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Microsoft turns out not to be a fan of open source after all.

The Office Open XML (OOXML) file format is probably destined to be an international standard under International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). And Andy Updegrove, for one, is not happy about it. He says that the recent ISO/IEC recommendation to deny the appeal against the April 1 vote to ratify OOXML is a bad one.

RDN caught up with Updegrove to get his thoughts on the process behind the appeal and what its likely defeat means for developers and for the future of technical-standards making.

You might ask why I'm spending so much time figuring out how to best configure a Compaq Armada 7770dmt — a laptop with an ancient 233MHz Pentium II MMX processor, feeble 144MB of RAM and smallish 3GB hard drive. For one thing, I almost never abandon a machine that can be used. And this one definitely can be. Plus, I like the Compaq. It has a nice screen and keyboard, I like the fact that its power supply is totally contained in the laptop case. The thing's pretty solid.

In short, we are in an adversarial situation. Microsoft does not want us to succeed. Thus we cannot trust Microsoft, even if we'd like to, and must consider Mono based upon the question "What is the worst thing MS can reasonably do?". We can only trust Mono if we are convinced Microsoft doesn't have weasel room. The current situation appears, to me, to have lots of weasel room. The technical merits of Mono are basically irrelevant if its a trojan horse in the long term.

[An older article, posted at Groklaw in response to the interview with Miguel de Icaza by Der Standard -- Sander]

In 1997 Miguel de Icaza - together with Federico Mena Quintero - started one of the most influential Open Source projects: The GNOME desktop. At Novell he nowadays is leading the development of Mono, the free .Net-implementation he initiated in 2001. Since a few months he is also working on an open source version of Microsofts Silverlight - a task officially blessed by Microsoft.

During the recent GNOME Users and Developers Conference (GUADEC) Andreas Proschofsky had the chance to sit down with de Icaza and talk about future developments around Mono and Moonlight, the possibility of open sourcing .Net itself and changes in Microsofts attitude towards free software.

Banshee is a simple but powerful multimedia player with Audio/Video playback support, subscribe and playback podcasts and last.fm radio from Banshee. With Banshee1.2 Import, organize, play, share your music and videos using Banshee's simple but powerful interface. Rip CDs, play and sync your iPod, create playlists, and burn audio and MP3 CDs

Lenovo has announced its entry into the "netbook" market. The Linux-based IdeaPad S9 and Windows-XP-based S10 feature 8.9- and 10-inch displays, respectively, plus 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processors, 1.3 megapixel webcams, 802.11b/g wireless networking, and up to 160GB of storage, says the company.

After 10 years of supporting Linux, IBM (NYSE: IBM) continues to challenge Microsoft on multiple fronts and aims to push Linux even further into the enterprise. While IBM has competed and partnered with Microsoft over the last two decades, the Microsoft-free PC effort is perhaps its most direct assault yet. "The idea of Microsoft-free personal computing has been in the air for a while," Inna Kuznetsova, director of Linux at IBM, told InternetNews.com. "We're just partnering with Linux distribution vendors and hardware vendors to make it happen."

This article shows how you can install the Zimbra Desktop email client on an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) desktop. Zimbra Desktop is a full-fledged replacement for email clients such as Outlook or Evolution, offering email, contacts, calendar, documents, tasks, etc. You can use it in conjunction with the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) or any other email account that supports POP3 or IMAP.

Fedora 9 now lets you create a bootable Linux distribution on a flash drive with persistence. In other words, you can not only boot any PC that will accept USB drive booting into Linux, you can even boot into your own personal desktop. Now, that can be useful. With Fedora on a stick drive, no matter where you go or what PC you're using, you'll have your own Fedora desktop already set up just the way you want it. Fedora 9 is an excellent, modern Linux; if you enjoy using it, you'll enjoy even more being able to use it on almost any PC at hand.

LXer Feature: 05-Aug-2008

Here are a few thoughts and a quick roundup of what I have seen at LinuxWorld 2008 in San Francisco so far.

The global Internet community is bracing for the potential of malicious attacks on the domain name system with the discoverer of the DNS exploit that send shockwaves through the industry last month expected to reveal full details of it on August 6 at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

[The flaw in this logic is of course that the details of the exploit have already been revealed. If you only start to brace for impact now, you're far too late. -- Sander]

How to use RedHat grub to retrieve a lost root password.

Everyone knows that UMPCs, particularly Linux-based ones, are popping up every other day, but did you know just how many of them there are?

Oracle's post BEA Systems acquisition roadmap hits the ground running in the next two weeks with the delivery of version 10.3 of BEA's popular application server. WebLogic Server 10.3 has been released to manufacturing with customers expected to get final CDs in the next 14 days, senior vice president of Oracle server technologies Thomas Kurian told BEA users at an Oracle event on Monday.

The good news is that Mozilla's popular Firefox browser is getting video support. The bad news is that you probably won't notice. Why? Because the video codec that is coming to Firefox is not commonly used: Ogg Theora. Firefox will also be adding a new HTML tag to make embedding video easier - no more need to launch Javascript - but, again, the video codec is not the ubiquitous QuickTime, Windows Media, or Flash that people use.

I often find it ironic and a little sad that one of the most important security applications on the Internet is so poorly funded. For anyone that manages machines remotely and is concerned about security, it is perhaps the most important application to rely on for security and stability. I'm sure you know which application I am referring to, but do you know that it is the de facto world standard in its class on the Internet? I wonder if there is any other application on the Internet, proprietary or Open Source, that comes close to the market penetration that OpenSSH has earned compared to competing alternatives.

[While not about Linux, this look at OpenSSH (and OpenBSD development in general) is well worth reading - sr]

Startup Vyatta has bundled its Linux and open source software-based router and firewall software into an x86 appliance for the enterprise market. Vyatta will market its appliance to compete on cost-performance with Cisco, Nortel and Juniper Networks. Vyatta has bundled its dual-licensed Linux and open source software-based router and firewall software into a branded hardware "appliance" version for the enterprise market.

I've been thinking about how to best improve the Linux* userland over the last few days. I was venting pretty loudly about my Linux gripe of the day -- I don't even remember what I was complaining about at the time, but it was a mess of shell scripting, pipes, and about half a dozen command line programs that were conspiring to drive me up the wall. Before I could get into a really quality rant, the kind that would peel paint off the walls, the friend who I was giving an earful to asked me a question, probably to shut me up.

"So what would you do to fix it?"

That's not exactly a new question, but I hadn't been asked it before. So I put a little thought into it.

FbTerm provides you with a fast terminal emulator that runs directly on your system's framebuffer. Using the framebuffer brings improved performance while allowing you to render UTF-8 text in the terminal. FbTerm aims to be at least as fast as the normal Linux kernel terminal while providing internationalization support and modern font handling with fontconfig. It allows you to create as many as 10 different terminal windows on the same framebuffer, each window having scrollback history.