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The 5th Linux Vacation/Eastern Europe Forum took place at Belarus on July 2009. The goal of LVEE is to exchange experience between Open Source community members and promote Linux-based solutions

As I scour the market for a potential Ubuntu netbook purchase, I’ve stumbled onto two interesting tidbits of info: First, Ubuntu netbook demand recently exceeded supply at System76. Second, another niche Ubuntu PC maker will introduce a netbook this August. Here's the scoop.

Google developers are giving out about 40,000 lines of Java code for two components of the Google Wave browser software.

Three months after Google released an "early look" at version 1.5 of its Android mobile operating system, a newer version has made its way into the eager hands of developers. Dubbed Donut, the new alpha version brings a raft of new features to 'Droiders. As demoed at the Google I/O conference back in May, when Donut is fully baked - or, more appropriately, deep-friend - it will include system-wide search that can also be accessed by handwriting gestures, text-to-speech, and an API that supports integration with Google Voice Search. MobileCrunch also uncovered screenshots that appear to indicate CDMA and VPN support.

With our international program still developing, technological kinks being worked out, and our local teacher and University students still exploring and researching ways for the XO's to be integrated into the California 3rd grade curriculum, we have not yet done extensive documentation and created a resource model. We have been conducting sit-in observations of the class, and working with the teacher to understand his needs, concerns, and ideas for the future.

In this final part of our series on laying out a book with OpenOffice.org, you will learn how to position illustrations in your book, how to use paragraph styles, and how to export in different formats. What you will take away from this is one method that has worked for me and many other people. At the end of this post, I will provide links for further study on the subject.

If you're feeling a little dizzy, maybe it's because you marched in circles too long on Pi Approximation Day. Or perhaps your head is spinning over the news that Microsoft donated about 20,000 lines of driver code to the Linux kernel. Or it could be that DRM has you shaking your head back and forth in violent frustration. Just don't go pounding it against the nearest wall.

Canonical has organized its Ubuntu partner program into three segments — business partners, technology partners and training partners. But to spot the next generation of potential Ubuntu channel partners you need to check out two areas: Cloud computing and the so-called Ubuntu Marketplace.

The submission by Microsoft of twenty thousand lines of code to the Kernel has, predictably, caused many an eyebrow to arch. The phrase “beware Greeks bearing gifts” comes swiftly to mind. I checked the press release. I also checked the calendar just to make sure I hadn’t fallen into a wormhole and emerged back on April Fools Day. I hadn’t. That reaction was probably replicated right across the free software community. Given Microsoft’s track record it’s hardly surprising. Perhaps what was more interesting was Linus Torvalds’ reaction. After all, this is not an inconsequential flame war about using Gnome or KDE. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

GNU/Linux gets attacked from so many different angles. It is hilarious to read some of the comments and allegations that are made against it. I find one particular allegation hilarious and it equates GNU/Linux to Communists. So, here we go...

For a very long time now, I've been on the hunt for a distribution that really put a lot of effort into their KDE4 implementation. This has been a frustrating search, full of broken installations, incredibly slow performance, and so many visual artifacts they made my eyes explode. Since KDE 4.3 is nearing release, I had to pick up this quest in order to take a look at where 4.3 stands - and I found a home in the KDE version of Fedora 11. Read on for a look as to where KDE 4.3 currently stands.

The winners of the fourth annual SourceForge Community Choice Awards were announced at this years OSCON. Over 47,000 open source projects were nominated for this years Community Choice Awards and 85 finalists were selected across twelve categories.

The Linux4Afrika development help project that is active in a number of east African countries has released the next verson of its software distribution. The donated used hardware will be expanded by new functionality.

Last week, Microsoft and the EU each announced that they had reached a proposed settlement of the various anticompetition law violation claims that had been brought against Microsoft by the EC. Typically, and as an afterthought, most of the stories written so far focus on browser issues, at most adding a brief mention that a settlement has also been provisionally reached relating to "another" dispute, this one relating to interoperability. That's a shame, because it's an important issue, and the answers are murky.

Eric Geier introduces the Untangle Gateway, a Linux-based user-friendly Internet shield that provides a firewall, ad-blocking, anti-malware, protocol control, secure VPN, WAN balancing and failover, and other advanced and essential services for safely navigating the big bad Internet.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, explained at OSCON how hardware convergence is changing the questions, not just the answers.

Microsoft has promised the European Commission a "significant change" in attitude and publishes its proposal for the marketing of Internet Explorer in Windows 7. Additionally there's news regarding the GPL publishings.

Yahoo is close to making Microsoft's Bing its search provider. The deal, which would make Microsoft a more credible competitor to Google, is likely to be announced this week, and seems likely to be based on a revenue share, not on a big fat check upfront, as some at Yahoo had hoped. Yahoo's request for an upfront payment (it is said to have asked for several hundred million), in addition to revenue guarantees that would amount to billions over the course of the deal, caused a breakdown last week in the on-again-off-again talks. But they were revived late on Thursday, according to executives with knowledge of the situation.

The 2009 kernel summit is planned for October in Tokyo. Over the years, your editor has observed that the discussion on what to discuss at the summit can sometimes be as interesting as the summit itself. Recently, the question of how user-space programmers can communicate requirements to the kernel community was raised. The ensuing discussion was short on definitive answers, but it did begin to clarify a problem in an interesting way.

It's not everyday that there is a public security exploit published for the Linux kernel, yet that is what happened in early July. Though the flaw itself was patched in the mainline Linux kernel several weeks prior to the public exploit code being published, not all users may have patched. It could have been a lot worse. The issue of patching aside, the public exploit could easily have been a zero day exploit on the Linux kernel itself, were it not for the fact that the bug that enables the exploit was caught by a scan from code scanning vendor Coverity. The Linux kernel has been actively scanned by Coverity since at least 2004 in an effort to find bugs and improve code quality