A few days after Mark Shuttleworth, Gaël Duval, founder of Linux Mandrake, now Mandriva, posted a FAQ related to his distribution. He addresses some controversial issues such as Will Mandriva ever demand licence fees?, How can a free software based company be sustainable? and even Why is the default desktop in Mandriva Linux blue?

For years, the goal of creating a truly responsive Web application was hampered by one simple fact of Web development: To change the information on part of a page, a user must reload the entire page. Not anymore. Thanks to asynchronous JavaScript and XML, we can now request new content from the server and change just part of a page. This tutorial explains how to use Ajax with PHP and introduces Sajax (Simple Ajax Toolkit), a tool written in PHP that lets you integrate PHP with JavaScript.

Corel had a chance of a lifetime handed to it on a silver platter - support OpenDocument and take an immediate lead in the charge to supplant MS Office. They've decided to stick their head in the sand instead, according to Andy Updegrove.

Nearly half of European local government bodies are using open source software while nearly a third don't know that they are using open source at all. A Maastricht University survey of 12 counties has reportedly found 49 per cent using Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) while 70 per cent said they expect usage to increase.

The new Microsoft's Exchange 2003 service pack comes with the so-called "Direct Push" key enhancement being the ability to push new e-mail directly to mobile devices and eliminates the need for Microsoft mail servers to notify remote users of new e-mail via text messages. Other new features includes, new calendar appointments, contacts and task notifications can also be automatically sent out and support for Sender ID.

HP seems on its way out, or so claims Sun. Sun's Global information systems strategy office, Larry Singer, says Sun hears a consistent message from HP customers: "They have no idea where HP is going. If you chase the decision up the stack to the OS, you realise HP’s OS has had no major release since Fiorina took over," he says. "People only have three legitimate OSes: Windows, Red Hat or Solaris. As soon as HP talks to 9900 or Alpha customers they have to say HP does not have an OS."

This month's magazine focuses on what goes on behind the scenes. Whether you're developing for Fedora Core, writing scripts to make your life easier, integrating Java applications, or simply trying to get better performance out of your systems, the Red Hat Magazine has advice to offer.

Five years ago analysts were predicting that cellphones and PDAs will eventually merge. Many laughed at these predictions (especially PalmOS users of that time) but today we know that the future of PDAs already lies with smartphones. "Convergence" seems to be the key element of all new cellphones, even the ones that are not in the "smartphone" category: they all playback mp3 for example. It's obvious that convergence will move even further: music & video players and recorders will eventually give in much of their marketshare in favor of a one-device-does-it-all type of informational, entertainment & communication product. And Apple is definitely aware of this trend.

As laptops and mobility become more effective and prevalent, your job as a system administrator is to provide users with easy, secure access to their data. IMAP is one way to allow users to receive email wherever they go. Cyrus IMAP is a popular server, but installation and configuration is a bear. Fortunately, Francisco Reyes has the answer in this tutorial on installing and configuring Cyrus IMAP with Postfix.

"Open source advocates are doing what was once unthinkable - giving the thumbs up to a Microsoft source code licensing program. The Free Software Foundation has said new licenses for Microsoft's pseudo open source program, the Shared Source Initiative, appears to satisfy the four requirements defining Free Software." So, what does it mean for you? Update: A description of the changes.

Opera Software has released a preview version of their latest browser iteration, codename Merlin, Opera 9.0. Some of the changes include support for XSLT, Web Forms 2.0 and Canvas 2D; rich-text editing; site-specific preferences; find highlighting; default useragent ID as Opera; almost 100% Acid2 test compliance.

This article describes features of a future version of Sun's HotSpot JVM implementation. It introduces some of the synchronization optimizations slated for Mustang, the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE), version 6.0, which has been on the "to-do" list for many JVMs for quite some time.

Today, we roll out the OSNews Meta Blog. We are trying something new. Whereas OSNews proper is moderated and logged, the OSNews Meta Blog is here solely to discuss the site, without bombing an unrelated news thread. It's unmoderated, anonymous, and, perhaps best of all.... XHTML compliant. For details, please visit this post.

SUSE Linux 10.1 Alpha 2 is ready for testing. Improvements and updates over alpha 1 include KDE 3.5 Beta 2, GNOME 2.11.1 (according to the announcement that is; 2.12.1 is more likely), smartpm, and OpenOffice.org 2.0 RC3. This alpha is available for x86, x86-64 (AMD64/EM64T), and PowerPC. Download locations, including torrents, are listed in the release announcement.