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Last week, we began the migration from Outlook in Windows to Thunderbird in Linux. We transferred over the basic data to the open source email client. Now we'll install a calendar, task manager, and note feature. We'll also figure out how to export our existing Outlook data and import it into Thunderbird. Lastly, we'll set up auto signatures. Let's get started!

The realtime preemption project is a longstanding effort to provide deterministic response times in a general-purpose kernel. Much code resulting from this work has been merged into the mainline kernel over the last few years, and a number of vendors are shipping commercial products based upon it. But, for the last year or so, progress toward getting the rest of the realtime work into the mainline has slowed.

Having recently constructed the BoxeeBox, DeviceGuru blogger Rick Lehrbaum naturally was eager to check out Neuros Technology’s somewhat similar IP-TV set-top box. Though currently at a “gamma” release, the $300 Neuros "Link" -- which runs a stripped-down Ubuntu 8.10-based OS -- shows great promise.

In 1999, Mr. McEwen attended a seminar for young presidents at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He listened to the story of Linus Torvalds and how he had assembled a world-class computer system over the Internet by using the "open source" technique. At its heart was Mr. Torvalds's willingness to reveal his computer code to the world and invite thousands of anonymous programmers to vet and improve it. Open-source problem solving! Expose your goal, your problems and all your data on the Internet. Invite proposals from anyone. Offer clear guidelines and substantial financial incentives to induce quality responses, and act on the best proposals received.

Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin said in his blog yesterday (26th February) that the Microsoft patent infringement suite against TomTom, at least at present, does not appear to be a covert attack on Linux. Microsoft have made assurances that their dispute is solely with TomTom and Zemlin says there is no reason to doubt that is the case, or to suspect a move against the Linux ecosystem.

One Laptop Per Child program has a new twist for small deployments. Rather than selling XO's to already funded projects wanting 100 or so XO's for programs that have committed community buy-in and long-term project plans, OLPC is going to develop: OLPCorps Africa - $3,500,000 for 100 teams of college students to get $35,000 in support for 10 week projects in Africa. Each group gets 100 XO laptops, assorted hardware, a $10,000 stipend, and 10-day training in Kigali, Rwanda, before being sent out to projects they need to have arranged by March 27th. While the OLPCorps Africa is a great idea - similar to the Peace Corps or Geekcorps - 10 weeks is wastefully too short, college students, while meaning well, are the wrong implementers, and $3.5 million could be much better invested in small deployments.

It's been quite a couple of weeks for Google as the search giant has had to deal with adversity for perhaps the first time ever and it's been interesting to watch how they respond. In the end, they have behaved like any other large organization under pressure and the result has not been pretty.

windows user I've been a windows user for a very big part of my life, just like the most people in the western world I guess. I've converted myself to a Linux user, and these days I administer a mixed windows/Linux environment. Sometimes when I've been away from windows for a while, (I really try to avoid the windows machines,I have to do some maintenance now and then) I sit myself at the desktop I know from all these years.

As a kind of pint-sized free software fidei defensor I feel obliged to counter some of the misconceptions that are put about on the subject around the Web. But I find myself in a slightly embarrassing situation here, in that I need to comment on some statements that have appeared in the virtual pages of Computerworld UK.

Steven Sinofsky, the Senior Vice President for the Microsoft Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, in an attempt to quell a beta tester rebellion over a perceived lack of feedback concerning bug reporting has made an astonishing confession: Windows 7 has at least 2000 bugs.

Today’s candidate is the latest release of a distro I first looked at some time ago, Sabayon. I’ve had mixed feelings about it in the past, I found 2.2 Professional to be very bloated, capable of interesting innovations but overall slightly disappointing. It’s a Gentoo based distro from Italy and it seems there’s no love lost between the Gentoo and Sabayon camps or so I’ve been told. I wanted to see how it had developed now they’d reached version 4.0, so here goes nothing…

This guide explains how to set up WebDAV with Apache2 on an Ubuntu 8.10 server. WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allow users to directly edit files on the Apache server so that they do not need to be downloaded/uploaded via http://FTP. Of course, WebDAV can also be used to upload and download files.

Novell spent most of the 1990s as a one-hit wonder, searching for growth opportunities beyond NetWare. Fast forward to the current Novell era, and the company is experiencing deja vu. This time, Novell’s one-hit wonder is SUSE Linux. Novell’s latest quarterly results show continued problems across the rest of the company. Take a look.

ZaReason is an independent Linux systems vendor, and I think one of the best. They "get it". Which is not something you can say about a lot of Linux vendors. Like the ones who plaster "We Recommend Windows Vista!" all over their Linux pages...

What can I say but Knoppix is a great distribution! Always has been. Even back when I was in college I used to use Knoppix on the Microsoft Windows 2000 client desktops just so I can remain somewhat sane and continue to work in an environment I was more comfortable in. Even when I used to be a service technician, Knoppix was always around to be able to perform data recovery/transfers from one medium to the other. Over the years I have continued to use Knoppix as the excellent tool for data recovery that it is.

Our longest title ever ;) Following up on yesterdays post on 301 redirects, which we realize is a tired subject, today we're going to take look at simple ways you can do regular/subdomain redirection using htaccess and "mod_rewrite" for Apache on Linux or Unix. And, while yesterday's subject matter (and perhaps even today's) may be somewhat generic, we're trying to even the balance here.

As the global economic crisis deepens, companies are considering options they might once have rejected out of hand in order to cut costs. Open source vendors have long waved the lower-TCO banner, and the recession seems to fueling business in the sector. It's not quite clear, though, whether a switch to open source will result in cost savings in the long run.

Cisco is one of the top contributors to Linux, but what exactly are they doing? In an exclusive interview Cisco exec detail what Cisco is doing in terms of direct Linux kernel contributions, whether or not there is a Cisco Linux and detail a microgrant program that gives grants to open source efforts.

Just yesterday though I found out that it’s possible to easily install a minimalist Debian setup with the fluxbox WM. In fact, this “how to” will be over before you know it.

This interview with lead developer Stefan Kost continues my report on the development of Buzztard. As the interview reveals, Stefan's work on Buzztard represents only one level of his deep involvement in Linux software development.