unveiled Thursday is known, could mark a breakthrough in resolving how to protect vendors and customers from patent royalty disputes resulting from freely shared Linux code.

Sun is offering its high-end Java IDEs, Sun Java Studio Creator and Java Studio Enterprise, at no cost. Java Studio Enterprise 8 is the commercial IDE, which is based on open-source Netbeans 4.1. Java Studio Enterprise is capable to generate UML diagrams from your source code and vice versa. It has also a built-in collaboration tool that allows better team-work. Java Studio Creator is the Sun's Visual Basic Studio. It allows you to develop J2EE-App using Java Server Faces as front end.

This article lists the 10 worst software bugs in computing history. "In 1945, engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark II system. The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer's logbook with the words: "first actual case of a bug being found."

Firefox turned one year old Wednesday, marking yet another milestone for the popular open-source browser. Firefox has grabbed 8.65 percent of the market and put a dent into Internet Explorer's dominance, according to NetApplications' October results. Elsewhere, Camino 1.0b1 was released.

"The Luppi worm is blazing a trail with great potential for attackers. We might learn a lot about how secure Linux systems are in the next few months. While the authors are clearly still feeling their way around, there's no reason to believe that this will be a real biggie. But if someone writes a well-designed 'grab bag' worm to exploit the various bugs in PHP and other products common on Linux servers, we could have a problem on our hands."

Today we feature an interview with Frank W. Miller, Ph.D., developer of the CornfedSIP User Agent VoIP client for Linux. We discuss the merits of VoIP, its problems and its future.

ZDnet has installed the x86 version of Mac OS X and did some preliminary tests. Their conclusion? "Mac OS X looks in amazingly good early form on the x86 platform. As far as power consumption and OS performance are concerned, it can already keep up with Windows XP. Application performance clearly lags behind, though, and still needs to improve." Now, let's wait and see if Apple dares to send angry letters to ZDnet too.

As reported previously, the NetBSD Foundation made a call for donations a few months ago. This was widely publicized, and the open source community responded generously, donating almost $30000,- (E25500,-). As also previously noted, this money was earmarked for specific purchases, and the NetBSD Project would like to let its users know what in particular was bought from these donations. Please see Thor Lancelot Simons detailed summary for information regarding what was bought, the current status and a long list of people that made all this possible.

In an e-mail to top executives, Gates urged company leaders to "act quickly and decisively" to move further into the field of offering such services, in order to best formidable competitors. But he also warned that the company must be thoughtful in building the right technology to serve the right audience. "This coming 'services wave' will be very disruptive," Gates wrote. "We have competitors who will seize on these approaches and challenge us - still, the opportunity to lead is very clear."

"The purpose of this document is to detail proposed projects and direction based on an analysis of the existing desktops on Solaris and Linux, but with input from MS Windows and Mac OS/X also being taken into account. Post Solaris 10 a significant effort is being put into making Solaris simple for everyone (not just sys-admins), and this is being done from the ground up. The Keep it Simple Solaris (KiSS) project is at the heart of this."

The big news the discovery of an Apple patent that allows the computer maker to protect the installation of Mac OS X. In this case, really limit it to just Apple-produced hardware. However, the patent describes a process whereby users would be able to load one of three operating systems as their primary OS and then load a secondary operating system as their secondary OS.