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OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte has revealed that the project could switch to ARM processors for its next-gen XO laptop. This move is odd in light of the organization's increasingly Microsoft-centric software strategy, but Negroponte says he is hopeful that Microsoft will port Windows XP to ARM.

Go to the Fedora Project Wiki and search for "uninstall Fedora." You won't find anything. Try "remove Fedora." Nothing. Go to Ubuntu's official documentation site and search for "uninstall Ubuntu." You won't find anything in the "official" documentation but in the "community" section you find two entries that state "Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu...." In an installed Ubuntu distribution, clicking on Help and searching for uninstalling or removing Ubuntu finds nothing. A link “repeat the search online at the Ubuntu help pages” brings up a 404 – page not found. If you look hard enough on the real community support pages you'll find a post from July 2007 titled "HowTo: Remove Ubuntu (& Restore Windows)" .

In so many ways, Linux gives us an embarrassment of riches, such as a multitude of desktop environments to suit all tastes and purposes. Bruce Byfield reports that the latest release of Xfce (4.6) delivers a high level of polish and usability, without lard, that makes it a worthy alternative to the popular KDE and Gnome desktops.

Microsoft Corp. is facing increasing pressure to bring its mainstream Windows operating system to the ARM mobile CPU. But analysts say the company should take a different route. Nicholas Negroponte, head of the One Laptop Per Child Association Inc. (OLPC), said Wednesday that "like many, we are urging" Microsoft to support the ARM processor already used in several billion cell phones and which the OLPC, as well as others, plans to use in the next version of its children's laptop. The week before, Warren East, CEO of ARM Holdings, the designer of the CPU, said that with 10 ARM-based netbooks likely to hit stores by year's end, Microsoft is in danger of missing out.

A report on the Open Source Observatory and Repository Europe (OSOR.EU) web site, says that, according to Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard, the French Gendarmerie's gradual migration to a complete open source desktop and web applications has saved millions of euros. The Lieutenant-Colonel, says "This year the IT budget will be reduced by 70 percent. This will not affect our IT systems."

From another conversation I had on an AMIA.org members only list that I wrote: Years from now I hope that people will laugh at these debates [Free/Open Source vs Proprietary EMR software] in the same way that today we think the alchemists where misguided. I hope that laugh will happen in just a few years, and not 20. Do you remember the Steve Martin 'Medieval Barber' skits in which he does blood letting on customers then starts talking into the camera, lays out the discovery of the scientific method then grins into the camera and says 'naaaah!' and continues doing dreadful things? That's what seems to be going on here a kind of 'Medieval Barber' type thing that is occurring with many people in thinking about Health IT. That this proprietary vs. Free/Open Source is even debated just seems so odd to me.

The good news is the deployment of open source is growing. The bad news is that policies managing those projects are an afterthought. Those are the results of an informal survey of developers at the Software Development West Software Development Conference this week.

The whole FAT licensing saga between Microsoft and TomTom just got a whole lot more complicated. Microsoft sued TomTom because the satnav maker had not licensed FAT from Microsoft, even though several others have. This left TomTom in a difficult position: not license it, and face legal penalties - license it, and violate the GPL. The second part, however, is up for debate now: the terms under which Microsoft licenses FAT may not violate the GPL at all. Near-instant update: On Slashdot, Bruce Perens and Jeremy Allison have explained that the FAT terms are still a GPL violation. Allison accidentally emailed the journalist who wrote this story with the wrong information.

Unreal Tournament 3 was released back on the 17th of November in 2007. Nearly a year and a half later, we still have no UT3 Linux client -- nor do we know the reason(s) behind this massive delay. Ryan Gordon, the widely-known Linux game developer that was contracted by Epic Games to port UT3 over to Linux and Mac OS X, has provided a brief update on the matter.

Kodak has released a free scanner application for Linux called ScanTWAIN that promises "production quality scanning." The software is released under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) version 2 and comes with a complete GUI that supports all of the options of its Windows counterpart. Support is included for duplex scanning with automatic feeding of multiple pages through an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF).

A well-regarded security consultant has shown just how easy it can be to take illicit control of Mac OS X. Security consultant Dino Dai Zovi has given a demonstration to the SOURCE security, business and technology conference in Boston in which he broke into a Mac and took photos with its iSight camera. Dai Zovi explained that Mac OS X's heap memory is poorly protected, and that it is relatively easy to find the location of various libraries.

Why is FREE! the world's best-selling noun, verb, adjective and adverb, yet so hard to credit as a foundation for business in the Internet Age? And what will happen when business folk finally grok the abundant opportunities that FREE! provides? Dictionary.com lists 49 meanings for the word free. Here in the World of Linux, there are two main ones: 1) the presence of liberty, 2) the absence of price. Or, as Richard M. Stallman drew the distinction, free-as-in-freedom and free-as-in-beer. Both kinds contributed enormously to the development not only of free and open source code, but to the Internet — the place where most of that code was written and on which most of it runs.

Congress has apparently listened to the public's complaints about lack of convenient access to government data. The new Omnibus Appropriations Bill includes a section, introduced by Rep. Mike Honda (D-California), that would mark the first tangible move toward making federal legislative data available to the public in bulk, so third parties can mash it up and redistribute it in innovative and accessible ways.

Anyone who was lucky enough to grab a GrandCentral account during one of the short spans when they were available to grab can testify that it is an interesting service, to say the least. As interesting as it may be, though, it has been plagued with technical and customer service issues that had some declaring that Google had left the platform for dead. A reasonable assumption — until this morning, that is.

Being an open source advocate apparently can be dangerous to your health -- or at least your hair. That's what Helios' Ken Starks found, anyway, when a field technician took issue with the threat of FOSS to his livelihood. Then there are the tips, lots of Linux tips.

So you're not a programmer, you say? If you can string a few shell commands together, it's not much of a step from there to programming. To demonstrate that, Akkana Peck will take you through the steps of writing a very simple web gallery script: one that will take your images and build a little web page to show them off.

After two years, the relatively popular PCLinuxOS distribution has finally put out a new major release, imaginatively called PCLinuxOS 2009.1. PCLinuxOS is a release originally based on Mandrake (now Mandriva), but which has taken on a life of its own. The distribution has one selling point (for some, at least) few other popular distributions have: it eschews KDE4 (for now).

Google has strengthened its mobile services with the debut of a service called Voice that could be a challenge to Skype and other phone firms. It lets customers make cheap international calls and gives them a speech-to-text feature for voicemail. The services are available thanks to Google's acquisition of phone firm GrandCentral which gives users a lifelong universal phone number. "This could be big. Google is seen as disruptive," said analyst Jon Arnold.

If you want to see where the technology industry is heading in the next few years, a quick review of the past might be useful. As Amar Bhide of Columbia Business School reminds us in Thursday's Wall Street Journal, the personal computer industry was born in the pain of the 1980s economic recession. Why then? "History suggests that Americans don't shirk from venturesome consumption in hard times," Bhide writes, suggesting that consumers show a appetite for risk that far exceeds the near-term value they individually derive from things like software and mobile devices, a tendency that is unlikely to abate in our recessed economy.

There are small Linux distributions, and then there are tiny Linux distributions. In what must be one of the smallest Linux versions ever, Tiny Core Linux is a portable Linux desktop that is just 10MB in size. With the 10MB disk image in hand users can run it from a CD, USB drive or just as a minimal hard drive installation.