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Almost exactly one year ago, I made the followingsuggestion in the wake of Dell's long-awaited decision to offer ready-configured GNU/Linux systems alongside the usual panoply of Windows systems:we must vote with our wallets. Assuming the Dell GNU/Linux systems are not hopelessly flawed in some way, we must all try to buy as many of them as we can (within reason, of course).What follows is a short report on my own experiences of putting my money where my mouth is.

The KDE Plasma team is inviting everyone to participate in a contest to create Plasma themes from which a select few will be chosen to be included as a part of the upcoming KDE 4.1 release. This is a great opportunity to contribute to a very visible component of the KDE project, the Plasma desktop.

The Eclipse Foundation's announcement of a runtime project got a lot of coverage, as the one-time tools-centric initiative moved deeper into runtime deployment and management. OSGi on mobile was one area that generated particular interest at EclipseCon. And not just any mobile: we're talking Google's Linux-based Android.

The Ubuntu team released Ubuntu 8.04 LTS beta. Codenamed “Hardy Heron”, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition features incremental improvements to familiar applications, with an emphasis on stability for this second Ubuntu long-term support release, and is easier than ever to try out with the new Wubi installer, the team said in a release.

Would you like to add an animated scrollbar, such as gOS's iBar or the one on Mac OS X, to your Linux desktop? If you're looking for some eye candy but don't want a program that gobbles your RAM or CPU, then wbar is just the thing for you. This fast, small launch bar features cool effects and a modern look.

The methodologies of Open Source are not owned or guided by any one person. The closest thing we have are the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and support of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The OSI certifies what qualifies as an open source license. They have as of late also been adding the (TM) to the Open Source logo which is the equivalent of the Good Housekeeping seal of approval for open source software. While the Free Software Foundation maintains the Free Software Definition - to show clearly what must be true about a particular software program for it to be considered free software.

To sum up, not a single “Yes” voter was not in Microsoft’s pocket. Is this voting? Microsoft virtually had 5 seats. It holds them by the money, the mutual favours, the incentives, the personal relationships. Shouldn’t an impartial panel be deciding on OOXML, based on the technical quality of the candidate alone?

Will the Google-sponsored Android platform be the right alternative for today's proprietary mobile environments? The answer is an emphatic "no," according to open source developer David Schlesinger.

The Eclipse Foundation looks destined to remain a mistress to Microsoft and Sun Microsystems - while the platform is married to IBM. The fifth annual EclipseCon this week saw a blockbuster project announcement and an almost shocking partnership.

Think of Qt (pronounced "cute") as a toolkit. In fact, according to Wikipedia, Qt is "a cross-platform application development framework, widely used for the development of GUI programs (in which case it is known as a Widget toolkit), and also used for developing non-GUI programs such as console tools and servers. Qt is most notably used in KDE, the web browser Opera, Google Earth, Skype, Qtopia, Photoshop Elements and OPIE". I suppose if you needed that definition to tell you what Qt is, then maybe this book isn't for you.

This FUD which has been floating around for some time has raised it's ugly head once again.

The steps for setting up any mail-merge document in OpenOffice are easy; the one potentially gnarly bit is creating your contacts database in the first place. Your contacts list must be in Base, which is a bit of a pain. But the good news is Base can import data from most other databases, spreadsheets, text-delimited files, and email address books.

A year has passed since Linden Lab, maker of the popular 3-D virtual world Second Life, released the source code to its Second Life viewer under the GNU GPL. In that time, a viable community of developers has grown up around the SL code, and the company is pleased enough with the success that it has branched out further into open source and open standards.

Apple has been battling renegade Linux hackers, upgrading the iPhone's firmware every time they hack into the device. "It has been a little bit of an arms war," said Saurik, aka Jay Freeman. Will things change now that Apple has opened up its SDK to developers, welcoming the gaming community and targeting the enterprise space?

Not long ago, OLPC undertook a drastic internal restructuring coupled with what, despite official claims to the contrary, is a radical change in its goals and vision from those that were shared with me when I was invited to join the project. Adding insult to injury, I was asked to stop working with Walter Bender...I was to report instead to a manager with no technical or engineering background who was put in charge of all OLPC technology.

TorrentFlux is a BitTorrent client that runs on top of a server running Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It extends the functionality of traditional clients by operating almost entirely through a Web browser interface. It uses the BitTornado client in the background to manage the queuing, downloading, and seeding of torrent files. You can run TorrentFlux on your home machine and access it through a folder on a Web server. You can also install it on an external host to increase bandwidth and transfer speeds.

A couple of weeks ago Hans Bakker, who had never touched KOffice code before, started hacking on a Krita plugin for the 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator. Within a week or two he had a working plugin for Krita and it quickly became clear how cool these little devices are and how many possibilities for new user interaction paradigms they afford.

A change to GCC for a recent release coupled with a kernel bug has created a messy situation, with possible security implications. GCC changed some assumptions about x86 processor flags, in accordance with the ABI standard, that can lead to memory corruption for programs built with GCC 4.3.0. No one has come up with a way to exploit the flaw, at least yet, but it clearly is a problem that needs to be addressed.

What good is a mobile computing environment if you can't keep track of your favorite news feeds on the go? Even though you can use Android's browser to read your favorite Web sites, you'll miss the chance to integrate RSS or XML data with other mobile applications to make your own mash-ups. This tutorial shows you how to use the Android Developer Tools to read, parse, and display XML data.

Only rarely is something new written or said that cuts through the fog of war that has come to surround the battle over OOXML. A few days ago in South Africa, someone did just that, and that’s what I’ve written about today.