jleveille writes “We are quite pleased with the latest offering from Red Hat, sticking with the Red Hat tradition, the entire distribution is very familiar, the installation routine has not changed visibly, as a matter of fact if you have ever installed version 7.1 or 7.2 you will be very comfortable with 7.3.

Red Hat took an already stable and robust platform and gave it additional usability with new desktop features including Gnome 1.4, KDE 3.0, and the Evolution productivity suite. Review + screenshots“

– By Grant Gross –

We often think Microsoft’s licensing cops go above and beyond what’s practically necessary to stamp out software “piracy.” Witness a couple of weeks ago, when the software giant tried to tell schools that removing Windows from computers donated to them is illegal.
So it’s the mother of all ironies that Microsoft itself has been convicted of software piracy in a French court. Tina Gasperson tracked down the little-reported case from late 2001. Perhaps it’s only piracy when it’s a Microsoft product being copied? When you’re a huge monopoly, you might be tempted to think that way.

Meanwhile, Microsoft complained that proposed antitrust sanctions would let “hackers” run wild on Microsoft software, as if that wasn’t already happening.

Inching closer …

The Mozilla project leaders released an RC2 version of its leading-up-to 1.0 release this week. We tracked down project leader Mitchell Baker and asked her what’s next.

Declaration of war?

Red Hat caused a bit of a stir this week by going “all competitive” and announcing rebates to customers switching from other Linux distributions.

Newly released

AbiWord, the Free Software word processor project, officially released its 1.0 version. We took a look and found that it fixed some annoying bugs that were present in earlier releases.

Ximian released version 1.0.4 of its Evolution email software package.

The Apache project released version 2.0.36.

theKompany.com released version 1.0.4 of its Rekall RAD DBMS tool for Linux.

Newly reviewed

Norbert Cartagena takes a look at the new SuSE 8.0 and mostly likes what he sees, although he notes some room for improvement.

Across the street, LinuxandMain takes a “so-what” approach to SuSE 8.0. Also among several reviews of SuSE 8.0 was The Register’s.

The Register also reviewed Mandrake 8.2 and had mostly positive impressions.

Linuxlaboratory.org says Galeon 1.2.0 is making it easy to ignore other browsers.

New at NewsForge/Linux.com

Among the other stories we reported first this week:

StarOffice book author Solveig Haugland offers some tips and tricks for getting around the office suite that works with Linux.

Jack Bryar suggests Open Source may help save the new merged Hewlett-Packard/Compaq.

Stock news

The Nasdaq ended the week at 1,600.85, a drop of more than 12 points from the May 5 close of 1,613.03, which was already the lowest the tech-heavy market had closed since October 2001. Most of our 11 Open Source-related stocks followed Nasdaq’s lead, with eight dropping for the week, although most dropped only slightly. HP, MandrakeSoft and TiVo bucked the downward trend.

Several sites noted layoffs and a lowered revenue forecast at Linux/Unix distributor Caldera. But Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that CEO Ransom Love
remains optimistic.

Here’s how Open Source and related stocks ended this past week:

Company Name	Symbol	5/3 Close	5/10 Close
Apple	AAPL	23.51	23.32
Borland Software Int’l	BORL	10.29	9.78
Caldera International	CALD	1.00	0.87
Hewlett-Packard	HPQ	17.44	19.26
IBM	IBM	81.78	79.68
MandrakeSoft	4477.PA	e2.60	e2.70
Red Hat	RHAT	5.16	5.03
Sun Microsystems	SUNW	6.77	6.26
TiVo	TIVO	3.96	4.00
VA Software	LNUX	1.18	1.11
Wind River Systems	WIND	7.00	7.49

Prweb.com press release says, “Major IT training companies and publications have teamed up to sponsor the annual online event, planned for June 17-24. For one week, IT professionals can try free certification training courses, post resumes and search for jobs at www.ITCareerWeek.com.”

Linux Journal article about Computer Associates software products that are supposed to make it easier for enterprise-level sysadmins to use and migrate to Linux. Quote from the story: “Managing Linux in a mixed-OS environment can be achieved either by having the management software installed on a Linux box, by adding Linux capability to software running on a different OS or a combination of the two. CA supports both approaches.”

Skeptical Reader writes “In a brief review, Dennis Powell of Linux and Main goes against some of the other reviews of SuSE 8.0. It’s not likely to win converts to SuSE, he says, and doesn’t provide much upgrade for cost for existing users.”

Jenny writes “A fully grown elephant needs to eat up to 400 pounds of food each day to stay in shape. The elephant is also one of the only creatures on this earth that can change its environment.

And so goes Microsoft, the behemoth among software makers. Bill & Co. is changing the computing landscape to make sure it keeps the money rolling in. Full Story“

Press release at LinuxPR claims, “Linux Administration Handbook is the industry’s first book for professional Linux administrators in production business environments.”

Yes, it’s true. Even eBay is going to start running popup ads, according to CNet via Yahoo News. NewsForge has resisted, and will keep on resisting, this bit of Internet awfulness. Call us stodgy, but we don’t like the things.

This review of the book Copyrights and Copywrongs,
by Siva Vaidhyanthan, is at infoanarchy.org. Here’s a brief quote: “When Lawrence Lessig gives a positive blurb for a book about copyright, I stand up and take notice. However, my attention wanes when the book is dry and academic.”

PRweb.com press release:”Ayrsoft Limited, a Scottish Linux development company has released version 8.2 of it’s secure small business server called eBoxit.
This is a major step forward for small business computing and fills the void left behind by larger competitors.”