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Maps are cool; there's no end of applications which can make good use of mapping data. There is plenty of map data around, but it's almost exclusively proprietary in nature. That makes this data hard to use with free applications; it's also inherently annoying. We, as taxpayers, own those streets; why should we have to pay somebody else to know where the streets are?

The European Commission has published guidelines for the procurement of open source for public administrations in Europe following public tender processes.

A Firefox developer has revealed that pre-release versions of Firefox 3.1 have been updated with a new feature. Officially called 'Private Browsing' it will be more familiar to many as the much talked about Porn Mode that caused such controversy when Microsoft announced it was being included within the forthcoming IE8 browser.

Multimedia infotainment devices are a hot seller in today's automotive market and can be the deciding factor in which vehicle a customer ultimately chooses. The automotive infotainment market has successfully navigated the initial wave of consumer devices invading the automobile, offering basic connectivity for consumer electronics in the passenger cabin.

More and more people are asking for security and how they can protect themselves and their businesses. I thought it might be useful to take a look at Debian 4rc5 and how to install an encrypted directory.

Small laptops are becoming a big problem for Microsoft Corp.'s Windows business. A new breed of lightweight computers called netbooks are beginning to crack the company's dominance of operating systems. Acer Inc. and Asustek Computer Inc., which together account for 90 percent of the netbook market, are using the rival Linux software on about 30 percent of their low-cost notebooks.

The VAR Guy abandoned Windows for Ubuntu Linux in mid-2007 because he was fed up with poor Microsoft product quality. But the blogger and open source advocate will be willing to give Windows 7 a try when it finally arrives. Here's why.

The pam_mount project lets you unlock an encrypted filesystem automatically when you log in. The same password used to log in is used as the key to unlock the encrypted filesystem, so you only need to type it once. Using this method, you can easily share a laptop and have only a single user's home directory unlocked and mounted when he logs in. And pam_mount can mount any filesystem, not just encrypted filesystems, so you can use it, for example, with an NFS share that you are interested in but which you might not like to leave mounted when you are not logged in.

Developers of the XDA Forum found a simple hack to gain access to root privileges on the Android platform of G1 mobile phones. The result is the potential of installing and using native Linux applications on the G1 and messing things up in the process.

Open source multimedia specialist Collabora is hiring developers to work on the nonlinear video editor PiTiVi. The Cambridge, UK-based company contributes heavily to the GStreamer media framework and other GStreamer-dependent projects, so PiTiVi is a natural fit -- and it fills a sorely needed niche on the Linux desktop. PiTiVi is a GTK+ video editor written primarily in Python and available under the LGPL. It uses GStreamer for audio and video processing, and the Gnonlin editing components. PiTiVi maintainer Edward Hervey is a Collabora employee, and the company employs another PiTiVi hacker part-time to focus on user interface improvements.

Microsoft announced a new program the other day called Microsoft BizSpark, where they give away a boat load of software and services to young startups and presumably lock them into Microsoft long-term. For a small start-up with little capital, this has to be a very attractive offer, but think be for you take the offer.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Wednesday, November 5, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Today's stories include a new president for the United States of America, your tax dollars at work avoiding the benefits of FOSS, an open source election at OpenSUSE, a new legal challenge to the RIAA's anti-piracy campaign, and more good Linux news on the netbook front.

Linux Magazine is broadcasting a live stream from the UKUUG Linux Conference in Manchester, UK (November 7 through 9). It's the yearly event of the UK's Unix & Open Systems User Group. The UKUUG Linux Conference will cover a variety of subjects, including kernel and desktop development, tools, applications, networking and security.

Last week we published Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 benchmarks from a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 and had found Ubuntu's performance degraded peculiarly over the past year and a half. We then published Fedora 7 to 10 benchmarks covering the same time-frame and from the same exact Intel notebook computer, but the newer releases of Fedora were only marginally slower in a few tests. In our performance exploration of Ubuntu we now have additional tests to publish this morning. This time around we're switching out the hardware we're testing on to Intel's newer Core 2 series and we're comparing the performance of the x86 and x86_64 editions of Ubuntu 8.10 against Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.5 operating system.

Sun and IBM launch project and repository of code to make OpenDocument Format application development easier.

Battle of the Browsers postings are nothing new, but usually are based upon the opinion of a single reviewer. However, if there were cash prizes to uncover bugs in Chrome, FireFox 3.1 and IE8 you might get a broader and more interesting view. Welcome to the Browser Bug Battle...

If you're looking to run a serious open source collaboration server, Yahoo's Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) should be on your short list. This Web 2.0 email and groupware server offers AJAX Web-based administrator and user interfaces, a variety of useful groupware features, and email import functionality. ZCS comes in five versions. The Open Source Edition, which is the one I tried, doesn't have all the features of the others, but it's purely open source.

This document describes how you can configure a Debian Etch system for IPv6 so that a) it can connect to other IPv6 hosts and b) other IPv6 hosts can connect to it. IPv6 should become more important in the future as recent estimates assume that there will be no more IPv4 addresses left by 2010 or 2011. Therefore it's time time to learn IPv6.

In an intriguing interview with kernel developer, Greg Kroah-Hartman, he says he has evidence that Linux now supports more devices than any other operating system. In the lengthy interview, he talks about why this is true now, and how hardware suppliers and open source developers can work together to bring more peripherals to life.

A new release of IBM's Lotus Symphony office suite brings the software to a wider audience with a beta for Mac OS X and a full version for Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Can Symphony take a significant share of the office suite market from OpenOffice and Microsoft, or is the company's attempt to compete merely an Irrelevant Business Move?