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Developers Francesco Gingoli and Lorenzo Nava have released firmware under GPL for a number of Broadcom 802.11 chips.

Nokia announces that its Qt cross-platform User Interface (UI) and application framework for desktop and embedded platforms will be available under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1 license from the release of Qt 4.5, scheduled for March 2009. Previously, Qt has been made available to the open source community under the General Public License (GPL) license. In addition, Qt will now be available from the new domain, http://www.qtsoftware.com.

Using the SSConverter class that we developed last week, which used the OORunner class from the week before that, this week we'll create a Python function that allows us to use spreadsheets as if they were CSV files by converting them on the fly.

Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, has presented a plan in her blog whereby Mozilla will have Web world domination by 2010.

Moving towards the 2.0 release with almost monthly beta releases, the KOffice team has once more honoured its promise to bring out beta releases of KOffice until the time is right for a release candidate. So today we bring you this beta with many, many improvements across the board. Incremental as it is, this beta is an important step towards a final release.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Tuesday, January 13, 2009, with your host, Marcel Gagné. This is episode 44. Today we uncover some Vista trash, an ongoing battle between the forces of OO and Go-OO, Shuttleworth and Ubuntu get the New York treatment (Times, that is), Linux goes to CES, Fedora gets a moniker, and Twitter gets bashed.

KDE's Konqueror file manager and Web browser is a powerhouse loaded with useful features. However, sometimes it takes a bit of digging to unearth treasures and to figure out how to make it do what you want. Carla Schroder offers up tips on creating view profiles that stick, and how to open it exactly to the profile that you want.

James Grimmelman compares Google to Sauron. I'm flabbergasted. I had always thought that Google was the Ringbearer and that Mordor was where Gates and Ballmer hung out. Was I misinformed? Or am I just confused? If it's the latter, I have a decent excuse. After all, even though Google and Microsoft have very different public personae, it's getting harder and harder to tell them apart as businesses. Both built their empires through the same strategy: gaining control of the economic chokepoint of the prevailing computing model of their day.

One of the items being worked on by Red Hat for Fedora 11 is making the GNOME volume control and sound preferences area more intuitive and easier to use. With Fedora and most other distributions now using PulseAudio, they are beginning to take advantage of some of the features available through this sound server. Some of this work involves reworking the user interface for controlling GNOME Sound Preferences, which we are providing a glimpse of in this article. Among other benefits, there is finally the ability to adjust the volume level on a per-application basis.

Welcome to this year's 1st issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. This issue is dedicated to Thiemo Seufer, who died on 26 December 2008 in a tragic car accident. Topics covered in this issue include "Bits from the Debian CD team", "Bits from the Debian Installer team" and "Results from the Lenny release GR".

Today I would like to announce the appointment of Tracy Anne Barlow aka tracyanne to Contributing Editor. Tracy has been a force of fact and opinion in the LXer forums for some time now. Her contributions to the forums quite literally speak for themselves. LXer is lucky to have her. Please join me in welcoming Tracy to the LXer Team.

Yesterday I published "Why Linux makes Windows 7 obsolete" . Okay, that was quite funny and we all had a lot of fun. But let's analyze what actually happened. In the past, editors of the "major" websites complained they couldn't publish a story on Open Source without being "flamed to hell". It appears that nowadays Windows supporters are just as touchy. The point is, they seems to feel they have to defend their choice. That is quite a change from the arrogant attitude they had before. All in all, it was an interesting social experiment.

This guide explains how you can set up LVM-based virtual machines on a Xen host running on Debian Etch instead of virtual machines that use disk images. Virtual machines that use disk images are very slow and heavy on disk IO.

Steve Jobs is taking a five and a half month medical leave of absence from his role as CEO of Apple, saying his health issues "are more complex than I originally thought." Jobs underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in mid 2004. Since then there has been much speculation about his health, largely due to a significant loss of weight that gave him a somewhat haggard appearance.

[I have a feeling its going to turn into more than just five or six months. - Scott]

This is the first time that I'm reviewing GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), and it's definitely long overdue. As the open-source image editor of choice, the feature list of GIMP 2.6 is very long, and despite its status as a free application, it's as feature-packed as any commercial application. GIMP is loaded with the up-to-date tools many demanding professionals need: Bézier path editing with brush stroking, tablet support, Heal Tool, alpha channels, multiple-undo History, area-averaged eyedropper, PSD file compatibility, and a wackload of other high-end tools that are impressive in their attention to detail.

While TiddlyWiki is probably the most popular desktop wiki out there, it’s not the only fish in the sea.

Microsoft has a strategy aimed at converting Linux/Unix users to windows, this is obvious because they are creating the tools and extensions to windows that resemble Linux. powershell I had a good laugh when I met windows powershell for the first time, it's really great. You're used to Linux command line and you always type the wrong commands in windows, and suddenly your commands start working. It was really surprising the first time this happened.

Nokia has announced that starting with version 4.5, Qt will be available under the LGPL 2.1. From the announcement, "The move to LGPL licensing will provide open source and commercial developers with more permissive licensing than GPL and so increase flexibility for developers. In addition, Qt source code repositories will be made publicly available and will encourage contributions from desktop and embedded developer communities. With these changes, developers will be able to actively drive the evolution of the Qt framework."

If you haven’t tried OpenOffice.org’s mail merge feature because you find it confusing or difficult to use, you are in luck. This in-depth guide to mail merge with OpenOffice.org explains all the intricacies of using this powerful feature. Learn how to use the mail merge feature to create letters, labels, and envelopes. The guide is also available as a free PDF Ebook document for your perusal

For some time, Ubuntu Brainstorm has been a place for users to share and vote on ideas for Ubuntu. Today, that process just got a little better with the introduction of a new version of Brainstorm.