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The old push-down transition has done its 15 years of service, and it's time for something new. Do the sleepy faces in your meetings agree? OpenOffice.org Impress 2.4 has the answer: ten 3D transitions rendered in OpenGL.

"Ok, this kernel is a winner," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, playfully announcing the 2.6.25-rc2 kernel which gained the name "Funky Weasel is Jiggy wit it". He continued: "Just to show how _much_ of a winner it is, it's been awarded a coveted 'weasel' series name, which should tell you just how good it's going to be. It's a name revered in Linux kernel history, and as such this brings back the good old days where if you find a bug, you're almost certainly simply mistaken, and you probably just did something wrong. But hey, you can try to prove me wrong. I dare you."

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma applets can now be dragged from the desktop to the panel. More internet data sources for the Picture Frame and Comic Plasmoids. Configuration dialogs are added to many Plasmoids. The in-development "WorldClock" Plasmoid supercedes the KWorldClock standalone application. A new Plasma applet: Conway's Game of Life. KRunner becomes completely plugin-based. Support for editing GPS track lists in Digikam. More work on expanding theming capabilities across KDE games..

While Intel's X48 Express Chipset is not due out until the middle of March -- after having faced a few delays reaching production -- the kind folks at Gigabyte have today provided us with the Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 motherboard. This motherboard is similar to the Gigabyte X38-DQ6 that we reviewed last October, but it employs the new X48 Express MCH and the revised feature-set that this chipset brings to the hands of enthusiasts. This is our first Intel X48 motherboard review and the world's first look at this new flagship chipset under Linux. In this review of the Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 we will be comparing it to Intel's current P35 and X38 motherboards.

A highly unusual take on why Linux isn't very popular on the desktop. Apparently Linux has one major problem: It's free. In the author's words: "I know this sounds like complete dog's bollocks, but hear me out before judging my sanity."

Microsoft is up to the usual trick, spreading disinformation in their latest wave of product marketing. Here comes Windows Server 2008.

When I installed OpenBSD on this system's 14.4 GB drive, I made the root partition a whole lot bigger than recommended. I recall a previous FreeBSD install that crapped out when I didn't have enough space, but I was too ambitious on what I was installing at that point. Still, I gave / a whole gigabyte. I'm not quite sure why I gave /usr so much space, but in the case of /, I wanted to make sure I had room to grow.

Do you remember a bit over a year ago when the MMORPG Ryzom was being liquidated and the FOSS community tried to buy the assets and release it under the GPL? Do you remember that in the end it was granted to another company under the impressions that they could keep the game going and provide better care for the employees? Well, not only has the company that took over (a subsidiary) bankrupted, but they have also left their employees unpaid for several months and the liquidator unpaid. Anyone else think that the FOSS community could do worse?

Acer, who previously said they would not join the UMPC market, has announced that they will be joining in all the other companies trying to pick up some of the success of the Eee PC.

People want to get the job done. They don't have or take the time to learn a new tool, even if this investment makes them more productive in the long run. That behavior is one of the most important obstacles in the adoption of Open Source products. People are only willing to change if their applications don't change.

A newly published and quite intriguing Patent application from Microsoft describes technology for hand-activating page turning of Microsoft documents.

M-Audio has supplied hardware and software to computer-based musicians for 20 years. Its new "make-music-now" line of products, aimed at musicians just getting into computers or PC users with an interest in music, includes a microphone, speakers, drum machine, and DJ mixer deck. Unfortunately, its bundled software, called Session, is for Windows only. Our challenge was to try out this hardware -- specifically the KeyStudio MIDI keyboard and Fast Track audio interface -- with Linux applications. We were half successful.

Parted Magic 2.0 is a 42MB Live CD/USB/PXE with the main goal of providing disk drive partitioning software. This new edition of Parted Magic 2.0 is designed for use on x86 hardwares and was released two days before this year's Valentine's Day. This GPLed specialized Linux distro is currently ranked at number 60 at DistroWatch.com. It originates from the U.S. and it is based on the Linux From Scratch. The easily noticeable new features, besides the new Linux kernel 2.6.23.13, Xfce 4.4.2, X.Org 7.3 and various other software updates , are the availability of Firefox 2.0.0.4 and the simple but capable Start Network tool.

SOA usually implies heavyweight technology for large enterprises, but the advantages of the SOA architectural pattern also apply to smaller environments. This article describes how to follow SOA principles using lightweight principles like REST, rather than all the overhead that is used in larger environments.

Linux Journal recently caught up with Intel's Arjan van de Ven. Van de Ven leads Intel's green Lesswatts.org initiative and is the developer of PowerTOP, one of the most acclaimed power management tools on the Linux platform.

You've probably seen them: black and white checkerboard-patterned matrices printed on labels and other real-world objects that you can optically scan with a cameraphone or other handheld device to extract an encoded message. But although 2-D barcodes (as they are known) are getting more common, working with them is still a bumpy road for the Linux and free software crowd. Fortunately, several options exist for reading and generating them with open source software.

OpenBSD doesn't use the CUPS printing system by default, and while I've been successful in using Apsfilter in Damn Small Linux (but not in Debian), now that I've figured out all the quirks in CUPS and my office network-printing situation, I prefer to use CUPS to manage the many network printers at my disposal.

One thing I noticed this week is that the mono group has been able to encumber a growing number of Ubuntu (not Kubuntu) applications with proprietary Microsoft technology. However, the documentation and program descriptions do not warn of this (of course they want to keep it under the radar).

I use, on a daily basis, three different Linux distributions: MEPIS 6.5 and 7, OpenSUSE 10.3, and SLED 10 SP1. So, when I saw that Frank Ohlhorst, my colleague over at The Channel Insider, had gotten his hands on a ThinkPad T61 with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 Service Pack 1, I was interested in what he would find.

Well it seems that SCO has more lives than Jason. cha cha cha cha hah hah hah hah... Un freaken believable! So to be a balanced LXer news spotter sort of bloke, It is my solemn duty to follow up to my post sometime ago about SCO's inspiration. Yet again torn from the unofficial Holy Grail script... clop clop, clop clop, clop clop, clop clop....