The BBC has a story about Linux moving into the corporate market. “Linux, the free computer operating system loved and tended by the
T-shirt and beard geek community on the internet, has cast off its
scruffy image and donned a corporate suit.

From IBM to Nokia, from SAP to Sharp, the giants of the CeBIT
technology fair in Hanover are all showing products based on the
system which began life as a Finnish student’s hobby.”

Ram Viswanadha writes: “ICU from IBM is an open source library released under IBM Public License, provides a Unicode implementation with functions for formatting numbers, dates, times, and currencies according to locale conventions, transliteration, and parsing text in those formats. It provides flexible patterns for formatting messages, where the pattern determines the order of the variable parts of the messages, and the format for each of those variables. These patterns can be stored in resource files for translation to different languages. ICU provides code and data [over 150 locales] to handle the complexities of native language collation, searching, and other processes. It also provides a mechanism for accessing strings from resource files, whereby common strings can be shared across countries that have the same language. Included are more than 100 codepage converters for interaction with non-unicode systems.”
More info at http://oss.software.ibm.com/. Download:
http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/download/1.8/index .html

Improvements and Features:

The collation code is reimplemented to improve performance significantly and to make it compliant with the Unicode Collation Algorithm. For details and current limitations, see the collation design document.

Support for all Unicode encodings in the converter API, including:
UTF-32BE/LE (now complete)
UTF-7
SCSU (instead of a separate API)

Improvements in ISO-2022 converters; new JIS, JIS7, JIS8 converters

More complete set of conversion tables for IBM codepages

Additional Unicode string handling functions:
Unicode string case handling – uppercasing, lowercasing, case folding, case-insensitive compare
C/C++ string compare in Unicode code point order
ANSI-C-style string functions like u_strrstr(), u_strtok_r(), u_memcpy(), etc.
u_sprintf()/u_sscanf() functions in the extra/ustdio library (unsupported)

safeClone() functions for collators, converters and break iterators for creating object clones that are safe to be used in different threads

Transliterators:
New Inter-Indic transliterators for nine Indic scripts
LatinJamo transliterators much improved
Arabic letter shaping for handling legacy data (no handling yet of the “tail” glyph fragment character)
decmn tool to take apart ICU common data files (memory-mappable .dat files generated by gencmn)

Data for more locales

Ever wondered about terminal emulation? O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com has an excellent article discussing the history of terminals and terminal drivers (using NetBSD for examples).

Macworld has a story about OS X. In it is a review of how many of Apple’s promises stack up to real world handling.

Starting off talking about politics, this Linuxworld article tries to explain how US politics will affect the Free Software/OpenSource projects around the world.

Ryan Troy writes, “MaximumBSD.com is a relatively new BSD portal aiming to bring the BSD community the latest BSD related news, articles and how-tos. Come check it out today at
http://www.maximumbsd.com.”

Anonymous Reader writes, “I was pointed to a new OS project by one of our readers. The Menuet project is a extremely fast and tiny graphical multitasking OS coded in 32-bit assembler. In addition to a GUI, it features support for sound, and has complete source downloadable from there website. The assembly code can be compiled in nasm. I gave it a try, and was very impressed by the progress of system. For a new OS project it is bootable, can run code, features a basic GUI/Sound API, and has a assembler ported. Check out the story at OSFaq.com.”

“Linux Users Group (Singapore) once again recognizes the efforts of various organisations by awarding the LUGS Awards.” Full details on LinuxPR.

The “Linux for beginners” course is designed for busy professionals with no prior experience with Linux or any other flavor of UNIX. This two-day introduction to Linux broadens their horizons with a detailed overview of the operating system. Attendees learn how to effectively use a Linux system as a valuable tool. This press release brought to you by LinuxPR.

CNet reports that investors are standing behind Red Hat in spite of the general downturn in tech stocks recently.