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Hiring a well-known free software advocate to oversee efforts to work with the community is a good plan for any company, but for a company that has had rocky community relations, it may be essential. VIA Technologies has done just that, by contracting with Harald Welte to help guide its strategy to work more closely—and less contentiously—with the community. VIA announced a new effort aimed at cooperation with the free software world last April, but got off to a slow start that had people wondering about its commitment to fulfilling that promise. Welte will be well placed to ensure that community concerns are heard within VIA.

Ok, more specifically, troff using the mm macros to HTML. This is another from my "rusty scripts" collection which was written for a specific task long ago. In this case, we were converting some internal documentation from troff using the mm macros into HTML. troff is a very sophisticated system so doing this right would be a lot of work. But, writing something to get rid of 90% of the grunt work of conversion is pretty easy. Paul Dunne did one for the ms macro set which you can find here but mm is different.

The communications equipment maker has bought one of its software suppliers, Pingtel, in a deal Nortel claims will help promote open source communications.

Continuing our journey, it's time to take a trip up the OSI Reference Model, and learn what this mysterious thing is all about. The network stack is of great significance, but not so much that it's the first thing you should learn. We've waited to start the "layers" discussion for good reason: Many so-called networking classes will start by teaching you to memorize the name of every layer and every protocol contained within this model. Don't do that. Do realize that layers 5 and 6 can be completely ignored, though.

Pardus is a GNU/Linux distribution funded and developed by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. Pardus has its own unique installer, package manager, configuration wizard, and control panel. This originality, and the developers' attention to detail, make Pardus worth a look. From the beginning of my experience, Pardus showed its attention to detail. The installer is so incredibly simple that even a Microsoft fan would be hard-pressed to complain. The installer hasn't changed much since we took a look at the previous release seven months ago, so I won't reiterate the process, but it's still worth mentioning how easy to use the installer is. My only complaint is that my choice of Dvorak for keyboard layout was not available as an option.

Yahoo is helping make location more global with the launch of its new Fire Eagle platform. Fire Eagle lets users update their location in one centralized place, then have that data broadcast to a number of services. The launch opens up new possibilities for developers. Because the platform is open, any service can put the data to use -- and plenty already are.

Who says you have to give up your must-have Windows applications when you migrate to Linux? If you can't leave some crucial Windows program behind, you can run it using CodeWeavers' latest version of CrossOver Linux. Though today there are many great Linux end-user applications, some people still have "must-have" Windows applications -- Quicken instead of GnuCash, for instance, or Photoshop instead of the GIMP. That's where CrossOver Linux 7 comes in.

An important topic at Akademy is modularisation and integration. It has been the main topic of one talk but you will find it comes up in many others. It is clearly on the minds of many hackers here.

Its just been made official that the State of Pahang is migrating all its productivity suites to OpenOffice.org. This succinct memo from the State Secretary of Pahang entitled "Perlaksanaan Penggunaan Perisian OpenOffice.Org Di Semua Agensi dan Pentadbiran Negeri" (translated: "Implementation of OpenOffice.org suite in all State Agencies and Administrative centres") outlines the reasons for migrating, the benefits and how to proceed.

The Polish Ministry of National Education is advising schools and universities to use Open Source software. The recommendation comes at the end of a volunteer campaign to help schools switch to Open Source. The Ministry recommended in a statement that schools and universities use OpenOffice. The application suite is sufficiently mature and advanced to be used for teaching and for office use in education and science institutes."OpenOffice can successfully substitute proprietary applications and will result in significant savings on licenses."

Vyatta offers hardware and open source software for enterprise-level network infrastructure. Vyatta can turn any 32-bit x86 machine with at least one network interface into a network appliance that handles routing, firewall, and VPN tasks. The company released Vyatta Community Edition 4 in April, with improved scalability and feature enhancements. Large enterprises now have a low-cost alternative to proprietary hardware like the Cisco 7200.

Network latency and bandwidth are the two metrics most likely to be of interest when you benchmark a network. Even though most service and product advertising focuses on bandwidth, at times the latency can be a more important metric. Here's a look at three projects that include tools to test your network performance: nepim "network pipemeter," LMbench, and nuttcp. For this article I built each utility from source on a 64-bit Fedora 9 machine. I used nepim version 0.51, LMbench version 3, and nuttcp version 5.5.5.

It used to be that travelers looking for the hippest getaway, the coziest hotel, or the best restaurant had to rely solely on travel guidebooks, which were often out of date by the time they were published. The Web, however, has spawned a new destination for those seeking travel information: travel wikis and online communities.

During the Emsys-sponsored Mobile and Embedded day at Akademy 2008 Nokia distributed 100 N810 internet tablets among the KDE hackers, and gave another 50 for the project to decide who to give to.

Guvnor is the business rules management system in Drools 5. When you deploy it out of the box, you get an unsecured web application that stores data in Jackrabbit’s embedded Derby database. This article explains how to tune Guvnor deployed on JBoss Application Server 4.2.3. This means that we will use the container’s configuration files and security infrastructure. We will cover enabling password validation based on an LDAP server, moving from the default data repository, and enabling SSL for better security.

It's been almost impossible to not stumble across laptopmag.com's hands-on experience with Windows XP on the XO since the article was published last Tuesday. In case you haven't seen it here's a link to the story called "Exclusive Hands-On With OLPC’s XO Running Windows XP" and the original verdict which read: "On paper, a dual boot XO gives kids the best of both worlds: the somewhat boring, but ubiquitous Microsoft OS and its giant universe of software together with Sugar, which is packed with learning tools for kids. However, our early peek suggests that the XP portion is not ready for primetime, as evidenced by the slow boot time, slow application load time, and trouble with multitasking and streaming media. We hope OLPC can fine tune the performance without increasing the cost."

A tech vendor-backed company that buys up patents in an effort to protect the Linux community from intellectual property litigation will soon launch a Web site to help inventors file defensive publications -- documents that make details of an invention public, preventing others from later making patent claims on it. "The more we can mobilize this community, the fewer patents that will actually be granted," said Keith Bergelt, who recently became CEO of the Open Invention Network. "Whatever happens in the patent reform world in the next [U.S.] administration is great, but we have to act now to stop the granting of patents that threaten Linux and open-source in general."

Developers from Nokia and Mozilla have been working hard to port the Mozilla Platform and Firefox to Qt and there are now some solid results available. An experimental build of Firefox Qt is available, and you can download the sources from Mozilla's mercurial repository. The plan is to merge the Qt branch into the central Mozilla branch to make the port official. KDE Dot News spoke to developer Oleg Romaxa from Nokia who came to Akademy 2008 from Finland.

HP has started shipping a $500 mini-notebook pre-installed with SUSE Linux. Boasting perhaps the largest keyboard in its class, the HP 2133 Mini-Note has an 8.9-inch WXGA display, 4GB of solid-state storage, 512MB of RAM, and a 1GHz Via C7 processor, with ExpressCard and SD-card expansion.

Like any true gaming fan, I like to share my gaming moments of glory -- that multifrag shot, and that super smooth drift around the S-bend. But most free and open source games don't record gameplay videos. Even those that do don't always make it easy to export videos out of the game. GLC is an audio/video capture tool that can capture videos in a variety of ways, and also encode them so that you can host them on your blog or upload them to video-sharing Web sites.