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In many African countries, few people have access to computers and the Internet. Experts say this is hindering development and preventing students from being able to compete for jobs. At a conference in Dakar this week, software experts, government officials and students came together to look at how open-source software, which is free for anyone to use, could make technology available to more people. Kari Barber has this report from Dakar.

Last Thursday PKN (Polish Normalization Committee) had a meeting on which it was supposed to come up with the decision concerning Polish recommendation for ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (OOXML) proposed standard. The common stance has not been acheived.

Last November we had looked at Mythbuntu 7.10 and found it to be an excellent MythTV distribution. With its LiveCD MythTV front-end capabilities and intuitive Mythbuntu Control Center, this distribution is far more than just a re-branded edition of Ubuntu with a couple MythTV packages. Being released in tandem with Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" next month will be Mythbuntu 8.04 and today we are taking an early look at this spring refresh using the recently released beta.

This posting is targeting cloning Mercurial Repository for Xen 3.2 on Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop (64-bit) and creating 64-bit Xen 3.2 Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop Dom0. To verify Dom0 functionality Solaris (Nevada Build 84) has been installed and tested as DomU. Looks like same procedure at Ubuntu 7.10 Server (amd64) differs from described above.

After nearly 2 years of non-stop development, FreeSWITCH has evolved from an idea and an empty directory into a fully operational soft-switch capable of withstanding the loads 8-10 times as large as anything else they were able to deploy in the past with other software according to the reports from our early adopters.

A while back, we bought a Sun Ultra 5 workstation with a winning bid of about $20.00 or so. It has a 360 MHz SPARC processor, 128 Meg of RAM, and an eight gigabyte harddrive. Most computers from Ebay are sold without operating systems, and this machine was no exception. Installing an operating system on Sun equipment isn't hard, once you know how to do it.

At first blush, Microsoft hounds might want to pounce on Apple's release of over 80 vulnerability fixes this week. But before anyone bears that red M tattooed on their chest, you should take another look at Apple's updates.

[How's this for a loaded article title? Interesting how updates became vulnerabilities - Scott]

Efforts to increase the adoption of open-source software are being derailed by the efforts of a "loud minority" within the community who have made personal attacks on individuals who have expressed doubts about the software, according to one of the open-source movement's main advocates.

Consolidation in the business intelligence market has pushed Business Objects into the arms of SAP and Cognos into IBM's fold,but there are other options. Pentaho is gaining traction with its open source alternative, a BI suite that includes reporting and analysis tools, data mining, and dashboards. Service subscriptions tripled last quarter.

There's been a lot of discussion about which open source application works best as a replacement for Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Outlook: Evolution, Ximian, Thunderbird, and so on. Let's add another contender to that list, shall we? Meet Spicebird, currently in beta 0.4 form.

One big hole for open source lies in security. It’s not a real hole. It’s a meta-hole. But we still view it as a hole, so it’s a hole. That hole opened up again in Australia this week, where a “loud minority” got personal when Australian Taxation Office chief information officer Bill Gibson expressed concerns about open source security.

In this article I am going to explain how to configure and use DOSBox, the best MS DOS emulator for Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux systems.

Apple updated its Safari Web browser for Mac and Windows on Tuesday and offered the new version for download from its Web site. The company also began pushing the browser to Windows users -- whether it was previously installed or not -- via the Apple Software Update, a practice Mozilla CEO John Lilly said is just "wrong."

WHAT a refreshing change, a Linux distribution with a well-chosen, meaningful name. But just having a good name isn't enough, is it? Nor is saying you're going to do something, then not following through. Here's a precis of what the Foresight Linux team have to say about their operating system on their website (http://www.foresightlinux.org/)

"Allocations of larger pages are not reliable in Linux. If larger pages have to be allocated then one faces various choices of allowing graceful fallback or using vmalloc with a performance penalty due to the use of a page table," began Christoph Lameter, describing the third version of his virtual compound page support patchset. He continued,"a virtual compound allocation means that there will be first of all an attempt to satisfy the request with physically contiguous memory. If that is not possible then a virtually contiguous memory will be created."

Floating point whiz ClearSpeed continues to try and make coding for its specialized hardware easier. The company this week touted the release of Version 3.0 of its mainline code. As you might expect, the package includes a variety of additions to simplify the process of moving code off a general purpose x86 chip and onto ClearSpeed’s CX600 accelerators.

Our friends over at OpenUsability have just started a call for students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design or related subjects for the Season of Usability. Season of Usability is a project that offers mentoring students that want to work on usability aspects of various projects, including KDE. Students are offered a stipend worth $US1000. KDE is involved in the Season of Usability with three possible stipends, two for students who want to work on the KDE 4 Human Interface Guidelines, another project aims for improving the toolbox and palette interaction KOffice.

COMMENTARY -- I used KDE as my primary desktop from 1996 through 2006, when I installed the GNOME version of Ubuntu and found that I liked it better than the KDE desktop I'd faced every morning for so many years. Last January, I got a new Dell Latitude D630 laptop and decided to install Kubuntu on it, but within a few weeks, I went back to GNOME. Does this mean GNOME is now a better desktop than KDE, or just that I have become so accustomed to GNOME that it's hard for me to give it up?

Web services have come a long way. There are no more interfaces to write or implement. There is no code to generate or XML files to create.

In late February NVIDIA had introduced the GeForce 9 series with the introduction of the mid-range GeForce 9600GT 512MB graphics card. Earlier this week they then introduced the GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics card, which consists of two NVIDIA GPUs bridged together with SLI support. We have been quiet on how the GeForce 9 series performs under Linux, but this morning we are providing our initial GeForce 9600GT results using an ASUS EN9600GT TOP HDMI and comparing its Linux desktop performance to its GeForce 8 sibling and the ATI Radeon HD 3850 and 3870. On Windows the GeForce 9600GT has been able to outperform the Radeon HD 3850/3870, but on Linux an entirely different story is rendered.