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D*I*Y Planner Dynamic Templates is a nifty little application that comes with a few handy templates you can tweak and save as ready-to-use PDF documents.

PLplot is a cross-platform software package for creating scientific plots that has been in continuous development since its inception 17 years ago. On May 23, 2009 the PLplot developers quietly celebrated our ten thousandth commit since our initial software repository was populated back in May 1992.

Back in April, we looked at the Linux kernel patches for Intel's Trusted Execution Technology (TXT), a mechanism to verify the integrity of the kernel before booting it. Since that time, another version of the patchset has surfaced. The relatively few comments on the feature were largely concerned that there might be opposition to its inclusion—not because of technical considerations, but instead because of ethical concerns about what TXT could enable.

[Well, this should start a conversation or two.. - Scott]

The Swiss News Agency (SDA) reported on Thursday, 28 May, that the Swiss Federal Administrative Court had issued an immediately enforceable ruling ("Superprovisorische Verfügung") that stops the award of a large federal government order to Microsoft. The Swiss Federal Office for Construction and Logistics (BBL) had previously awarded an order to Microsoft for the extension of licences, maintenance and support worth 42 million Swiss francs, without putting it out to public tender. Many open-source firms – including the Linux suppliers Red Hat, Univention and Collax and the groupware specialists Zarafa and Open-Xchange – objected to this award procedure.

One of the most exciting developments in the last few years has been the application of some of the core ideas of free software and open source to completely different domains. Examples include open content, open access, open data and open science. More recently, those principles are starting to appear in a rather surprising field: that of government, as various transparency initiatives around the world start to gain traction.

A new release of Blender, the immensely popular open-source 3D modeling software, is now available. This is not the much-anticipated Blender 2.5 release, but instead version 2.49, which brings forth several prominent changes and improvements while the developers continue work on the next major release. As part of the 2.49 release, the Blender Game Engine (BGE) has also received improvements too.

The KDevelop team is proud to announce the third public beta of KDevelop4. This release includes some major new features, such as a new code-writing assistant, a new documentation plugin showing you the API docs for Qt and KDE APIs, a reworked Mercurial plugin and a rewrite of the classbrowser plugin. On top of that we improved stability a lot, made loads of small improvements throughout and fixed as many bugs as we could.

Remote Desktop Control displays the screen of another computer (via Internet or local area network) on a local screen. This type of software enables users to use the mouse and keyboard to control the other computer remotely.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Linux Mint 7 (Gloria) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Linux Mint 7 is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 9.04 that has lots of packages in its repositories (like multimedia codecs, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Skype, Google Earth, etc.) that are relatively hard to install on other distributions; it therefore provides a user-friendly desktop experience even for Linux newbies.

"Linux desktop roll out is easier than expected for properly targeted end-user groups." OK, so you're probably throwing your hands in the air and going "Well duh!" The concept itself is common-sense, and folks like me who administer mixed networks have already been doing it. The revelation is expressing it in a sentence, and then going on to describe some useful ways to figure out which of your users are good candidates to migrate to a Linux PC.

Industry titans Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. are getting rave reviews this week about innovative new approaches to Internet search and communications, respectively. Even Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak told a reporter that Microsoft's new Bing search engine looks "astounding" and that he's "a big fan, now." There's much to like. In a nutshell, Bing does more to surface information you're probably looking for than Google does. For example, if you search for a company, one of the top results will present links to customer service, store locator -- that kind of information.

How difficult or easy is it to obtain one of the much-touted "royalty-free, reasonable and non-discriminatory" licences for Microsoft patents that are part of a technology like Mono? Judging by the frequency with which references are made to such licences by those who back Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza's bid to create an open source clone of Microsoft's .NET development environment, it's surprising that no-one has ever ventured to test this claim.

Today I’d like to take a quick look at a distribution still in the early stages of development, but one that in my opinion, holds massive potential. That distribution is Chakra Project and it’s based on Arch Linux, which I reviewed not too long ago. The idea to create a liveCD displaying the virtues of Arch and KDEmod is a noble one. I tried out alpha 2 this week to see how they were getting on…

The FBI has confirmed reports that it was forced to shut down it's external unclassified email network "as a precautionary measure" following the discovery of a virus infection. Wonder if it was a Windows system, bet it was!

SourceForge Inc., which runs projects like the SourceForge.net open source software site and the Slashdot news site, is taking over the Ohloh open source directory.

The best thing anyone can do to continue making the Internet more closed, restrictive, and prohibiting is to use Adobe Flash as it exists today. The Internet was created to allow for the open and unconfined infrastructure to share information; yet, it is being used today for the opposite purpose: to stop this information torrent.

Novell reported Thursday that its Linux Platform revenue climbed 25 percent year over year in the midst of one of the worst recessions in history. Talk about Linux swimming against the economic current.... Novell's problem is that outside its Linux Platform and Identity Management businesses, which both grew, its other lines of business stumbled -- Workgroup was down 14 percent, while Systems and Resource Management dropped 2 percent.

Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, will help the company gain some search share against Google and has features that users will find helpful, but it is in no way a quick fix for the company's poor position in the search market, analysts said. As expected, on Thursday Microsoft revealed a rebranded and expanded search engine, which it's promoting as a "decision engine" aimed at helping people better organize search information and find what they're looking for more quickly. The news came after months of speculation about what Microsoft would call its next iteration of Live Search and what new features it would have.

If you're not on a flat-rate ISP data-plan, and your ISP made you pay extra last month such as myself. You might be interested in monitoring your total home bandwidth usage. A nifty little feature of most routers or ADSL modems, is support for SNMP. In this blog I will be writing a Windows batch file and using net-snmp tools on Windows to poll the ADSL router for SNMP usage data, then a python script will post-process the data to generate a total monthly usage report. The same python script and snmpget command can be used on Linux and other platforms

Svartalf, a member of the Phoronix Forums and developer for Linux Game Publishing, recently asked our readers on the forums to provide a wish-list of games they wished to see ported to Linux. There ended up being an outpouring of interested Linux gamers with more than 1,120 replies! Svartalf shared that "[the] effort that actually did much more than I'd hoped for" and "as it stands, we've got one on contract (stalled though...) and one complete game as a result of this thread."