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IBM fired the opening salvo at this year's LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, and to the surprise of no one, it was aimed squarely at Microsoft. Sure, it was the low-hanging fruit -- Microsoft's an easy target. It's kind of like taking pot shots at John McCain at an Obama fund-raiser. But here, the ammunition was more notable than the target.

If there was one solid message to come from the opening keynotes at LinuxWorld in San Francisco, it is this: Now is the time. Illustrated through the lenses of two large, mainstream industries -- financial services and health care -- the first two presenters talked about ways that investments in new technology might help the bottom lines.

During a press briefing at LinuxWorld today in San Francisco, IBM announced a new partnership with Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical to offer "Microsoft-free" personal computers with IBM's Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony software. The goal is to provide a preintegrated stack that can serve as a complete alternative to Windows and Microsoft Office.

Let me introduce to you, my sister. She likes coach bags, her little pug, time with her family, and drinking Miller Lite at country festivals. She likes trendy bars and trendy clothes. She likes to watch Friends and Sex in the City. She majored in Criminal Justice. Her radio habits are Top 40 and/or country. Needless to say, she's the furtherest thing from a geek anyone in our generation can be. And she hates computers. I had a spare computer laying around. 1.7Ghz Pentium 4, 512 MB of RAM, DVD-Burner and I figured it was time she got rid of her old Celeron HP. I got a copy of Xubuntu 8.04 and began my install...

OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 is a free, open source alternative to Microsoft's Office application suite. It is fantastic if you need basic office applications -- such as a word processor or spreadsheet -- at no cost. However, large organisations and power users may be disappointed by its lack of features and support.

Since the release of the Quake 3 engine source code in summer 2005 a lot of modifications and spin-offs have emerged. One such spin-off, Smokin' Guns (formerly known as Western Quake 3), is all about classical Wild West themes: big rifles and revolvers, wailing steel guitars, bank robberies, and smooth talking. It's a game you don't want to miss.

The nasty taste which has always 'ever-so-slightly' tainted my use of Ubuntu is that Mono is there only to support applications written in languages and for platforms which are basically Microsoft's. It encourages software development using systems that are based on technologies almost certainly encumbered by a whole raft of M$ patents. To my mind, there are many great non M$ languages and architectures out there which are almost part-and-parcel of Linux programming and I see no need to bring .NET, ASP or even Visual Basic to my desktop. If I want to write an application, I could use PHP, Python, PERL, C, C++, Java and, of course, many others. Why do I need to endorse and encourage the proliferation of non-free software by relying on M$'s IP and the smell of their stinky patents? Well, I figured I don't. So, I thought I'd see what happened if I removed Mono from Ubuntu.

A vendor of Linux-based WiFi arrays is finally releasing a version of its WiFi Monitor utility for Linux desktops. The open source, widget-like Xirrus WiFi Monitor for Linux enables users to monitor, secure, and troubleshoot WiFi networks, says Xirrus. The company refers to the software as a "desklet," a widget-like applet that provides quick access to information and functions. Developed under the gDesklets framework using the Python language, the utility is being made available under the GPL (General Public License). Users have access to complete source code of the application, says Xirrus.

Screenlets are small owner-drawn applications (written in Python) that can be described as "the virtual representation of things lying/standing around on your desk". Sticknotes, clocks, rulers, youtube, gmail and more. Screenlets are free opensource software released under GPL License. Screenlets use GTK2 & Cairo for drawing and windowing.

Microsoft turns out not to be a fan of open source after all.

The Office Open XML (OOXML) file format is probably destined to be an international standard under International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). And Andy Updegrove, for one, is not happy about it. He says that the recent ISO/IEC recommendation to deny the appeal against the April 1 vote to ratify OOXML is a bad one.

RDN caught up with Updegrove to get his thoughts on the process behind the appeal and what its likely defeat means for developers and for the future of technical-standards making.

You might ask why I'm spending so much time figuring out how to best configure a Compaq Armada 7770dmt — a laptop with an ancient 233MHz Pentium II MMX processor, feeble 144MB of RAM and smallish 3GB hard drive. For one thing, I almost never abandon a machine that can be used. And this one definitely can be. Plus, I like the Compaq. It has a nice screen and keyboard, I like the fact that its power supply is totally contained in the laptop case. The thing's pretty solid.

In short, we are in an adversarial situation. Microsoft does not want us to succeed. Thus we cannot trust Microsoft, even if we'd like to, and must consider Mono based upon the question "What is the worst thing MS can reasonably do?". We can only trust Mono if we are convinced Microsoft doesn't have weasel room. The current situation appears, to me, to have lots of weasel room. The technical merits of Mono are basically irrelevant if its a trojan horse in the long term.

[An older article, posted at Groklaw in response to the interview with Miguel de Icaza by Der Standard -- Sander]

In 1997 Miguel de Icaza - together with Federico Mena Quintero - started one of the most influential Open Source projects: The GNOME desktop. At Novell he nowadays is leading the development of Mono, the free .Net-implementation he initiated in 2001. Since a few months he is also working on an open source version of Microsofts Silverlight - a task officially blessed by Microsoft.

During the recent GNOME Users and Developers Conference (GUADEC) Andreas Proschofsky had the chance to sit down with de Icaza and talk about future developments around Mono and Moonlight, the possibility of open sourcing .Net itself and changes in Microsofts attitude towards free software.

Banshee is a simple but powerful multimedia player with Audio/Video playback support, subscribe and playback podcasts and last.fm radio from Banshee. With Banshee1.2 Import, organize, play, share your music and videos using Banshee's simple but powerful interface. Rip CDs, play and sync your iPod, create playlists, and burn audio and MP3 CDs

Lenovo has announced its entry into the "netbook" market. The Linux-based IdeaPad S9 and Windows-XP-based S10 feature 8.9- and 10-inch displays, respectively, plus 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processors, 1.3 megapixel webcams, 802.11b/g wireless networking, and up to 160GB of storage, says the company.

After 10 years of supporting Linux, IBM (NYSE: IBM) continues to challenge Microsoft on multiple fronts and aims to push Linux even further into the enterprise. While IBM has competed and partnered with Microsoft over the last two decades, the Microsoft-free PC effort is perhaps its most direct assault yet. "The idea of Microsoft-free personal computing has been in the air for a while," Inna Kuznetsova, director of Linux at IBM, told InternetNews.com. "We're just partnering with Linux distribution vendors and hardware vendors to make it happen."

This article shows how you can install the Zimbra Desktop email client on an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) desktop. Zimbra Desktop is a full-fledged replacement for email clients such as Outlook or Evolution, offering email, contacts, calendar, documents, tasks, etc. You can use it in conjunction with the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) or any other email account that supports POP3 or IMAP.

Fedora 9 now lets you create a bootable Linux distribution on a flash drive with persistence. In other words, you can not only boot any PC that will accept USB drive booting into Linux, you can even boot into your own personal desktop. Now, that can be useful. With Fedora on a stick drive, no matter where you go or what PC you're using, you'll have your own Fedora desktop already set up just the way you want it. Fedora 9 is an excellent, modern Linux; if you enjoy using it, you'll enjoy even more being able to use it on almost any PC at hand.

LXer Feature: 05-Aug-2008

Here are a few thoughts and a quick roundup of what I have seen at LinuxWorld 2008 in San Francisco so far.