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Sun explains the importance of quality assurance in OpenOffice.org

When you buy a new computer, you may first think about its operating system — is it PC, Mac, Linux? Smartphones have those same operating systems and others. But the OS isn’t likely to be the No. 1 issue for many consumers even though it’s playing an increasingly important role. Smartphones — which can handle e-mail, Web browsing as well as audio and video in many cases — have seen strong growth this year as more consumers opt to have their cell phones do double and triple duty.

Newly appointed CTO of the Linux Foundation and kernel developer Ted Ts'o is appealing to the Debian project to adopt a more pragmatic attitude about its Linux distro. The provocation for his advice is the current controversy over Debian's next 5.0 "Lenny" release.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Monday, December 29, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. This is episode 41. In today's stories, we get to speculate about the coming year (that would be 2009) for Linux and FOSS, make lists of things we thought were pretty cool (or will be), and look back on where we went wrong, and reflect on just how pointless it is to make predictions.

I had no expectation that it would work, but I decided to shove my trusty Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA 802.11b wireless networking card into the meant-for-Airport-only slot in my Power Macintosh G4/466 running Debian Etch. I connected the antenna wire. I booted Debian. I opened the Desktop -- Administration -- Networking tool. There it was, eth2, my wireless card. One problem: Since the Orinoco WaveLAN Silver card is quite a bit longer than the Airport card this slot was meant for, there's no way I can even close the case of the G4 while using the Wi-Fi card.

Juliet Kemp introduces DBAN (Darik's Boot And Nuke), a self-contained boot disk (floppy, CD, USB) that securely wipes hard disks. It is operating system independent and meets a number of government security standards; read on to learn more.

Everyone wants to know what's going to happen in the new year as if anyone can accurately predict these things. However, one can deduce, with reasonable accuracy, that there will be innovations that are designed to get our attention. This is my list of Linux-oriented predictions for 2009. The keyword for 2009 is Innovation.

Bringing a more accessible, easy-to-use and fast way of doing business and home computing in a web 2.0 flavour is what we are going to achieve by the beginning of the new year. Sabayon Linux 4 offers an easy-to-use and attractive desktop coming with thousands of tools and applications.

Since earlier this year we have been waiting for AMD to release documentation and/or code on the ATI R600 series concerning 3D acceleration so that the open-source Linux drivers can begin to support the newer ATI graphics processors. It has taken longer than expected for AMD to complete and release this information, but it's now available. AMD has released the fundamental Linux code needed to begin fostering the development of an open-source R600 3D driver. Furthermore, this code also concerns the latest R700 series of graphics processors! The microcode for the newest GPUs has also been released.

I have never had a successful Ubuntu dist-upgrade, so I had low expectations. Amazingly, it was successful on my computer... ...which surprised me because the poor thing gets thrashed in all kinds of ways. I'm forever installing weird software and hardware, and doing source builds and backports and you name it, and it keeps on chugging anyway. I gave it a good housecleaning first to give it a fighting chance and deleted all the weird junk, and it went fine except for one thing-- those dratted NVidia drivers. We hatess Nvidia.

Aside from the removal of some annoying Vista bells and whistles and the new Peek and Snap window-management enhancements, it is difficult not to notice the resemblance between Microsoft’s much-touted revamped Aero and the excellent, now 3-years old, KDE 3.5.x.

Lead kernel developer Linus Torvalds announced the official release of Linux 2.6.28 on Wednesday. The new version introduces some noteworthy changes that will put the kernel in a strong position for growth and advancement in the coming year. This latest release follows a few months after version 2.6.27, which was released in October.

Ian Tree, the chief architect at IT consultancy Hadleigh Marshall Netherlands b.v. of Eindhoven, The Netherlands, has some free advice for IBM's Software Group: Take the Notes/Domino groupware stack open source with a community-developed programming model. The idea is to keep the Notes client and the Domino server relevant in a world becoming more accustomed to open source products.

Google Maps is a free service that provides browser-based directions as well as maps of particular locations through the Internet. You can zoom in on the interactive maps to show detailed information, providing great user interactivity with the Web site. The maps provided by Google can be used not only directly by customers, but also to develop customized map services and products with the Google Maps API. The latest Google Maps API version, however, is not good at parsing Chinese geography, which makes it difficult to use in applications for a Chinese audience. In this article, we describe a feasible solution, combining other Web services, to parse Chinese geography with the current Google Maps API for a Chinese mapping solution. We'll use the example of the sites for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games to demonstrate our solution.

Netbooks are popular, hugely popular in fact. Everyone from Dell through to Toshiba has joined the Eee PC goldrush. Everyone but Apple, that is. Steve Jobs has made it clear that he has no real interest in the netbook market, if recent reports are to be believed. One company that did have an interest, long before anyone else, was the British outfit Psion which launched the very first 'netBook' way back in 1999. Then things went pretty quiet from Psion, until now. Even at the height of the netbook media feeding frenzy at the start of the year, when the Eee PC dominated the headlines, Psion was keeping quiet. But now it appears that Psion is getting busy, and vocal, about how it has the trademark on the term netbook and is prepared to defend it.

The Interclue extension is supposed to give you a preview of links in Firefox before you visit them, saving you mouse-clicks and, with a little luck, allowing you to move quickly between multiple links on the same page. Unfortunately, the determination to monetize the add-on and keep its source code closed results in elaborations that make the basic idea less effective, and its constant pleas for donations make Interclue into nagware. As much as the usefulness of the basic utility, Interclue serves as an object lesson of the difficulties that the decision to go proprietary can take.

When you're talking Linux, three big names always pop up: Canonical's Ubuntu, Novell's openSUSE and Red Hat's Fedora. Ubuntu has ridden a groundswell of both consumer and commercial support to its current ranking as the most popular Linux distribution. OpenSUSE, with its business underpinnings, has always been popular in Europe and has been making inroads in the U.S. And it is largely thanks to Fedora that Red Hat has become the biggest Linux company with a major role in community Linux.

LXer Feature: 28-Dec-2008

Welcome to the last Weekly Roundup for 2008, but fear not my fellow news hounds for even as we continue to grow in 2009, LXer will be here to keep you up to speed on all things FOSS. At the end of the year its always about the numbers isn't it? This week we have couple of 7's, 15 tips, the new Ext4 and 3 Debian derivatives worthy as gifts to your favorite geek.

2009 is the year of Linux. So is 2010 and 2011 and by 2012, the last pair of eyes will finally glaze over at the prospect. Zenwalk becomes Zenrun. Lindependence comes to Redmond. This and other predictions may or may not happen next year.

Another search engine; another algorithm. When will it all make sense? ;)