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Users of BasKet Note Pads, an advanced notepad application for the KDE desktop, are called to participate in a usability survey. The survey is carried out by the recently launched BasKet Usability Project, a sponsored student project in the "Season of Usability" of OpenUsability.org.

A large number of very useful Free templates have been created by third parties and individuals alike for use in OpenOffice.org office suite, with worldlabel - a label manufacturing company being in the forefront of it.This article takes a look at one of the ways by which one can easily import third party templates into OpenOffice.org.

A physician and medical imaging specialistspeaks out on VistA content protection or digital rights management in a medical environment:'...the field of medical imaging either bans outright or strongly frowns on any form of lossy compression because artifacts introduced by the compression process can cause mis-diagnoses and in extreme cases even become life-threatening. Consider a medical IT worker who's using a medical imaging PC while listening to audio/video played back by the computer (the CDROM drives installed in workplace PCs inevitably spend most of their working lives playing music or MP3 CDs to drown out workplace noise). If there's any premium content present in there, the image will be subtly altered by Vista's content protection, potentially creating exactly the life-threatening situation that the medical industry has worked so hard to avoid.

Red Hat Inc. shares climbed as much as 19% Friday after the No. 1 provider of Linux software reported a quarterly profit and outlook that topped Wall Street forecasts.

Oracle said during its Q2 conference call that people downloaded 9,000 copies of its freebie indemnified Unbreakable Linux

2.4 kernel maintainer Willy Tarreau [story] announced the release of the 2.4.34 stable Linux kernel, "2.4.34 brings the usual bunch of security fixes, bugfixes, and adds support for gcc 4 to x86, x86-64 and sparc64, thanks to Mikael Pettersson's work." Willy also released the 2.4.33.7 kernel with a security fix added in 2.4.34-rc3. He went on to note some caveats:"One user reported regular panics with aacraid since 2.4.32, so there's no regression here. I will seek for some help to get this fixed in 2.4.35. I also get reports of people getting trapped by NIC vendors who suddenly change their ethernet chips with no big warning notice. The i82546GB chip which replaced the i82546EB in e1000 cards come to mind. It is not supported by the driver in 2.4.34 but I will try to solve this in 2.4.35 (right now, you have to download the vendor's drivers when you replace a NIC). Another driver should get some lifting : skge. I have got a few reports of problems with the vendor's sk98lin driver and I noticed the same problems at work (UDP becoming silent on NFS server)."

QuickSec 4.1 Enables Carrier-Grade Security Gateways to Support Next-Generation Mobile VPN Devices

Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks: A Pain-Free, Project-Based, Get-Things-Done Guidebook

A new blog,All Scrubbed Up is discussing using Ubuntu GNU/Linux as the base for a FOSS EHR network in South Africa. They are tentatively calling the projectMedical Ubuntu. Its a good idea, and I hope they follow through. -FT

Nouveau is a community project that is working on producing open-source 3D display drivers for NVIDIA's graphics cards. Nouveau is not affiliated with NVIDIA Corporation and is an X.Org Foundation project. While this project is still far from being completed, for this holiday special we are sharing some of our first thoughts on this project from our experience thus far. We would like to make it very clear, however, that the Nouveau driver is no where near completed and still has a great deal of work ahead for the 3D component. This article today will also hopefully shed some light on the advancements of this project so far.

How many times do people confuse the opinion of the whole site with the opinion of one of its members? This has happened to Libervis.com enough times. It's a discussion site, with respect to freedom of speech, not a propaganda publication!

There is just something weird about a community of people who promote "open" who don't want to be open with their own names and qualifications. Openness is supposed to improve quality, but if we don't know if a person in a discussion is actually qualified to talk on a subject, wouldn't you think the result would be lower quality?

[I do wish he had given a more specific example of the contrived IDs he's referring to. How are these people driving the discussions? And how does this impact the quality of FOSS? Has Enderle been smoking the poinsettias laying around the office? - dcparris]

For many Windows users who want to create PDF files, Adobe Acrobat is overkill. Acrobat has more functions and features than they'll generally use, and with a price tag of $299 ($449 for the professional edition), Acrobat costs more than many people want to spend. Luckily, Windows users can create PDFs from any application using the GPL-licensed PDFCreator. Built on top of Ghostscript, a popular free PostScript interpreter, PDFCreator is fast and configurable. For most purposes, it's a great alternative to Acrobat.

[O.k., so it's for Windows. We all know many of you still have copies of Windows around. You've all 'fessed up before. So now you can at least use a Free Software program on your Windows box to create PDFs. ;-) - dcparris]

Novell’s Linux pact with Microsoft has cost it open-source guru Jeremy Allison, who left in protest to take a position at Google.

The perpetual debate over the legality, practicality, and wisdom of using, distributing, producing, and supporting binary-only drivers flared up again recently, with a recent debate on the Linux Kernel Mailing List over the legality of binary-only drivers simmering down and Ubuntu company Canonical considering enabling binary drivers by default in the next release.

There's a comprehensive update of the long-raging Wireless Wars at the IEEE site right now, written by Greg Goth, and aptly titled This Little Standard Went to Market; This Little Standard Blew Up. Those wars, you may recall, have been raging for years. Most recently, attention has focused on a new and hotly-contested wireless personal area network standard intended not to replace WiFi, but to allow other types of devices - like stereo equipment - to be connected wirelessly.

Let's be honest here. When most of us think of open source and free software, we really aren’t thinking of something flashed to a BIOS ROM chip. And yet when it comes to the Linux BIOS project - that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Many religions have some sort of holiday during this season, and many companies close down or work short hours until the current year ends and the next one begins. We, too, will be taking time off to spend with our families and friends, so NewsForge will be on a reduced posting schedule between now and January 1. We'll still cover breaking news, and you'll see a trickle of feature articles and NewsVac links, but not as many as you're used to.

LXer Feature: 25-Dec-2006

Here's hoping you find a penguin under your tree this year!

Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.1, a security and stability update for Firefox 2, has been released.