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Microsoft has been busy these past few days reminding the world that it really is an organization of monstrous proportions and its tendrils reach from the humblest consumer desktop right up to the level of super-computing. Its message is clear: The company has no intention of giving up any of the markets in which it competes to open source operating systems like Linux -- at least not without the mother of all fights.

Google will take a swashbuckling step towards license-free web video playback next month when it open sources the leading video codec from a company it just acquired for $124.6 million, according to a report citing multiple people familiar with the matter. NewTeeVee reports that Mountain View will open source On2's VP8 codec at its Google I/O developers conference in San Francisco in mid-May. The publication also says that Google will roll the codec into its Chrome browser, and that Mozilla will do the same with Firefox.

Originally, PDF export in OpenOffice.org was limited to three levels of quality, whose exact differences were obscure to most users. But that was many releases ago. The latest versions of OpenOffice.org provide, for no cost, most of the features available in Acrobat Standard for $299 -- to say nothing of a few features that even Acrobat Pro Extended does not include even at $699. The problem for many people is knowing what options they might want, especially since the wording of the dialog window is sloppy in a couple of places.

Expected for release in May, Linux kernel version 2.6.34 contains several new network drivers and various advancements designed to improve network performance or increase network configuration flexibility, which will particularly impact virtualisation.

What happened to the old "sysadmin" of just a few years ago? We've split what used to be the sysadmin into application teams, server teams, storage teams, and network teams. Now look at what we've done -- knowledge is so decentralized we must invent new roles to act as liaisons between all the IT groups.

One thing I have noticed on just about all windows installed computers outside of my strict control is that they are full of viruses, spyware and there are more programs installed than they know what to do with. These programs are also not updated with the latest service patches and virus lists. Most of the time the programs are junkware that are installed automatically with other programs and automatically start up when they log in. Consequently their machines are a mess and run slower than I can swim through frozen molasses. It is easy to see why virus and malware writers love windows machines.

Besides the Fedora 13 Graphics Testing Week taking place over the next few days, this week is also significant within the Fedora community as it will mark the release of Fedora 13 Beta. There's just one month left to go until Fedora 13 (codenamed Goddard) will be officially released, but over the past few hours we have been testing out what will become the official Fedora 13 Beta spin this morning. Fedora 13 is quite exciting and worth checking out.

fter covering the war of words over IBM's use of patents in a business dispute with French start-up TurboHercules and giving my two cents on this open-source family fight, I'd hope the matter would die down. I was wrong. Florien Mueller, the founder of the European NoSoftwarePatents campaign, who started this most recent open-source internal fuss, has now published an analysis which claims that some of the patents "IBM asserted against Hercules may also [jeopardize] other major Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, including but not limited to OpenBSD, Xen, VirtualBox, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and Kaffe."

Google appears to be prepping an Android-based tablet device, says The New York Times. Meanwhile, a study by IMS Research predicts that at year's end, Apple's iPad will own 51 percent of the $3.6 billion tablet PC market, with Android taking 24 percent.

Most folk know if they want a secure gateway between the Internet and their home or business they should use Linux for maximum protection. The new IPFire distribution seeks to take security to the highest level while also making things a breeze for the less experienced to set up.

The free software community, along with the commercial ecosystem which surrounds it, is widely seen as having pointed the way toward successful, collaborative development of common resources. We have seen a number of attempts to port the free software model to other areas of endeavor. Open content, headlined by sites like Wikipedia, has adopted this model with considerable success. Other areas, such as open hardware, are still trying to find their way. Your editor recently read an interesting book (Rob Carlson's Biology is Technology), which raises an interesting question: is there a place for an ecosystem based around free "software" running on biological processors?

One of the remarkable features of KDE 4 is the extensibility. Developers or even regular users can contribute to the rich collection of artwork, software, widgets, and visual improvements. Ever so often, I look around for rather random add-ons that make my desktop experience more pleasant or occasionally even serve a meaningful purpose. They range from full applications to very basic widgets.

The sidux distribution is one which has been on my to-review list for a while. It's a small project which makes a bold effort to take Debian's Unstable repository and turn it into a functioning day-to-day operating system. Prior to trying out this ambitious distro, I had a chance to chat with two of the project's developers, Ferdinand Thommes and Chris Hildebrandt.

The annual DrupalCon conference is coming up, April 19th to 21st at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Drupal, of course, is the increasingly popular open source content management system founded by Dries Buytaert, and OStatic itself runs on the platform. There will be many movers and shakers from the Drupal world at the conference, and we've been running a series of Drupal-focused guest posts in advance of it. In this latest Q&A post, Zack Rosen, co-founder of Drupal-focused services company Chapter Three, discusses the company's new offering, dubbed Mercury.

It's been three weeks since Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 Alpha 2 was released (compared the usual two weeks, due to the tour of Chernobyl), but the third alpha release for this next release codenamed "Lyngen" is now available. Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 Alpha 3 is carrying mostly internal changes and improvements to pts-core, but there are some externally visible changes too. The start of the suite-to-pdf option has been introduced, various bug-fixes, text-based interface enhancements, tweaks to the generated graphs, and compatibility with older versions of PHP 5.1/5.2.

I’m having an identity crisis. Regular readers of both this blog and my Education blog will know that I border on being a Google fanboi and Linux tends to work its way into my computer passions as well. I work almost constantly in the cloud and Linux obviously provides a cheap, stable platform for whatever I want to do online. My primary desktop and exclusive web and file server platforms? Ubuntu. Google Apps makes my life easy in my day job and manages virtually all of my communication needs in and out of work. However…

In the mood for a bit more color in your life? Check out Bashish to try out themes for your terminal. I installed from source due to problems with the Debian repository; if doing this, note that you'll need to install the dialog package manually via apt-get. Once you've run ./configure; make; sudo make install, run bashish to get things set up properly. Then restart a terminal to get the default theme. bashish list shows the theme list and bashish THEMENAME switches theme. Try elite for a multi-line prompt, moan for something more basic, or flowerpower for a floral look!

LXer Feature: 12-Apr-2010

This week we have Jim Zemlin and SJVN weighing in on IBM's supposed breaking of their own pledge to open source many of their patents. Are HP and Dell giving up on netbooks? What will come after Linux? Jack Wallen sees the future, a review of Tiny Me and much more in this week's LXWR.

We are several days into Script Frenzy, a thirty day challenge to write a script, either a movie, play, television or graphic magazine. The challenge is similar to the fall exercise known as National Novel Writing Month where you have to write a novel. But where NaNo is about word count, Script Frenzy is about page count. But this is not the only difference.

In a move that will boost support for open video on the mobile Web, Google has provided funding to TheorARM—a project that produces an ARM-optimized implementation of the Ogg Theora video codec. Google's support for the project could be a signal that the search giant is significantly warming up to open video. Although HTML5 delivers open standards for Web video playback, browser vendors have not been able to reach a consensus on the codec. Some parties favor Ogg Theora, a royalty-free codec that can be freely redistributed because it is thought to be unencumbered by patents. Others favor H.264, a codec that offers technically superior compression but is burdened with costly licensing fees.