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Because I like small, gutsy companies that are willing to take on the big guys, a graphics outfit Xara caught my eye....But it goes toe to toe against Adobe Illustrator, the $500 heavyweight widely considered a standard. You compete against industry titans on two obvious levels, one of them being price. Xara Xtreme sells for $79 yet offers composition and editing tools that stand out in the rapidly growing vector graphics field. And if low price can improve its market share, Xara is getting more aggressive still with the announcement that it will convert its products to an open source format and make them freely available to Linux developers (a Mac OS X version also looms).

LinuxDevices.com has launched a discussion forum specifically focused on the exciting new Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. We believe the 770 has lots of potential, and we expect it to evolve rapidly as more and more of the tablets get into Linux enthusiasts' hands. We therefore want to encourage our readers to ask -- and answer -- questions about the device.

PARIS: Supporters of open sourcing for computers have been given a shot in the arm by news the French police is abandoning Microsofts Internet Explorer for the Mozilla Foundations browser Firefox.

The gendarmerie's 70,000 desktops were being converted to Firefox and its email client Thunderbird because of the navigator's "reliability, security and inter-operability with other state services," said General Christian Brachet, IT director of the police force.

Google and eBay's Skype are investing in a startup that plans to help hotspot owners charge for Wi-Fi access, a plan that could face significant opposition from internet service providers (ISPs). The Internet heavyweights were joined by venture capital firms Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital in making a $US22 million investment in FON, the Spanish startup.

Rochester, NY – The GoblinX Linux Project (http://goblinx.com.br/), today, released GoblinX Premium 2006.1 edition, exclusively at On-Disk.com. 

GoblinX is a bootable live CD distribution based on Slackware Linux. The primary goal for GoblinX is to create a more pleasant and functional desktop, standardizing all icons and themes to make it easy for novice users to learn about available applications.

A demonstration of the next release of Novell's Linux for desktops drew cheers, although the final version of the software is not expected for some months.

Nat Friedman, the company's VP of Linux desktop engineering, showed Novell Linux Desktop 10 playing videos and MP3 music files, and exchanging music and photos with an iPod and a digital camera, in a keynote presentation at the Solutions Linux conference and trade show on the outskirts of Paris.

[Ed: Previously covered in an earlier article. tadelste]