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The local community will get a first-hand account of South Korea's open source experience from government and private executives visiting a national meet in Cebu later this month. Different groups from South Korea -- including Hansoft, one of Korea's biggest software firms -- will be attending the national open source conference on July 23 and 24. This was confirmed by Bonifacio Belen, executive director of the Cebu Education Development Foundation (CEDF-IT), a private-government IT consortium in the province. The Korea IT Industry Promotion Agency (KIPA) will also send a group of executives to the conference.

Firstly, Firefox 3 is imminent. Although beta versions have surfaced – and even considered stable enough for inclusion in Ubuntu’s “long term support” 8.04 release – it really has been several years since the last major revision was published. Some are still sceptical we’ll actually see it but Mozilla are confident to set the naysayers right. In fact, this coming June 17th is marked as Firefox 3 download day. Yes, on June 17 you’ll be able to download a shiny new Firefox 3. It doesn’t matter if you are a Linux, Windows or Mac user; there’s a build of Firefox 3 for you.

A new breed of extremely small and light (2 pounds or so) laptop has emerged just in time for summer travel. Called mobile Internet devices (MIDs), and also known as mini-laptops, mini-notebooks, or mini-notes, these lightweight laptops are practically naked, stripped of all extraneous features. And starting at around US$400, they're far cheaper than other mobile PCs.

LXer Feature: 15-Jun-2008

First off, It is Father's Day in the U.S. and I want to wish a Happy Fathers Day to my beloved Father and to all the Dads across the world. In this week's Roundup we have stories from the big OOXML vote fiasco that has been brewing. We have an LXer Feature written by Thomas King entitled "The future is bright for Linux filesystems", How to buy the wrong color laser printer, a review of Slackware 12.1, IBM rolls out Symphony support, The inevitability of open source Windows, Richard Stallman attacks Oyster's 'unethical' use of Linux, Are there any evil distros? and last but not least I end things with a couple of very funny articles that should bring a smile to your face. Enjoy!

Sometime last night I started a "21 bug salute": pick 21 bugs and fix them one after the other. Closing bugs that are already fixed, are upstream bugs or are WONTFIXes don't count. Only bugs closed with patches do. Currently the count is 11 down, 10 to go. The goal is to be done before the weekend is through. I keep getting interrupted, however, by the continuing fallout from what has become one of the biggest faith-in-the-community destroying events I've experience. Having read a couple more angry FUD filled blog postings on this matter, proving squarely just how confused people are at the moment, I figured a picture might help.

Here's the full text of a very angry letter, sent today to the educational advisory body Becta by Mark Taylor, president of the Open Source Consortium and chief executive of the enterprise support firm Sirius. I'm currently writing up a story on this, so keep an eye out for that, but the letter is far too long to include in that story in its totality.

A review of the 10 best KDE applications that are not included with KDE.

"Oh great, not yet-another-kernel-tree, just what the world needs..." began Greg KH, continuing, "yes, this is an announcement of a new kernel tree, linux-staging." He explained: "In a long and meandering thread with some of the other kernel developers a week or so ago, it came up that there is no single place for companies and developers to put their code for testing while it gets cleaned up for submission into the kernel tree. All of the different subsystems have trees, but they generally only want code that is about to go into this release, or the next one. For stuff that is farther off, there is no place to go. So, here's the tree for it."

Have you tried lately to figure out which Linux operating system you’d like to use? And, did you think about adding a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) device to that Linux system? We can guess that you probably overwhelmed with the choices available to VoIP users today. In fact, to write a truly definitive guide to VoIP for Linux users, we would need to write a book. Instead, we combed the online Linux and VoIP Wikis to find the most-used combinations of Linux and VoIP according to the systems and devices that were most talked about on these support and documentation pages. Those choices, listed below along with their Wikis, will provide you with a definitive guide to choices available, and to the choices that provide the most documentation for ease of use.

Opera Software released a security-conscious version of its freely-available web browser that adds protection against malware. Opera 9.5 also adds a faster browser engine, a clean-cut new interface, and synchronization features that keep the browser in line with the Opera Mini mobile browser, the vendor says.

Open source is more than a marketing buzzword -- it is a developer state of mind delivering real returns to companies and the broader market, writes Dave McAllister, director of standards and open source for Adobe Systems.

This weekend, the One Laptop per Child movement in New York City is holding an OLPC "Grassroots Jam" at the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. The Jam is a gathering of volunteer educators, content creators, artists, writers, programmers, engineers, and others who want to help create a central server for NYC schools that already make use of OLPC laptops. According to LXNY secretary Jay Sulzberger, the server will provide "automatic backups, end-to-end encryption and authentication of email, extra processing power for individual and group tasks, convenient Bitfrosting (working with the default OLPC security platform), and [working] with programs which today do not yet run on the XO-1 [laptop]."

Of all the community distributions, probably the least known is openSUSE. After two and a half years, the distro is not only still working out details about how its community operates -- including how its governing board is elected -- but also struggling to come out of the shadow of its corporate parent Novell, much as Fedora has emerged from its initial dominance by Red Hat. With the pending release of openSUSE 11.0, community manager Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier suggests that the distribution is finally starting to get the recognition it deserves. In the middle of preparations for the new release, Brockmeier took the time to talk with Linux.com about the priorities within the community and its relation with the larger world of free software.

eBox is a server framework and platform that allows administrators to set up network services such as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) or a firewall from scratch relatively easily. eBox does not offer management of every option found in all service configuration files. Instead, it focuses on managing network-centric services and messaging applications easy by offering a single Web GUI portal. In addition, eBox can be extended by programmers who wish to add other services and management modules of their own.

If you take a gander at the number of Linux distributions listed at Distrowatch, you'll find there are tons of "forks" and "offshoots" from one distribution to another. With Linux, we have the freedom to do that, but I'm curious if there are any Linux flavors that are truly offensive to people. There has been some controversial uprisings in the past, but it begs the questions -- does the freedom to fork ever cross over into creepville?

The open source community was bitterly disappointed today after the UK appointed an unknown consultancy to run an historic programme of advocacy in schools. International big hitters had piled behind UK open source houses bidding for a Becta contract to set up an open source community in the schools sector. It was seen as a breakthrough - an indication that convicted monopolist Microsoft was losing its grip on the sector. But Becta gave the open source community an almighty slap in the face when it turned down their three bids and awarded the business to a consultancy with no links to the open source community, said representatives of the community.

Open-source developers targeting the mobile space need to learn business rules including digital rights management, Nokia's software chief has claimed. Speaking at the Handsets World conference in Berlin on Tuesday, Dr Ari Jaaksi told delegates that the open-source community needed to be 'educated' in the way the mobile industry currently works, because the industry has not yet moved beyond old business models.

A small, light laptop makes an excellent second computer -- unless it costs more than your first. The computer industry has been taking its time to grasp that point. The smallest, lightest computers have routinely sold for $2,000 or more, with most under-$1,000 offerings limited to heavy, bulky laptops that can't stray far from a desk or a power outlet. (Dell has one under-five-pound machine that starts at $1,000.)

In the field of penetration testing, BackTrack is today's premier Linux distribution. Designed for, created by, and used by security professionals around the globe, BackTrack is the result of a merger between two earlier, competing distributions -- WHAX and Auditor Security Collection. The most recent beta version was released on June 10. BackTrack 3.0 beta (BT3) is showing up in a lot of places these days. There was a presentation in February at ShmooCon, an annual hacker convention. At this year's National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (NCCDC), it was the distro of choice for the Red Team -- the attackers -- made up of experienced security professionals.

Sun has made good on its promise to deliver OpenSolaris, the company's Unix-based answer to Linux, with a company-supported, commercial update arriving in mid-May. Although far from a complete product, the latest OpenSolaris is impressive and in the long run could prove a viable alternative to Linux. Part of OpenSolaris' appeal is that it contains a subset of the source code for the Solaris Operating System, but with an open source license. Among the familiar Sun features are the enviable DTrace tuning and monitoring tool and the ever-impressive ZFS filesystem, neither of which are likely to make it to Linux due to licensing and personality conflicts.