OStatic

Why is Google using Solr for search? The company has adopted the open source search server based on Apache Lucene for its All for Good site.

Australian defense force builds $1.7m Linux-based flight simulator. It runs on SUSE Linux-based clusters of Opteron servers, and uses an open source graphics platform.

Should open source hate Apple? The whole idea that the Free Software Foundation should go against Apple rather than Microsoft is a straw man.

7 reasons to use Debian. From stability to documentation, it's outstanding.

Four free, slick word processors. You can use these no matter what operating system you're running.

Today marks the final installment in our series that takes a look at educational versions of popular Linux distributions ideal for students returning to class in the next few weeks. We've already talked about Edubuntu and openSUSE Education, so today let's take a look at Debian Jr.

While many distros provide educational software for students all the way up to college-age, Debian Jr.'s age-specfic apps top out around the 12-year old mark. According to the project's Web site, Our goal is to make Debian an OS that children of all ages will want to use. Our initial focus will be on producing something for children up to age 8. Once we have accomplished this, our next target age range is 7 to 12. By the time children reach their teens, they should be comfortable with using Debian without any special modifications.

The Linux Foundation welcomed its newest member today, the European-based free and open source standards consulting firm, credativ. This new partnership is a particularly exciting one, thanks to credativ's presence in the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada, and its focus on creating and implementing standards.

Naturally, credativ's business -- providing consulting and support services to businesses using free and open source software -- means it will take an active role in the Linux Standard Base workgroup. Because credativ is one of Europe's largest employers of Debian developers, the company also plans to participate in the Desktop Linux workgroup.

The Debian team has tangled with more than its fair share of demons during the development cycle of the 5.0 Lenny release. Lenny, which was loosely scheduled for release in September 2008, was delayed due to the number of release-critical bugs that were awaiting patches. As the year came to a close, Lenny faced other challenges, including team management shake-ups and a vote on how to handle Lenny's inclusion of non-free binary blobs to best meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

On February 1st, Lenny's second release candidate was announced, as well as the release's deep freeze status. Lenny is scheduled for general release over the weekend of February 14th.

OpenPandora will bring open source gaming to your palm. The project still needs work and the device looks a bit Soviet, but OpenPandora is developing an open source gaming handheld, reports The Open Road.

Does open source really control 18% of the PBX market? An analyst reports that it does, much of it dominated by Asterisk.

Canonical's $30 million and Microsoft's gathering storm. Linux's gains are Microsoft's losses, and both were seen this week, reports TechNewsWorld.

Debian founder Murdock is now Sun's cloud strategist. After a restructuring at Sun, Ian Murdock takes the new role of VP of Cloud Computing Strategy.

OpenChange, KDE bring Exchange compatibility to Linux. The OpenChange and KDE open source projects are set to bridge a missing link? in messaging and groupware compatibility from Microsoft's Exchange to open source clients.

Every software project, especially one with a history as long and colorful as Debian's, is bound to occasionally run into a release that it'd rather just put behind it and move onwards. The release itself, when finalized, might be the best ever -- but getting to the finalized point will induce flashbacks for years.

Debian's Lenny hopefully isn't that emotionally scarring, but it's undoubtedly been a release fraught with more than the usual amount of headaches. In October, Lisa reported that Lenny faced a delay due to some critical bugs. As the voting period on whether the inclusion of non-free binary blobs in Lenny meshed with the Debian Free Software Guidelines was held, Manoj Srivastava announced his resignation from the secretary post.

Last week, the votes were tabulated, and Lenny is set to move forward.

Canonical has announced that because of increased demand from hardware manufacturers, it will begin supporting ARMv7 processors (used in many smaller and system-on-a-chip (SoC) devices) with an optimized, commercially supported, full version of the Ubuntu desktop.

On Monday, the Debian project announced that it was renaming the former Custom Debian Distribution concept (the umbrella term under which Debian projects such as Debian Junior, Debian Med, and DebiChem were collectively known) to the more accurate (and catchier) name Debian Pure Blends.

Though Debian Pure Blends for some reason makes me think gourmet coffee, Andreas Tille of the Debian project makes a good deal of sense when he says that Custom Debian Distributions stated the obvious (yes, these projects use Debian code) without giving a clear picture of what the customizations were, or how closely they were related to the Debian base.

Motorola is betting the farm on mobile open source and Android.....

Is Canonical overly paternalistic with Ubuntu?.....

Version 3.0 of the Alfresco Enterprise Edition content management system is out, and adds Alfresco Share for online team collaboration.....

Three scripts for package management on Debian and Ubuntu systems.....

Notable open source innovations.....

Debian Lenny was originally scheduled for release in September. Now that we're well into October, Debian developer Alexander Reichle-Schmehl admits that plan was too optimistic. Although there are still over 200 release-critical bugs still waiting to be patched, if the Debian community is willing to step up, Lenny can see the light of day sooner rather than later.ﾠ