Once the decision to switch has been made, it's time to plan the move. "Planning is the most important step in a large-scale desktop migration," said Walker.

The four basic steps to planning a migration are choosing a Linux distribution, taking an application inventory, developing a migration strategy and identifying user groups.

Recently, a colleague and I decided to create a Web site that would serve as an online community and resource for young musicians. Though I had some Web design experience, neither of us had the experience or knowledge to create all of the features that we wanted in our site. Luckily, we were able to turn to WordPress. With its tools we could combine static pages with dynamically updated pages, categorize site content, automate formatting of site data, manage site membership accounts, incorporate RSS feeds and podcasts, and allow for community discussion of the site's content. Best of all, we could accomplish all of this with relatively little setup effort, and once the site was up and running, we could focus almost exclusively on content and let WordPress do the rest.

About 200 people, ranging from high school students to a government minister, celebrated Software Freedom Day at a LinuxChix Africa event held at Wits University on Saturday.

South African minister of science and technology, Mosibudi Mangena, gave the keynote address, highlighting the challenge of technological innovation in Africa.

Open source strategy consultant Maria Winslow offers some basic advice on getting started with Linux desktop and determining ROI and strategizing for open source deployments in this tip. Here, she poses and answers questions frequently asked by IT managers when she works with them as open source practice leader with Virtuas Solutions, a consultancy in Denver, Colo.

DistroWatch reports - Edubuntu is a partner project of Ubuntu Linux, a distribution suitable for classroom use. A preview of the project's upcoming release 5.10 "Breezy Badger" has been released for download and testing.

OSDir has some sweet shots of Edubuntu 5.10 Preview.

Recently, I was asked to reorganize some of our Web applications to improve their stability. The major push was to get each of our applications running in its own instance of Tomcat. These applications all are in various stages of development, and if a single instance allocates all of the memory available, the entire Tomcat server must be restarted. This, in turn, brings down all of the other applications.

Sun Microsystems initiated a warmer stage in its relationship with Red Hat on Monday, making conspicuous room onstage for the rival at a major server product launch.

David Patrick, vice president and general manager for Linux and open-source platforms and services at Novell, said: "For the first time we have been receiving input from the openSUSE community throughout the SuSE Linux beta cycle and that feedback is making a real difference in the product."

The MyFaces team is very proud to announce the fact, that the current codebase has just passed *all* JSF TCK 1.1 tests!

The Apache Software Foundation and The Apache HTTP Server Project are pleased to announce the release of version 2.1.7-beta of the Apache HTTP Server ("Apache"). This beta release should not be presumed to be compatible with binaries built against any prior or future version.

BEAVERTON, Ore. - September 12, 2005 - The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a global consortium dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux®, today announced the appointment of Dave Rosenberg to a newly-created position as Principal Analyst. In this role, Rosenberg will publish analyses of market trends, manage marketing communication programs and evangelize OSDL’s mission to increase adoption of Linux and open source technologies.

The cost of migrating from Windows XP to Windows Vista will encourage more companies to seriously consider moving to desktop Linux, the chief executive of open-source and networking company Novell said on Monday.

We consider Mono 1.1.9 stable enough to recommend it for all users. Those upgrading from the 1.0.x series should note that these notes only contain the differences between 1.1.8 and 1.1.9.

Ultima can be described very simply: it is Slackware pre-configured into a very useable desktop. So, DO expect Slackware's stability, performance and simplicity, as well as low hardware requirements. DO NOT expect cutting edge technologies and latest versions of packages - Slackware, and therefore Ultima, stick to what works for them. In particular, they still use 2.4.x kernels, though 2.6.x kernel is supposed to be available somewhere (but if it appeared anywhere as an option during the installation, I missed it).

Want to share your expertise? PyCon 2006 is looking for proposals to fill the formal presentation tracks.

Previous PyCons have had a broad range of presentations, from reports on academic and commercial projects to tutorials and case studies, and we hope to continue that tradition this year. As long as the presentation is interesting and potentially useful to the Python community, it will be considered for inclusion in the program.

The NetBSD Release Engineering team has announced that the release process of NetBSD 2.1 has begun. NetBSD 2.1 RC3 builds are available at ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-2-1-RC3. NetBSD 2.1 RC1 and RC2 were not announced publically because of build problems on some supported platforms.

A road map aimed at guiding governments and companies in the development of open information and communication technologies was presented Friday at a World Bank meeting in New York by a group comprised of academics, government officials and industry representatives. The Open ePolicy Group contends that the adoption of open standards is vital to global economic growth and innovation.

Colombo, 09 September, (Asiantribune.com) The sixth Asia Open Source Software Symposium was inaugurated last Wednesday with the participation of delegates from 19 countries in the Asian Region, coinciding the National Free and Open Source Software Week 2005 (FOSS) at Trans Asia Hotel. The symposium continues up to 11.

aLinux, formerly known as Peanut Linux, is a strange GNU/Linux distribution. It bills itself as a "Professional Linux Operating System" for advanced users, hobbyists, and new Linux users. However, the distribution has a number of problems that make it unsuitable for new users and unpleasant even for experienced users.

Linux+Live DVD is a distro based on Aurox Linux using Fedora Core 3 packages using KDE 3.4.1. As its name states this is a live DVD, meaning you obviously get more packages than a live CD, and it runs off of a DVD player.

While it's only been a few days since I did a review of OPEN SUSE Beta 3, with the pre-release of SUSE 10, it was time to roll up the sleeves and get back to work! Due to the demand on servers in the U.S., I opted to download from the Erlangen mirror. It was quick and easy and the download speeds were great.

Summer is a time for vacation, for introspection and for summer student internships. In 1967, it was about love. And in 2005, it was about code –- for Google, that is.

In this multi-game review Eric Skiff of samples an interesting cross-section of the current Open Source game offerings.

The Debian testing security team is pleased to announce the beginning of full security support for Debian's testing distribution. We have spent the past year building the team, tracking and fixing security holes, and creating our infrastructure, and now the final pieces are in place, and we are able to offer security updates and advisories for testing.

At the build system BoF at aKademy it was decided to start moving the KDE 4 build system from unsermake to the SCons/Python based system bksys. To find out more about this important future technology, KDE Dot News talked to its lead developer Thomas Nagy about the reasons behind the change and what it will mean for KDE developers.

Melding the contemporary concepts of SOA and open source, Iona Technologies on Monday is announcing its participation in the Eclipse Foundation and will propose an Eclipse SOA Tools Platform project.

The Apache Maven team is pleased to announce the release of Maven 1.1 Beta 2

http://maven.apache.org/start/download.html

Maven is a project management and project comprehension tool. Maven is based on the concept of a project object model: builds, documentation creation, site publication, and distribution publication are all controlled from the project object model. Maven also provides tools to create source metrics, change logs based directly on source repository, and source cross-references.

I started using Linux in the pre-KDE and pre-GNOME days. These have become pretty much the de-facto graphic user interface for Linux and with good reason. Their spit and polish, usability and functionality rival the best commercial desktop interfaces, like Mac OS 10.

Foresight Desktop Linux 0.9 has become the first distro to utilize the GNOME 2.12 front end, which was released only last Wednesday. "Foresight Desktop Linux 0.9 features a refined look and improvements in about every area, including hundreds of bug fixes and feature improvements over v0.8.1," according to developer Ken Vandine. "This is a distribution which showcases some of the latest and greatest from GNOME. Some of the things that may not be mature enough for some of the other distros."

Moving files from Windows to Linux just got a lot easier, thanks to a kind of truce between Linux and the notoriously proprietary NTFS (New Technology File System), Linux-Watch.com columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes.