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In this week's Distrowatch, I read about a new, small Linux distribution called SliTaz GNU/Linux that packs itself into 25 MB of space, loads and runs quickly -- and entirely into memory with 128 MB of RAM -- and can even run with 16 MB of RAM. Sounds a lot like Damn Small Linux and Puppy, but there's always room for one more project that runs like the proverbial wind on new hardware (SliTaz features a modern 2.6.24 kernel) and keeps the old hardware I use working as well as it can.

Watch out, Cisco. Move over, Microsoft. Unified communications and the Asterisk open source platform are on a collision course. In fact, a startup called Worxbox hopes to accelerate that convergence. Here’s why anyone interested in the unified communications market should care.

LXer Feature: 3-Apr-2008

This tutorial is a guideline on making your own letterhead on Open Office. Although there are letterhead templates in the wild, you may have a design in mind that you can only put together yourself. This should give you enough background information to do this on your own. Depending on how much glitter you want on it, it may take some artistic skill - sorry, I cannot impart that in this document. :)

Readers of the KDE Commit-Digest have probably noticed that Gilles Caulier is again on top with number of commits. On what does he work so furiously? Gilles is the main developer of Digikam which is under transition from KDE 3 to KDE 4 whilst simultaneously adding new features. Read more to know more about the future of advanced digital photo management for KDE and Linux.

While most basic hardware support for GNU/Linux is improving constantly, wireless support remains dismal. Few manufacturers make an effort to support the operating system, or to publicize what support they have. Moreover, the components of wireless devices change so fast that one version of a device may offer support while a second version doesn't -- even though both versions share the same model number. And if, in addition to functionality, you also want a device with free drivers and no reliance on proprietary firmware, your choices are even more limited. Fortunately, no matter what your preferences, online resources exist to help you find the card that's right for you or get your existing wireless network adapter to work with Linux.

The 451 Group is out with a new report on venture capital funding for open source, and the news is rosy. The first quarter of this year brought more venture capital funding for open source than ever before, totaling $203.75 million, up from $100.4 million in the same quarter for 2007. That's more than a double, for year-over-year growth, although the news immediately follows a plunge in VC funding for open source that arrived in the fourth quarter of last year. The report also includes some good analysis of how VC funds are flowing to the open source community.

Back in early February we announced that we were in the process of formalizing and releasing our internal test tools as a platform for facilitating easy to use, accurate, and reproducible Linux benchmarks based upon the testing work that we have been doing at Phoronix for the past four years. The goals with this are really to make it easier for Linux end-users to run reliable (both qualitative and quantitative) benchmarks for their own personal use, push more open-source projects to making their software more testable, and pushing hardware and software vendors for greater Linux testing based upon a standardized set of tests. Today we are very pleased to announce the first public release of the Phoronix Test Suite software, which is licensed under the GNU GPLv3, and the creation of a public database for freely sharing your test results and other information in a collaborative manner.

ClearHealth is happy to announce the release of ClearHealth 2.2-PR1 which is the first preview of the final 2.2 release. The real highlight of this release is support for PDF templates. Easily create fully custom forms and reports in Office or even on paper and load them into Adobe LiveCycle Designer, upload to ClearHealth and you're done (ClearHealth automatically creates the DB for forms with no programming necessary). There are several other new features and fixes in this release as well with the full release notes.

Extensions have long been written for OpenOffice.org Writer. However, the fact that attention is finally being paid to other applications seems a sign that OpenOffice.org is finally starting to develop an active extension-writing community. A case in point is the recent availability of extensions for Impress, OpenOffice.org's slide show program. Extensions for Impress are still outnumbered four or five to one by those for Writer, but at least they are now being written. Just as importantly, they are filling important gaps in functionality, and encouraging uses for slide shows other than the standard presentation in work or education.

Some people who are new to Linux want to install the operating system on an older, second computer, to try it out and see how they get on. Others have older computers with obsolete operating systems (such as Windows 98 or Me), and don’t want to pay for a newer version of Windows, but would still like to make a use of the machine. Some may simply want a separate backup machine, one for a member of their family, or maybe just a file server. Consequently, the question of the minimum specifications to run Linux frequently comes up. So what type of hardware do you need? The answer depends on what you want to use the computer for, and which applications you intend to run. That being said, there are a few general guidelines for the most common cases.

The British Standards Institution (BSI) has always been one of those iconic central points of reference in British life – a kind of Big Ben for standards. But it's a little hard to square that image – perhaps hopelessly outdated – with the BSI's recent decision to vote in favour of Microsoft's OOXML document standard.

Now that the OOXML vote is over, what can we learn, and what should happen next? It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the credibility and integrity of the formal standards development process has suffered serious damage as a result of what has just transpired. While that process may serve perfectly well under less contentious circumstances, reforms are obviously needed to address those exceptional circumstances in which greater protections are needed.

Earth Hour aside, 2008 may mark the year of "lights out" for power hungry computers. The gPC sold at Wal*mart and the Asus Eee PC led the way, both running Linux of course. The trend began in 2007 when we were introduced to the Koolu PC: I test drove a Koolu at the Ontario Linux fest last year and I was impressed with its speed and graphics capability.

"No cute April 1st shenanigans, just a regular -rc release that happened to come up today because I was waiting for the input layer oops-fixes to be ready and tested," began Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25-rc8 kernel on April 1st. "The big thing that is actually *noticeable* to most people is that this should fix the two top regressions. The other thing that bit a number of people and is now fixed (and that also probably often showed up as a suspend/resume regression) was some 'struct device' lifetime changes that broke the input layer. Thanks to people who debugged that one."

There is a new release of Mozilla Weave out this week, offering the promise of improved core synchronization and responsiveness. Mozilla Weave is an open source Mozilla Labs effort that debuted back in December of 2007 as an attempt to make Mozilla a platform play utilizing a Mozilla online services backend to store and synchronize data.

Just because OpenOffice.org Basic is designed to automate mundane tasks doesn't mean that you must use it only for serious work. It's a programming language after all, and nothing stops you from using it to write something fun. Today we'll use it write a simple game where you have to guess a word, a letter at a time, from among words you've stored in a Base database. Although this is not a particularly sophisticated game, it contains a couple of string manipulation techniques and a clever trick for picking a random record from a database, which you might find useful when writing your own macros.

A deal struck by government CIO John Suffolk and the Cabinet Office could save the public sector billions of pounds by supplying networked, supported PCs for around half the typical price. Suffolk said the Cabinet Office had cut the total cost of ownership for PCs by half, compared with the Gartner benchmark price of £2,000 per PC. The Gartner benchmark is widely used in the public and private sectors for pricing PCs. If just £100 a year were saved on every PC used by the UK's three to four million public servants, the annual savings would be at least £3bn over 10 years.

[Note that these PC's come with OpenOffice.org and not MS-Office. - Sander]

Prognosticators perennially say Linux is on the verge of gaining desktop traction, yet Linux PCs still represent less than 2 percent of the market. This time, though, there's actually evidence of momentum. While the best features in Vista require expensive top-notch configurations, one of the hottest segments of the industry involves inexpensive computers.

It’s almost 8 PM on a Tuesday night, and the lecture hall here at Virginia Tech University is filled nearly to capacity. The students – many of them computer science majors – have come to hear Richard Stallman, the grand forefather of GNU/Linux. The crowd is chatty and seems in a good mood. The Web page advertising this event referred to Stallman as a “legend,” and surely he’s influenced software development. He launched the Free Software Foundation way back in 1985, and led the drafting of the most recent GPL. He tends to provoke strong opinions among admirers and detractors alike, but no matter: Stallman is a tireless Free Software promoter, and he always makes his opinion known.

Linux represents 15 percent of the smartphone market, but that figure should grow considerably, says a market research report. The study, from Strategy Analytics, found that Motorola will continue to drive the growth for mobile Linux, along with Google. More than 25 million Linux-based cellphones have shipped to date, says Strategy Analytics. That figure represents 15 percent of the smartphone market, compared to Symbian's 50 percent and Windows Mobile's 18 percent.