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Free Software Foundation Europe is asking people what they can do in 2009 to improve things for themselves and others in the sphere of software freedoms. The best way is to join the successful Fellowship programme, through which Fellows work to support software freedoms - and have fun doing it! Have a look at the site for more reasons to join!

In 2008, The HeliOS Project built, placed and supported 329 computers where they were needed. Sometimes it was necessary to travel over 100 miles to do it. Admittedly, 329 computers doesn’t sound like much. Not many at all in the scope of things. That is until you take into consideration one relevant fact.

LXer Feature: 04-Jan-2009

Welcome to the first LXer Roundup of 2009, I hope your new year was a good one. ChannelWeb has a list of what they think are the 10 Coolest Open Source products of 2008 and Phoronix has their take on the great Linux innovations of 2008. Bruce Byfield gives us his list of the seven most influential Linux distributions. I like the list overall but I think it should include Damn Small Linux.

Flickr offers a vast collection of photos you can use with your OpenOffice.org documents, but trawling hundreds, if not thousands of photos in order to find the right one can be a rather tedious and time-consuming affair.

As always, KDE will have a presence at next year's FOSDEM in Belgium on 7-8 February 2008. This is earlier in the month than usual. We are looking for people to give talks in the KDE or cross-desktop devroom. FOSDEM is the European meeting of free software developers, with over 4000 visitors, 200 lectures and lots of stalls to visit over a 2 day period. You can come and listen to a plethora of interesting talks about anything related to free software, and meet the people behind the nicknames.

Now that the big 4 are done, we can get on with our lives ;) Ah, finally. Here we are. Regular readers will remember our previous entries in this series for finding your search index ranking on Google, MSN/Live and Yahoo We've finally gotten around to Ask and, with this script, that should be that... until one or any combination of them change their source.

GRUB 2, the next-generation Linux boot loader, has received a new font engine. Version 2 of the GRand Unified Bootloader introduces this new font engine that's written in C and with a font tool in Java. This engine will allow for better internationalization support including non-ASCII character codes and support for multiple fonts.

A file manager is software which provides a user interface to assist in the organisation of files. It helps users with their daily work in managing their files on a hard drive or other storage device. With terabyte hard disks becoming prevalent, file managers represent an essential tool in managing file systems.

It seems that each and every week there are new netbooks that are introduced, but there are not many differences between most models. Some netbooks will have a slightly longer battery life, a different exterior, or a solid-state drive, but there are more similarities than differences. However, one of the latest companies to join the netbook bandwagon here in the United States has been Samsung with the introduction of the NC10. Is there anything special about this 10.2-inch Atom-powered netbook? We will tell you in this Linux review of the Samsung NC10.

Software updates demand an Internet connection, which can make updating nearly impossible for those without reliable net access. There is now a solution: Keryx.

The IEEE has again ranked companies in different sectors to estimate the power that these companies have based upon their patent portfolio. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft came top in the "Computer Software" category and IBM tops the "Computer Systems" chart.

The so-called free economy is alive and well, despite a general economy that's in the dumps. Rather than legal tender, what makes this economy survive and thrive is a combination of ego-stroking and token rewards. It seems to be working pretty well for ThisNext.com.

The open source blogosphere featured two articles the last week of December 2008 that inaccurately draw software-market history timelines from which the authors then inaccurately position the place of open source software in the information technology (IT) market. I doubt if the statements are intentionally misleading; they are most likely the result of ignorance or sloppiness.

I write a great deal about Google mostly because it is always trying new things and putting them out there for free for the world to try. The tools are easy to access and use from wherever you are--any device with a browser and an internet connection--and you can't beat the single-sign on across the tool kit, but for all it has going for it, Google has a major trust issue. Every time I write about Google the comments always include people who won't trust Google with their content ever.

Sylvania's G Netbook Meso offers a nice-looking screen and plenty of ports -- you get three USBs as well as a VGA. The keyboard is just too cramped for reviewer Jack Germain's liking, though that's a problem found on just about any tiny netbook computer. The available Ubuntu Netbook Remix OS will give you the option to effortless switch between two GUI styles.

The Wikimedia Foundation has raised the necessary funds to operate Wikipedia until the end of June, the nonprofit organisation announced Friday. Wikimedia has received about US$6.2 million since launching its fundraising campaign in early November. More than 125,000 donors have chipped in.

German Linux integrator Millenux is launching a series of monthly workshops for Linux developers and IT managers on open-source Linux topics including high availablity (HA), Debian, and kernel development. The initial January 7 event in Munich will address "mobile computing," plus NoMachine's "NX" Xhosting technology.

Google with a dialect: You ph33l1n6 lu(ky?

Scanning and packet sniffing software; specifically network mapper (nmap) and tcpdump are tools I now use almost daily in some capacity. The underlying software of tcpdump - libpcap (packet capture library) - I have on three occasions needed to leverage pcap libs for various tasks. In the final part of the libpcap series the full source listing of the pieces from part one and part two are cobbled together into a single program. The Makefile is also constructed in addition to a small barely functional packet injector program which shows another side of libpcap; packets don't just have to be read they can be written as well.

The Obama administration has made a pledge to spend $50 billion dollars on Health IT, yet it is unclear how they will come to grips with proprietary health IT software, a problem I will call the 'Some Dude' phenomenon. In my now lengthening health IT career, I have frequently come across a remarkably destructive and unfortunately abundant person called 'Some Dude'. Some Dude is the proprietary license holder of an entrenched piece of health IT software that needs to be interfaced with other software. Some Dude is entirely and in my experience usually capable of: stonewalling, obstructing, fleecing, lying, tollboothing, and ignoring any effort to interface with their proprietary software. There are few to no penalties or consequences to the proprietary license holders for such destruction. There are many real consequences and penalties for patients and practitioners by such obstruction.