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Microsoft finally agreed to implement ODF support in Microsoft Office, but they didn't do it quite right, hurting both Microsoft and the ODF specification.

Regnum Online, a Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game that has a native Linux client offered by its developers (NGD Studios), has received a major overhaul. Regnum Online is one of the very few MMORPGs that has a native Linux client, but now its own game engine got a whole lot more powerful. The game engine has been reworked greatly and is now known as NG3D2.0, but later this year they already plan to introduce another major update on top of that.

Discover the Kickfire appliance--if this isn't the ultimate Linux device, one might not exist.

More funny pictures from the "world wide interweb" - I think that's what Mr. Monk calls it ;)

Michelle Minkin, a friend of this effort and an all-around nice lady; suggested that we auction off the opportunity to destroy these computers. We were almost ready to start soliciting the community for creative ways to make them go BOOM and film it for YouTube consumption. You are right, it was a juvenile and silly idea. One I personally liked thank you very much. Sure it might have been silly. So was spending 9 hours of my life seeking the solution for a problem that took all of 1 minute to solve.

Until September 20, 2007, nobody had ever sued anybody for violating the General Public License (GPL) — not a single company, project, or individual developer in the license's then-eighteen year existence. This momentous first, settled in a mere month, was only the beginning — the beginning of a landslide of litigation large enough to make Apple's lawyers cry.

I'll keep this quick. I followed the advice of Nathan from OpenBSD101 and replaced my upgraded OpenBSD 4.5 installation with an entirely new, reinstalled system. That took all of 10 minutes. I followed the advice of my friend Denny and was able to keep my /home partition intact. And all seemed well when I booted back into my shiny, new OpenBSD 4.5 desktop.

I love to poke fun at tech vendors who continually boast of their innovation, when in fact they're scared to death of real innovation, if they could even recognize it. Today I poke fun at the anti-malware industry: Kaspersky, Trend Micro, Symantec, F-Secure, and the rest of the usual suspects. Their existence depends on Microsoft Windows and the entire leaky MS application stack never ever getting fixed. I would die of shock if any of them ever grew a spine, demonstrated some real innovation in honesty, and announced "To cure your malware problems, don't use MS Windows."

Mozilla has unfurled a new API designed to expand the worldwide population of Firefox add-on developers. The open-source house boasts that over the last four years, more than 8,000 developers have built more than 12,000 add-ons for its Firefox browser. But with its new API, dubbed Jetpack, it hopes to breed many more.

Xen.org announced release 3.4 of its widely deployed, Xen virtualization hypervisor, which is widely used in Linux environments. The open source Xen 3.4 offers device pass-through improvements using Xen Client Initiative (XCI) technology, enhanced integration with the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor, and improved reliability and power management, says the project.

With the launch of the Free Software Pact initiative the European Elections now have free software as an issue for candidates. The initiative will ask those standing for election to support free software in the UK. The Free Software Pact is a European project to bring the importance of the development of free software to the fore, especially as the European Parliament is where many discussions and decisions, regarding software patents, interoperability and net neutrality, are made.

Implementing Linux desktops is easier than IT staff expect, a new study concludes. You just need to pick the right users. A study commissioned by IBM and carried out by Freeform Dynamics found that Linux on the desktop was most easily achieved when first targeted at groups of non-technical users, such as those with moderate and predictable use of email and office tools.

Cisco is only the latest on the long list of companies that have been forced by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) to comply with the GPL. The Center uses copyright law to protect the freedoms guaranteed by the GPL. It's perhaps not surprising that makers of network-capable devices, from routers to set-top boxes, use Linux to drive them. There's all this useful open-source software lying around on the internet, ready for downloading, almost always accompanied by the source code – why reinvent the wheel and write, say, your own network operating system plus tools for a SOHO DSL router if, after all, Linux can do all that's needed and will run on virtually any hardware?

Juliet Kemp introduces us to TrueCrypt, an excellent, easy-to-use encryption tool for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Using TrueCrypt will instantly make you smarter than all the big government agencies and companies who compromise terabytes of data when their unencrypted laptops and backup media are stolen.

Keith Curtis, a programmer with Microsoft for 11 years, says proprietary software made Microsoft one of the most successful companies, but is a model destined to fail. Bill Gates probably will not sing the praises of Keith Curtis, a programmer with Microsoft for 11 years who's now left the fold and written a book about why the Redmond way will fail. Oh yeah, Curtis is not afraid to speak his mind as a Linux guru, either. The mantra Curtis repeats throughout his book After the Software Wars: proprietary software is holding us back as a society.

PHP is the most popular scripting language used on the Internet and is a necessary component to many of the blogs and content management systems today. One of the important steps in securing your website is to disable those insecure options that are possible on PHP.

If you follow Phoronix or the Linux gaming scene at all you will know the mess that has become to be known as Unreal Tournament 3. Last month when we asked Epic Games about the status of the Linux game client, they were not even sure.

Firewalls need to be simple and firewalls need to be complex….yes, this is a dilemma of huge consequence. However, Fedora has accomplished both in one firewall. This new option in System/Administration/Firewall provides two layers of set up for the firewall.

A $100 networked-attached storage (NAS) device using the Marvell SheevaPlug reference design has been updated to support Linux desktops. The Cloud Engines "Pogoplug" (pictured) has also gained 64-bit OS support, as well as easier searching and sharing software, says the company.

IBM commissioned market research company Freeform Dynamics to conduct a study on companies' use of Linux as a desktop system. Researchers interviewed 1,275 IT professionals from the UK, US and other countries, 90 per cent of whom use Linux on their company desktops.