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I don't care whether or not you are thinking of using Vista, OS X or Linux. As a personal rule, I rarely upgrade until any release has been out for at least 6 months. Why is this?

Users by the truck load fill various user forums with problem topics in Linux despite widely available support documents available online. Today, I will talk about a few key areas that would solve a number of problems if they were to be addressed in the open.

Why is it that we can manage to sway countless hardware manufactures into looking our way yet those who work in other business circles continue to ignore Linux to the point of almost being laughable? Today, we will highlight these companies, just to remind them how their decisions are costing them money.

I haven’t really been keeping track of how the OLPC project has been evolving for the past few months, honesty. I truly admire the motivation behind what they’re doing, and I wish them all the best, so when I heard about their Give One Get One program, I was instantly intrigued.

The second day of the KDE 4.0 Release Event in Mountain View, California, was a very busy day. Reporters and users joined the hackers, peeking over their shoulders, asking questions and generally trying to figure us out. Talks were given - most notably the keynote by Aaron Seigo, but also covering KOffice, the KDE-Edu project, and multimedia.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A whole set of bugfixes and feature additions in Plasma, and various optimisations across KDE. Usability improvements in Blinken. More work on the timeline tool, including fuzzy selection in Digikam. Support for XComposite translucency in the Konsole KPart. QtScript can now deal transparently with all scripting backends supported by Kross. Improvements in KWin Composite effects. Support for an old feature request, "parenthesis highlighting as an expression" in Kate...

We called it Free Software at first. It wasn't until we started calling it Open Source that the punditry line counts began creeping up higher than the code line counts. We had this baby and we were proud of it, and the deep rooted insecurity born of being the ridiculed and utterly misunderstood underdogs made us require the approval of business and Grandma Bessie before we could ourselves be satisfied. Well, now we've got it, and in some ways Open Source is not better off because of it.

LWN is about to celebrate a birthday. Picking the true anniversary of an enterprise like LWN can be a bit tricky - there are many points which could be said to mark the true birth of the organization. After some thought, we have decreed that LWN.net was born on January 30, 1998. So we have a tenth anniversary coming up. That's a long time - far longer than any of us thought we would be doing this. Life is funny that way, somehow.

To continue my look at how non-profits and the free software community can engage, I’ve decided to look at some popular free software products and see how well they fit the need of an average charity—namely my employer. I’ll start with OpenOffice.org.

DeviceVM demonstrated a Linux-powered PC preboot application environment lets users instantly run several Internet-based applications, including Web browsing and Skype messaging, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. 'Splashtop' integrates with the PC’s BIOS and is launched prior to operating system boot-up.

Yahoo! has pledged to support OpenID from the end of the month, giving a massive boost for the online identity framework that aims to cut password headaches. Yahoo.com and sister site flickr.com will add support for OpenID 2.0, Yahoo! said on Thursday. Separately, Google's Blogger confirmed yesterday plans to become an OpenID provider.

MEncoder has supported video encoding for a long time with the MPlayer Project and FFmpeg, which also now is part of MPlayer now. Transcode is a new command-line tool on the horizon for video and audio transformations. Transcode used to give me horrors, but it is much better now. It does take some time to learn its wonderfully unintuitive syntax—the author used all the lowercase and uppercase English alphabet letters for specifying the command-line options. Using longer mnemonic options common in other Linux commands might have made things easier. Anyway, let's get to the meat of the matter.

LOOK OUT! Ultumix is running faster than ever thanks to the new XFCE interface. It’s running so fast with such a small RAM requirement that It does not even slow my PC down when I start it up in a Virtual Machine.

Linux and High Performance Computing go hand in hand. So to see what Australian users have been doing with Linux and HPC, this year's linux.conf.au is holding a Birds of a Feather session on the topic. Before the session kicks off we take time to speak to the BoF coordinator Anthony David. During the working day Anthony works for SGI as the onsite engineer for the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC).

This tutorial teaches you how to streamline development for Linux apps on handheld and mobile devices using UME. Along the way, you learn about several tools and new approaches to Linux kernel configuration and environment construction.

Lots of open source tools can help you transfer photos and videos from your cameras to a Linux computer and burn them on to a DVD. But before you mail them to your uncles, aunts, and cousins, wouldn't it be great if you could add a customized case cover to your disks? Koverartist is a KDE application you can use to quickly put together an artistic cover for a CD case.

Sun frequently touts their “predictive self-healing” implementation in Solaris 10. I wonder if that bullet point would be further down the list if they were familiar with the error detection, prediction, and correction capabilities of Linux on POWER platforms. In fact, the Linux on POWER implementation precedes the Solaris 10 implementation by at least a year.

Breaking from the KDE 4.0 release event right now is word that Trolltech will be releasing Qt to be released under the GPLv3 license. An official announcement will be made by Trolltech regarding this GPLv2 to GPLv3 license update on Monday, January 21, 2008. Richard Stallman is pleased by this move and had stated, "I am very pleased that Trolltech has decided to make Qt available under GPLv3." This news was delivered at the KDE 4.0 release event by Haavard Nord, Trolltech co-founder & CEO.

I have cron-apt set up on all my machines — you can get it to install any updates automatically but that sounds like Bad News to me, so instead it’s set to download and email me. I had a script that took names-of-machines-to-upgrade as arguments and did the rest for me, but that involved typing up to 50 machine names. And I am lazy. So I finally got around to writing a script that parses a local mailbox, grabs the machine names from the subject lines, and does the rest from there.

A visitor of this site, who goes by the name “Finland Calling”, has just dropped us a helpful tip. Quick translation of the text from “The Finnish News Agency” aka STT going rounds in web already and being published in all of the major and also most of the minor newspapers tomorrow: "In the meeting between prime minister of Finland Matti Vanhanen and Bill Gates, the software giant Microsoft promised to donate tailored tools for Finnish schools. Microsoft will offer Finnish basic education and general upper secondary schools and their students free Windows live services selection."