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Project Renaissance of OpenOffice.org opened up proposals for "Access Functionality" design changes for its office suite on April 20, 2009. The Impress presentation application was chosen as the Guinea pig. Deadline for submissions is just around the corner: May 4, 2009.

Well over a year ago we shared that two new PC action games were being ported to Linux. These games were Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds: Survivor, but throughout 2008 updates on the Linux clients status were bleak. This February we then learned that LGP has been working on Shadowgrounds: Survivor for Linux, while work on the original Shadowgrounds port to Linux seemed to have been dropped. A month later we were then playing Shadowgrounds: Survivor on Linux through a closed-beta program at Linux Game Publishing.

If you can't read this, you either speak a different language than me or this lead isn't spun properly ;)

A presentation on CouchDB given at the recent Golden Gate Ruby Conference by Matt Aimonetti, a member of the Rails Activists, has triggered controversy within the Rails community. The presentation in question was titled "CouchDB + Ruby: Perform like a Pr0n Star" and was themed throughout with sexually suggestive images. Complaints and expressions of discomfort with the content began to appear on blogs in the days following the conference.

Doctors tend to restrict their writing to journals that target their peers rather than to publications meant for consumption by the general public. For the most part, they have shunned Wikipedia, with its open editing policy. However, a recent study suggests that more professional participation on Wikipedia could be of great benefit to the public.

This guide explains how to set up an NFS server and an NFS client on Debian Lenny. NFS stands for Network File System; through NFS, a client can access (read, write) a remote share on an NFS server as if it was on the local hard disk.

It would seem that George Orwell might have been more prophetic than we perhaps gave him credit for. Currently, our televisions cannot watch us, but at the rate things are progressing, it is only a matter of time. After all, most PCs now come with web cams and certainly 90% of cell phones.

It has been nearly a year since the last update to Sauerbraten, the 2008 CTF edition, but the open-source developers behind this game and its engine of the same name have been preparing for a new release. Within the next few days we should see the first 2009 release of Sauerbraten and it brings a host of new features. In this article is a rundown on some of the key features along with screenshots we captured when running their latest Subversion code.

In this article I'll include three ways to screencast your Linux desktop with the help of recordMyDesktop, XVidCap and Istanbul. These three applications are included in every major distribution.

The Script has been tested with the above devices... If you have run this script against other devices, please let us know. Also the speed in the report function has drastically increased. I ran this script against a 6509 with 800+ devices connected to it in just over 2 minutes.

LXer Feature: 01-May-2009

Earlier today (as I write this), our esteemed tuxchick made a very bold statement:

If people don't want to learn an unfamiliar environment why do they stick with windows? Win 95 was radically different from 3.1, and it was a huge success. XP was way different from 2000, and everything was moved around and stuffed into different places. Vista was even weirder, with the added free bonus of new extreme annoyances like UAC. Windows 7 is organized differently yet again, and the tech press are all swoony over it and hailing it as The Best Windows Evah.

This touches on something I've been shopping around privately for a couple weeks now: Why do we in the "Linux community" assume prior experience with Windows, or any WIMP interface? At its core, this is a bad assumption for absolutely everyone, proprietary software houses included.

According to Net Application's Market Share service, Linux has achieved a one per cent market share of desktop, or client, operating systems.

Red Hat is launching a training road show for Red Hat Advanced Business Partners. But that’s not all. The VAR Guy thinks Red Hat’s annual channel revenues will potentially top $600 million within five years, up from about $326 million today.

Has anybody noticed that TV is no longer an over-the-air medium? Mostly it's over-the-wire, meaning cable. Some of it is over glass, meaning fiber optics. And some of it is over satellite, which is Xtreme Air — bouncing off a satellite 24,000 miles over the equator. But both fiber and satellite are just other ways of delivering TV by cable. What connects to the back of your set is still co-ax. And what you watch are a line-up of "channels", which are nothing more than names and numbers given to branded data sources.

The number and gee-whizness of features Sun Microsystems is putting into updates to both the Solaris 10 commercial operating system and the related OpenSolaris development release of Solaris are slowing. That's the best indication that Nevada - the code name for Solaris Next or Solaris 11 or whatever you want to call it - is getting closer to release. Closer doesn't mean close, however. According to sources speaking to The Reg, Sun is quietly telling customers that Solaris 11 is targeted for launch sometime around the middle of 2010.

Scrolling through this week's Distrowatch, I came across an interesting new distribution in the "waiting list" of projects that will eventually be tracked by Distrowatch, should they survive long enough to get through the waiting list. Lin-X aims to follow the Ubuntu distribution on which it's based but look as much like Apple's OS X as possible. While I'm a user of OS X as well as Ubuntu (and Windows and OpenBSD ...) and do like many things about the OS X user interface — the chief of which is the ability to keep an application running but NOT have a window of that application open at the time if I choose not to — I'm not one of those people who think OS X has it all over GNOME, KDE or even Windows XP.

The messaging and groupware landscape has altered significantly in the last few years with, like it or loathe it, Microsoft’s Exchange Server now firmly ensconced as the number one solution regardless of customer size or industry sector. There are alternatives, of course, but rival developers have more or less given up on trying to beat Microsoft at (what’s now) it’s own game. Instead most now concentrate their efforts on developing alternative messaging and collaboration servers which to end users, and their applications, look and behave just like the Exchange they’re hoping to replace.

Remember Office Open XML – a name chosen to be as confusingly close to OpenOffice XML as possible – better known as OOXML? Remember how just over a year ago this and many other blogs and news outlets were full of sound and fury, as OOXML slouched its way through the ISO standardisation process, finally staggering across the finishing line at the beginning of April 2008? I certainly do, but it's extraordinary how things can change in a year.

Given the ubiquity of Git as a version control system throughout the free software community, one would expect there to be more books about it. So far, that is not the case—though there are indications that is changing—so Travis Swicegood's Pragmatic Version Control Using Git is welcome for those trying to come up to speed on Git. Overall, the book provides a nice starting point, though there are some rough spots.

The guys and girls behind the NetBSD project have released version 5.0 of their BSD operating system. NetBSD is a highly-portable operating system, the second open-source BSD implementation (after 386BSD). Naturally, version 5.0 comes packed with a whole boatload of improvements.