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.

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.

On Monday, Michael DeHaan cast his net into Debian/Ubuntu waters, seeking out those who might be interested in packaging and maintaining the Red Hat-centric installation/provisioning server, Cobbler.

DeHaan states that recent additions and improvements added to Cobbler's development branch are shaping the project into a viable alternative to Debian's FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) package.

When you're working with a commercial software company, it's easy to keep up with their latest news: Between the company's Web sites, e-mail newsletters, conferences, and (increasingly) blogs, you can find out what is happening, and prepare yourself accordingly. Life in the open-source world is quite a bit messier, of course, in that there often isn't any central location or source for news. One of the key tools that the open-source community uses to keep in touch is blogs -- but it's not always easy to find all of the blogs on the subjects that interest you. That's where blog planets come in, providing a one-stop aggregation of many blogs on a particular subject.

As the LinuxWorld Expo conference, slated for August 4th to 7th in San Francisco, starts to take shape, more news is emerging about events to happen there. Oracle CIO Mark Sunday, IBM VP of Open Source and Standards Bob Sutor, and Kevin Clark, Director of IT Operations for LucasFilm are all slated to give keynote addresses. As of today, conference organizers have also announced a charitable Installfest event, where show attendees will be invited to customize donated hardware with open source software, to put computers in the hands of underprivileged children.