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Back in August we warned that Microsoft had just made a very suspicious donation at a very strategic time. It only days before the September vote on OOXML. The article which was cited at the time has vanished, but you can find a copy here:..

I have to confess a love, nay addiction of a certain closed-source non-free NFSU2 running under Wine. I had hoped to find a suitable Open Source replacement. Instead I found 10 open source racers to supplement it.

Since the release of Nexuiz 1.0 in 2005, we have been tracking its progress as one of the leading open-source first person shooters. With time, this fast-pace game has picked up a nice level of artificial intelligence for its in-game bots, engine optimizations, single-player campaign missions, and a variety of technical advancements. Nexuiz has always been one of the leading open-source first person shooter games, and with the release of Nexuiz 2.4 yesterday it reaffirms that you don't need to be a major game studio -- or a game studio at all -- to develop a quality title and even for being a free software game it has impressive graphics. With the graphical settings near maximized, a GeForce 8600GT on a quad-core system was brought to its knees by this free software (and free content) game.

As it stands today, the BRM has failed -failed to work, failed to impress, failed to create consensus and failed to succeed. Rules that were not part of the existing JTC-1 corpus had to be invented to come up with the astounding result of 6 countries approving the bulk voting versus 4 countries formally disapproving them.

This article shows how to develop and debug a graphical activity in Sugar using Python. The XO laptop includes many innovations such as an inexpensive and durable hardware design, the use of GNU/Linux as the underlying operating system, and an application environment written in Python with a human interface called Sugar, accessible to everyone (including kids).

This second installment in the three-part series shows you how to configure HTTP basic authentication for your Web services and Web services client, and monitor the HTTP basic authentication information using the TCP/IP monitor. Check out the first part of there series for the initial steps.

Four months after being announced, the End Software Patents project (ESP) is launching a new Web site with arguments for economists, computer scientists, lawyers, and lay peoplemen about why they should support the project. Prominent on the site is the publication of a report on the state of patents in the United States during 2006-07, and a scholarship contest that will award $10,000 for "for the best paper on the effects of the patentability of software and business methods under US law."

Last week when traveling to Europe for FOSDEM and other business meetings, I had picked up a new 9-cell battery for a Lenovo ThinkPad T60. While an additional three battery cells will noticeably extend your battery life, you can also extend your battery life by taking a few simple steps to optimize your Linux desktop that will also reduce your power consumption and heat output. In this article are a few simple steps to take in order to extend your notebook's battery life on Ubuntu.

Com One's Phoenix Wi-Fi radio is a home music appliance built on an embedded Linux foundation. Phoenix lets you stream music or play podcasts as easily as you can listen to a car radio, once you tell it what you want to hear. Its ability to play Internet radio is nice -- but is it worth its price? The radio is attractive enough in a shiny white plastic kind of way. It's smaller than a boom box -- about the size of three transistor radios (remember them?) side by side. The main controls include a five-way circular control pad and a knob that changes the music volume and moves through device settings during setup.

After a slow start, add-ons for OpenOffice.org are finally starting to reach a critical mass. When I last wrote about add-ons for OpenOffice.org in September 2004, the examples were relatively limited, with extendedPDF the outstanding example. Today, extendedPDF remains a must-have -- so much so that Debian versions of OpenOffice.org include it as part of the basic packages -- but the choices have expanded dramatically. There is even a web page that is slowly beginning to rival the Firefox extension page.

I haven't hooked up my OpenBSD 4.2 drive and booted it for about a week. The last time I left the box, I was playing around with Apache, and I thought all was well. Today I hook up the drive and boot OpenBSD. First of all, instead of a console login, I get an XDM login. That's strange. I don't remember XDM ever showing up before. Then Internet networking doesn't work. I check all the networking settings. Everything is correct. I can ping IP addresses on the local network, but nothing is working outside of that. Pinging google.com yields nothing. Since I can get local machines, I know it's not a bad cable.

An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) will allow your computer to continue to function for a period of time when mains power is lost. This can help you to smooth over short-term (1-5 minute) loss of power by running from the UPS battery. When the UPS battery is running low, the UPS can signal your computer to shut down cleanly. With a UPS you can avoid lengthly filesystem or RAID checks due to abrupt power loss. Here are some tips on UPSes in general and how to set one up to protect a Linux machine, even if the model you have lacks explicit Linux support.

Yesterday, Ubuntu tore a page from The Book of Dell and launched Brainstorm, an opportunity for its users to contribute their ideas to for software development and marketing. Kubuntu users finally have an invitation to vent their frustration at having a Cinderella distribution relegated to the role of ugly stepsister. Will Canonical respond?

Today we're going to dig into ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, a good tool for managing your Linux sound devices. It's good for managing multiple sound devices, and it works in all Linux environments including other window managers, or no X Windows at all.

The VAR Guy has been negative on Novell for a few years, and he frequently questioned the company’s open source software strategy. But according to a new piece of financial news, the Linux provider is performing better than Wall Street expected. Here’s the scoop, which surprised our resident blogger.

Sun has claimed that completing its purchase of the open source database developer MySQL will enable it to become the most complete provider of open source server software. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's chief executive, said in a conference call on Tuesday that the US$1 billion acquisition "completed our capability to deliver a holistic, secure, open source platform for networks", providing the last, key piece in a software stack that now rivals Microsoft's.

Ubuntu just launched Brainstorm, a system similar to Dell's Ideastorm that lets users propose improvements to Ubuntu and vote others' proposals up or down. The system has great potential in giving all Ubuntu users a voice in the future of the operating system.

Medsphere, an open-source VistA vendor and their customers, gave a talk on their system and their strategy at HIMSS yesterday. Relative to the number of vendors present at HIMSS, very few held a session at the "University" section of the tradeshow. Medsphere did and highlighted several of their key successes. Overall, I was impressed. Read on after the gap for my review of the session.

There are lots of ways that software gets included in Fedora releases. Because Fedora is a community-powered Linux distribution, the most common (and likely the easiest) method is when a community member packages and “owns” the task of building it for Fedora. This story follows that process.

Linux Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) can help you protect world-writeable shared directories from abuse. This article for Linux system administrators lays out the steps to enable namespaces with PAM. The pam_namespace module creates a separate namespace for users on your system when they login to protect users from several types of security attacks.