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Main news: How Microsoft is working on OpenDocument, an ODF viewer for Android, handling of application-specific features and making ODF books out of wikis.

"Let’s define what I mean by the term “hacker” first. There is so much FUD out there around this term. Large controlling institutions want you to fear hackers, want you to think the hacker mindset is dangerous. This could not be farther from the truth. Hackers are simply empowered individuals that want to figure things out for themselves." ... "1. Hackers are not consumer lemmings – As large institutions continue to brainwash American citizens into becoming slaves to the systems they’ve created"...

The simplified / elementary Nautilus idea firstly begun with the 100 paper cuts for Ubuntu Karmic and it stated that the menu and columns are too big and take away space for the really important stuff. Unfortunately, a fix was never released. Here is where Nautilus Elementary comes in: a Nautilus patched for simplicity. Nautilus Elementary 2.30 for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx comes with some nice new features, such as an option to set the toolbar either as vertical or horizontal, a new view_switcher mini widget and also some extra options you can set from within Nautilus (and of course, the features that were in Karmic too).

In this howto, I’ll show how to create and install ringtones on your iPhone. There are a bunch of howtos around the internets on how to do this using Windows, and possibly on Linux with jailbroken phones. However, I haven’t seen one showing how to do it using just Linux, without having to jailbreak your phone. So here goes.

There is no denying the huge selection of open source games available for Linux. Playing through all of these games would entertain many gamers for years. Nevertheless, there is still a massive market for commercial games. If Linux is ever going to usurp the desktop market, it needs a regular source of native high quality games that rival commercial games available on Windows.

The Wine development release 1.1.43 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

What do you get when you mix Python and C? According to Google, it’s Go – a new programming language developed in-house and later open sourced. Go was created by a small team inside Google, including the well known Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix and major influence on C. It was created out of a lack of satisfaction with existing languages, mainly the excessively (in the minds of Go’s developers) long compile times needed for other languages. With Go, even a very large and complex application can compile in a few seconds, often less. Additionally, Go has built in concurrency support, so you can code for multiple CPUs without resorting to outside libraries of unknown quality. While we don’t usually cover much programming here at MakeTechEasier, Go is such an interesting language that we just had to dip in a bit, and where better to start than by covering the system setup needed to get Go up and running on your Linux box.

After its recent acquisition of Sun, enterprise software vendor Oracle began making some significant changes to Solaris licensing policies. Solaris 10, the latest stable version of Sun's UNIX operating system, was previously available for free without official support. Oracle changed the license last month, however, limiting it to a 90-day trial. The new license is relatively clear, but left a number of questions unanswered.

The developers behind Google Chrome OS, the forthcoming cloud-enabled operating system from the internet giant, have explained how they are dealing with a key need for any computer - how well it plays with the printer. With Chrome OS on course for arrival at the end of 2010, the details of how the operating system, which is all about cloud computing, will do familiar computing tasks are an increasingly important factor. The Chrome OS developers are mindful of the interest and the latest blog post from Mike Jazayeri, group product manager for Chrome OS, explains the detail.

Part of my job is finding and testing open sourced solutions for already prominent commercially available software. The concept is simple: If it's open sourced, it can be customized, be platform independent, and it can be free. In the business world, this poses two key benefits. Having software that can be customized means fewer problems and more functionality. Getting it for free means lower cost for the services we provide to our customers, and having more money to spend on employees and infrastructure. As simple as this sounds, finding the right fit can be a laborious task of trial and error. Part of my job is minimizing the trial and error.

Dell is reversing its position on 3rd party drives. I don’t think I bothered to complain here but I sure sent my fair share of nasty grams. In fact Dell became one of my four letter words after I heard they were firmware locking Gen11 servers to only dell drives. Of course it was a mistake but I loved to unashamedly repeat the famous quote from Howard Shoobe.

I've been writing about such cockle-warming subjects as how Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx beta 2 and its 2.6.32 kernel handles such things as turning off kernel mode setting for Intel video that can't deal with said mode-setting, as well as the ever-moving buttons on application windows, and how the new gthumb is the best damn Linux/Unix photo-editing program for journalists. But I haven't said much about exactly how well Ubuntu Lucid runs on my old hardware. Pretty darn well.

Linux distributions don't simply appear on mirrors and BitTorrent networks fully formed. A great deal of work goes on behind the scenes before a release sees the light of day. Linux users who aren't involved in the production of a Linux distribution may not fully appreciate all of that work. Take, for example, the work done by Debian's ftpmasters team.

Software engineering tends to be an evolutionary process. Problems are addressed with solutions that can create new problems and subsequently new solutions. Ideally, the new problems that are created justify the original solution. The technology discussed here is one of the secondary solutions to a problem created by server virtualization. Before delving into KSM, however, let's take a quick look at the original solution and how KSM is applied here and elsewhere.

There will always be people who can't help but engender dissent, and there will always be those who betray their allies. This sad reality is on display in the Open Source world this week as another of the community's foremost commercial supporters is merrily thrown under the bus. Of the more recent examples, two come to mind. First was Cisco, which was burned at the stake last year as an Open Source archenemy over its Linksys product line. Cisco, as we said at the time, is a gold member of the Linux Foundation (at $100,000 a year), and counts on its rather long list of Open Source activities some 0.5% of contributions to the Linux kernel. Truly the heartless beast.

There is a lot of info on using wine to run Kindle for PC, but there are a couple of things you must know to make it actually work. (Of course, there ae no guarantees!) Once it does work, it works passably well.

Let's face it. Most people don't back up their important computer files with any regularity. The time you do think about doing a backup is typically right after you discover your hard drive has crashed. At that point it's too late. The only real way to consistently backup your files is to have it done automatically for you.

Memos for your Boss that create awareness of the possible pitfalls and caveats of proprietary software plus the proposal of open source software and its ability to prevent vendor lock-in situations when using proprietary programs.

The ODF Plugfest is a Conference whose goal is to to achieve the maximum interoperability between competing applications, platforms and technologies in the area of digital document sharing, and to promote the OpenDocument format (ODF). This is a short technical summary, primarily aimed at developers, of what happened during the first day of the conference

Watch this: a Linux powered baby dinosaur, with a arm processor heart. The robot runs Live OS. An embedded, linux based operating system which features a custom programming language, giving the possibility to interact with the robot on the programming level. It features Artificial intelligence,programmable emotions and lot's more.