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The government program "Holland Open in Connection" (Nederland Open in Verbinding) and The OpenDoc Society are collaborating on an online document factory to compare office suite applications. The free webservice Officeshots.org will start at the end of next month. Users will be able to compare online the output quality of office suites as well as web-based productivity applications. The collaboration was announced during a well visited ODF congress in Maarssen, The Netherlands. The project is financially supported by a one-time funding by the Dutch NLNet Foundation.

[Disclaimer: Your editor is one of the core developers on the Officeshots project -- Sander]

Dvd2Xvid is free opensource simple easy to use utility to convert DVDs into Xvid video formats. dvd2xvid is a simple GUI for MEncoder aimed at converting DVDs to xvid formats.

Which is the best Linux OS? This is of course an unanswerable question, still many people ask themselves this question. Of course they do! They definitely have to. There's nothing as difficult as a world full of choice, especially if you don't happen to have a lot of knowledge about the subject. And when it comes to Linux it will well make a difference you'll carry with you for the rest of your life as a Linux user.

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

The past couple days I've been interested in the fastest gtk-engine-theme available to load on my Ubuntu box. I just simply didn't want fast but as elegant as I could get.

The purchase of StarDivision, the makers of StarOffice, a German office "productivity suite", by Sun Microsystems in August 1999. The subsequent release to the free software community of the StarOffice code, in the shape of OpenOffice, came as a surprise to many. Sun was a hardware company. Its primary business was back room servers, and Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystem's CEO, was not a fan of office productivity suites. Quite the opposite. Back in October 1996, McNealy had announced to the National Press Club of Australia: "When the anthropologists look back on the 1980s and 1990s and do the archaeological digs, and get their calipers and brooms and microscopes out, they will blame the massive reduction in productivity during the 1980s and 1990s entirely on Microsoft Office."

The Montegancedo Astronomical Observatory, based at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s School of Computing and part of the Madrid Region’s ASTROCAM network, was officially opened on 23 January 2009, coinciding with the International Year of Astronomy 2009.

Nokia has released details of the 11 finalists in its "Calling All Innovators" competition, picked from almost 1000 entrants and apparently focusing on applications that improve the quality of life on earth. There are those who believe the best way to improve quality of life would be to switch off the mobile, but unsurprisingly that's not how Nokia sees things. The finalists are split between the ecologically sound, the improving-the-third-world and the cool-technology, with an interesting application or two in every section.

Matthew MacDonald is something of an "in-house" author for the Missing Manual series. He's "penned" (and I use the term loosely in this day of the word processor) Access 2007: The Missing Manual, Excel 2007: The Missing Manual and, of all titles, Your Brain: The Missing Manual (and since I've reviewed all three of these books, I can tell you that he had a little expert help with the last one, especially). He's also written quite extensively for Apress and seems to be well versed on a number of topics.

Proposing to change the implementation language for a large project is hardly uncontroversial, but when that proposal calls for moving from C++ to Python, one might expect an enormous flame fest. Surprisingly, a proposal to do just that with the code for the "Battle for Wesnoth" strategy game has resulted in a fairly flame-free discussion. Whether or not the project actually makes the switch—it looks unlikely that any wholesale switch is imminent—there is a great deal of value in the discussion, particularly in its tone.

Ever feel like you're Rodney Dangerfield? You live someplace and Linux shows you no respect, time-zone-wise that is. What I mean is that you live somewhere that's not one of the time-zones that comes predefined with Linux. If that sounds like you, then read on and get Linux to show you a little respect.

There is now talk on the Mesa 3D development list about the possibility of having a Mesa driver for the Nintendo Wii. Those working on developing custom games for this console platform have already experienced some success in bringing OpenGL to the Wii through the use of Mesa. Nintendo has its own graphics API (GX) for the Wii, which is resemblant of OpenGL but still different enough that some work is required to get OpenGL running...

A lot of notebooks and even netbooks these days run Windows, but also offer a minimalist Linux environment that boots in seconds. Now, with the Intel-sponsored Moblin project's alpha release of Moblin 2 Monday, it looks like insanely fast boots will become a standard feature of full-featured Linux desktops, too.

There is but ONE Waldo in the PI puzzle - Still with no hat ;) Last Friday, we posted a little puzzle we made up entitled "Where's Waldo?" where the objective was to find Waldo amongst the first million digits to the right side of the decimal point in the irrational number PI. Apologies for the picture as my editor couldn't deal with the length of the line and insisted on chopping it up into bits. The numbers were in order, so all that was necessary to get the entire string without spaces was doing simple deletion of all the space characters.

Linus Torvalds makes a minor, off-hand comment that is buried deep in a lengthy interview. The tech press and Linux community act like it's nude celebrity pics and go gaga. Bruce Byfield peels away the nonsense and finds a tiny nugget of actual news. Sorry, no nude pics.

So I am writing this rant on the eve of the release of KDE 4.2, and in the face of interviews from Linus Torvalds stating that he abandoned KDE after the 4.0 release, and partially in response to Steven Vaugh-Nichols negatively equating 4.2 to Windows 7. My bottom line: I've been using KDE since around the time version 2 came out, and while KDE 4.2 is not perfection, it is better than the 3.5 series, and as of right now 4.2 is easily my favorite Linux desktop... and this rant will address some complaints I've seen and to dissect which complaints are warranted and which are not.
[Nicely stated] - Abe

Debian Linux founder and former OpenSolaris chief Ian Murdock is taking over the role of chief strategist for cloud computing at Sun Microsystems.

Google has taken the eternal Beta that is Gmail offline and you know? Nobody has raised a single word of complaint, and for a damn good reason.

Slackware and some Linux distributions based on Slackware don't include GDM and don't have a graphical tool to set language and locale on the fly. However, if you're willing to edit one or two configuration files and install a few packages you can make Slackware speak your language, working in whatever language you are most comfortable with.

Ordinarily, I don't spend much discretionary income on computers. I get enough of 'em at work. But the other day, I actually considered buying a netbook. In the process of doing some shopping, I learned why Windows is outselling Linux.