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Microsoft and Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire this morning held a news conference in downtown Seattle to announce the company's donation of 30,000 vouchers for people in the state to learn new computer skills, positioning themselves for better jobs. As a point of clarification, officials were asked whether the vouchers would be good for learning non-Microsoft programs, too. For the record, that would be a big no. "Our programs are rather popular," explained Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, with a grin. Smith made it clear that the company isn't about to see its donation, with a value of at least $3 million on the low end, used to promote the use of competing programs. At the same time, he said Microsoft "would be thrilled" if other companies in the software industry took similar steps to promote training on their own products.

IBM's prospective (and as yet hypothetical) acquisition of Sun Microsystems could well give Meeks and other developers the chance to confirm their belief that a truly open developer-driven community centred around an independent foundation has the capacity to rejuvenate and enhance OpenOffice.org...

The Linux Foundation has finally chosen the winning entry for their "We're Linux" video contest. And the result is some coloured squiggles with a European accent telling us how awesome freedom is.

The new Shuttle X270V Nettop (compact PC) comes with openSUSE Linux pre-installed.

That title, makes you all fellow Linux users wanted to know why someone would like to go back to Windows, really? and it is because for all of us who has discovered the freedom, and not only the free as in beer, or the free as in freedom, but also the "living free of system halting", the "living free of viruses", the "living free of having to format the hard drive and reinstall from time to time", it is hard to believe that someone may want to forget about this, and go back to Windows.

In late December AMD had published open-source R600/700 3D code that also allowed for 2D and X-Video acceleration, but was not of use to end-users interested in full OpenGL acceleration. AMD had then released the R600/700 3D documentation a month later and then the R700 ISA documentation just a few weeks back. Today, however, AMD is finally pushing some workable code into a public code repository.

OLPC is excited to announce that a refresh of the XO-1 laptop is in progress. In our continued effort to maintain a low price point, OLPC is refreshing the hardware to take advantage of the latest component technologies. This refresh (Generation 1.5) is separate from the Generation 2.0 project, and will continue using the same industrial design and batteries as Gen 1. The design goal is to provide an overall update of the system within the same ID and external appearance.

This has nothing to do with Linux, or with computers, or with anything electronic. It's a gorgeous spring day. Go outside and play. If you can't go outside and play, here is the next best thing--- piccies of cute critters outside! Baby foals! Puppies! (Though the photos were edited in Digikam)

Although some of this stuff is old, here are some funny easter eggs I bumped into over time. In APT Fire up a terminal and type the following, one command at a time:

For the last six months, I've pretty much stuck with the same OSes on the same machines. There are two reasons for this: 1) I've found stuff that works. 2) see 1) OK, that's one reason, but it sure feels better as two.

Although OpenOffice.org Writer can't replace a dedicated outlining application, there are two ways to turn the word processor into a lightweight outliner.

Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, has announced in his blog, that the Common Public Licence (CPL) has been superseded by the Eclipse Public Licence (EPL). The move comes as the result of cooperation between the Foundation and IBM to help reduce licence proliferation.

Mozilla today is best known as a browser vendor, but one day it could be known as a Web services vendor, too. That's thanks to a services backend that has at its heart a Mozilla Labs project called Weave. Downloads and usage of the client software, which is available as a browser add-on called Weave Sync, remain relatively modest. Dan Mills, Mozilla Weave lead told InternetNews.com that Weave has had over 30,000 downloads, and around 6,000 to 7,000 daily users.

Last year at LinuxWorld Expo, I had the opportunity to speak with Cliff Schmidt, the Executive Director at Literacy Bridge. At that point, Cliff was showing off an audio recording device with the eventual plan of being able to distribute sub-$10 gadgets that would allow for education and collaboration in struggling third-world countries. The little device that was literally in pieces back at LinuxWorld now is being used in Ghana as part of a pilot program.

"Through all these vicissitudes the openSUSE community has continued to produce a high class Linux distribution, which continues to receive plaudits, and appears to support a thriving and enthusiastic community, with busy forums and its own weekly news bulletin, which is widely read. The traditions of SuSE continue against the tide."

The latest series of ads have left me wondering why Microsoft is targeting Apple at all, and if they are really rivals for the same business. I spoke to Dave Caolo, who is co-lead blogger at TUAW.com to get his view.

In general, Xen porting goes as usual . However, attempt to create initial ramdisk for 2.6.18.8-xen kernel fails due to known bug for mkinitrd in RHEL 5.3. Undocumented option <--allow-missing> provides a workaround to succeed with mkinitrd for xen-inified kernel. To port Xen 3.4-rc3-pre to xen disabled CentOS 5.3 instance (64 bit) install the most recent version of git and mercurial (hg).

It truly is a beautiful thing when something just works. Network-attached storage devices deliver ease of use, small footprints, and high capacities at commodity prices. Paul Ferrill examines the VIA ARTiGO A2000 Storage Server, a shoebox-sized FreeNAS-based NAS with capacity to burn.

Our friends at Unigine Corp have published a 2009 development road-map for the Unigine Engine, their cross-platform gaming engine that is able to deliver stunning graphics on Linux. In 2009 the Unigine Engine is set to receive support for game consoles, improved physics capabilities, multi-monitor support, world layers support, an integrated terrain editor, high-level vehicles support, a new game logic framework, and much more.

BleachBit is a simple cool utility to delete unnecessary files on the systemt to free disk space. This includes application and browser cache, temporary fiiles and cookies. Among the many supported application files are Bash, Beagle, Epiphany, firefox, Adobe flash, java, KDE, openoffice,Opera, XChat, rpmbuild etc.