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The New Zealand State Services Commission's (SSC) championing of open-source software in government helped its ICT (Information and Communications Technology) branch pick up an award in the government category of the inaugural New Zealand Open Source Awards, held in Wellington this month. The SSC has developed and published guidelines to government agencies that are considering open source, says the deputy commissioner and head of the ICT branch, Laurence Millar. The guidelines were published on the e-government website in 2003 and then updated, he says.

I was truly disheartened after trying out Evolution on Windows: how in the heck is this even considered anything but an Alpha? As a full-time Evolution user in Ubuntu, I have always been very happy with its PIM (personal information manager) abilities, MS Exchange support and the fact that it's easy to create a simple backup script to keep things safe in case of data loss.

The situation and rules for the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) are starting to become clearer. As you may know, this is a follow-up to the September 2 vote where the Microsoft/ECMA OOXML (”Open” “XML”) specification failed on both measures to become an ISO/IEC JTC1.Given the way the system works, this means that we get to go on and try something else to make it a standard. And if that doesn’t work, try something else. Repeat until either the opposition goes away, gets bored, or no one remembers what you were trying to do in the first place (grin).

This week on Open News Turbolinux Does Deal With The Devil, Sun Fights For The Community, No More Greenphone, Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon and Anonymous Browsing With JAP.

I’ve known for a long time to stay away from the short, sweet and simple “rm -rf /” command. It deletes every file on any writable filesystem mounted by a *nix system, but what exactly happens if you do run it? Do green leprechauns jump off the screen to warn you that you shouldn’t do it? Not quite. Here’s a video with the verbose option set to make it a little bit more interesting. I’m running it in a virtual machine so I can capture video of all the “action” - it was a bit slow to complete, but I’ve gone ahead and increased how quickly it runs to not be nearly so boring. Enjoy!

So you have GNU/Linux installed, and your friends are congratulating you on being the king of your computing castle. But you quickly lose that majestic feeling when you find yourself needing a Bash prompt, and start feeling like this whole GNU/Linux thing is a royal pain. The Bash prompt need not give you the feeling of having to issue royal decrees in a foreign language you've never even heard of, let alone speak fluently.

Microsoft have listed 100 reasons why people really ought to upgrade from Windows XP. They appeal to usability, mobility, security and entertainment. Yet, looking through the list, we reckon they’re actually talking about Ubuntu Linux, not that dog Windows Vista. Lets count down the top 10 reasons from Microsoft why you should upgrade to Ubuntu.

Dear Steve, Hi, this is François, from Mandriva. I’m sure we’re way too small for you to know me. You know, we’re one of these tiny Linux company working hard for our place on the market. We recently closed a deal with the Nigerian Government. We had a good answer to their need: the Classmate PC from Intel, with a customized Mandriva Linux solution. And then, today, we hear from the customer a totally different story: “we shall pay for the Mandriva Software as agreed, but we shall replace it by Windows afterward.” How do you call what you just did Steve, in the place where you live? In my place, they give it various names, I’m sure you know them.

KDE4 edged closer to final release this week with the development team announcing the KDE4 beta 4 release, the last step before final release candidates are built. Although intended primarily as a bugfix release, beta 4 has enough cool features to impress.

Imagine coming home from work and instead of plugging your phone to a wall where it will just dully wait to be recharged, plug it to your computer via USB and make a few phone calls, send a few SMS messages or tidy up your phone book all by using your computer keyboard and mouse, rather than that tiny phone keypad! GNU/Linux and other Freedomware platforms have at least three user friendly software programs which allow you to do this, with varying capabilities and relatively good user friendliness. So let's see what they can do!

What is Miguel de Icaza's latest game? His obsession with tailgating everything that Microsoft develops - and trying to impress the company by producing Linux equivalents - now seems to be spreading to others as well. News has emerged that the GNOME foundation is participating in meetings to discuss adoption of Microsoft's Office Open XML formats. There are a few people in the FOSS community who think that they can actually fight with an 800-pound gorilla and win. Some of these people are apparently part of the GNOME foundation.

What could make the Free Software Foundation (FSF), proprietary software companies, and at least one venture capitalist into allies? The End Software Patents (ESP) coalition, a new organization poised to swing into action next month under the leadership of Ben Klemens. The campaign currently has seed funding of a quarter million dollars from sources those associated with the group won't disclose, and hopes to augment that with donations from individuals and companies for a struggle that, to judge by the usual amount of time it takes to push major changes through the US Supreme Court, could take five years or more to complete.

"A "truly open and welcoming" community with an agenda is a contradiction. That is what Libervis.com largely is today and changing that fact is at the core of the blueprint proposal for the next revision of Libervis.com."

The other day my father dropped off his old Dell Insprion 8100 laptop that I think he has had for many years. It had Windows XP on it and well he thought my son might like it. Well, the first thing my son said was "Gee is it heavy and slow" he was right. Its not the fastest laptop in the world and it is build rather solid. My son has a gaming Intel 3g machine and he likes his video game so I could see his point.

Everex, a longtime personal computer vendor, has unveiled its latest PC featuring Ubuntu Linux-based open-source productivity software and Google-based Web 2.0 applications, for a mere $198. The Everex Green gPC TC2502 includes popular applications from Google, Mozilla, Skype and OpenOffice.org. It runs gOS Initial G, which in turn is based on Ubuntu Linux 7.10 The gOS operating system features a simple and intuitive Linux Enlightenment E17 desktop interface with a Google-centric theme. The system comes with a lifetime of free updates and revisions. The Everex gPC will be available at some, but not all, Wal-Mart stores and walmart.com for $198 starting in early November.

How to Install Beryl in Debian Etch

If you lose a Windows password, or you buy a system that has an OS on it, but you don't know the password, what are you to do? The best thing to do would be to throw in a Linux CD, format the drive, and install the Distro. But, what if you want to boot to the system and see what's on there, and get data off?

Explore new ways to record UNIX logins and other system activities in a number of different logs, and take advantage of this information to monitor user usage. This can be helpful from a number of perspectives, either to use for chargeback reporting or just to get an idea of how busy and active individual users are on the system to help when planning and allocating resources.

In public health, harm reduction is a practice that, rather than trying to eradicate potentially dangerous choices like prostitution, tries to minimize their effects. Often, the practice involves a limited condoning of the practice, such as safe injection sites for addicts. Harm reduction is the path that Fedora 8 has chosen on the issue of MP3 and other non-free codecs in the form of Codec Buddy, a Codeina-based program that tries to educate users about free software while giving them easy legal access to codecs by linking to the commercial Fluendo site. It's a decision about which the Fedora Board and community leaders feel considerable ambivalence.

Upgrade Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)