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As South Africa prepares to host the second annual ODF conference next week, momentum behind the Open Document Format appears to be growing stronger. To date at least 15 national governments, including countries such as South Africa, Brazil, and Italy, have adopted ODF as a government standard according to the ODF Alliance. And earlier this week Sweden national standards body approved ODF as a national standard in that country.

Google unveiled the first Android-powered cell phone last week, a T-Mobile-branded device dubbed the G1. Comparisons to Apple's iPhone were immediate -- and that is a good thing for Android, when you consider what a raucous and contentious week it was for iPhone developers. Initial G1 reviews were generally positive, but several reporters complained that when they asked about specific missing applications and features, the reply came back that third-party developers "are welcome to add that." In open source circles, that sort of comment is often regarded as a dodge, what a proprietary vendor says when dumping source code over the wall with no intentions of developing it further.

Zilog, creator of the Z80 microprocessors that powered numerous circa-1980 microcomputers including the Osborne and Kaypro, has just introduced its first general purpose 32-bit microcontroller family. The Encore! 32 microcontrollers integrate ARM9 processor cores, are offered with Linux support, and target embedded devices.

Your occasiodaily dose of FOSS news as delivered by your video host, Marcel Gagné (aka WFTL). Today's video news features a bailout for billionaires, rotten Apples, dried up venture capitalists, and two attempts to spread the Linux word to the masses.

Carla Schroder takes us on a tour of some of the excellent Linux package managers: RPM, dpkg, and the sophisticated dependency-resolving package managers, aptitude and Yum. Learn how to find out what is installed on your system, find files and packages, install and remove software, and update your Linux system smoothly and reliably.

Converting an old PC into a home or office server may look like a good idea on paper, but in reality, the idea has a few serious drawbacks. For starters, old PCs tend to be noisy, power-guzzling monsters, and older components make them less reliable. Turning an old PC into a server also means installing and configuring all the necessary software, which can be a time-consuming and laborious process. If the drawbacks of this approach outweigh for you its possible advantages, consider instead Bubba Two, a nifty Debian-based device that can be used for a variety of tasks.

In the annals of computer software with bizarre and seemingly random names, "Tomato" is probably one of the less weird examples as these things go. But whether you say tomay-toe or tomah-toe, this one is neither a fruit nor a vegetable—it is a firmware for wireless routers, including the popular WRT54G family.

As anyone familiar with the Linux wireless scene before 2006 knows, Broadcom, which manufacturers the wireless chipsets found in many laptops, was for a long time synonymous with everything evil about closed-source software. That’s changing. Here’s how

Debian Etch install took about 2 hr on the box with C2D E8400, 8 GB RAM built up on P5K Premium/WIFI board. South Bridge ICH9R has been setup to AHCI mode with 2×250 SATA drives attached. dom0_mem was set to 4GB in /boot/grub/grub.conf. Debian HVM allocated 2 GB memory , Ubuntu 8.04.1 HVM 2.5 -3 GB memory . In case Ubuntu HH Desktop stub domain install it’s important to have enough memory on the box for Dom0 and DomU.

What is Ubuntu Easy Business Server? A Canonical product? A small business concept? Or something else? WorksWithU.com gets the answers from Canonical Marketing Manager Gerry Carr. Here are the details.

Have you ever typed about:config into Firefox's address bar? If you do, you'll get back a huge array of files that you can modify to configure and customize your Firefox installation. Some people like to play with these. I don't like to, and that's why I'm a big fan of FireTune. FireTune is a free, downloadable utility that automates the process of improving your Firefox setup.

Because of Linux I hardly have to lift a finger anymore, and because of it my health is suffering. I rarely hop up and down in a fit of temper, I don't have to drive to the store to buy software, and I don't get the aerobic benefits of spending hours on the phone with tech support, breathing hard and accelerating my heartbeat. I rarely make site visits anymore. I don't even leave my chair...

Chances are you have some sort of web site. Linux has a rich history of text processing which can be used to turbo-boost your blogs. In fact, blogging goes to Linux like a hand to a glove. The theme for this month is “I didn’t know you could do that in Linux,” and today I’ll show you how Linux can really help your blog take off, both in terms of improving its performance as well as giving you a much greater handle on what’s happening.

Open source software reduced the government’s software expenses for geospatial services massively. This is according to Sindile Bidla, deputy director of the Eastern Cape’s Spatial Information Services’ chief directorate for spatial planning and information. Bidla was speaking at the Free Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference in Cape Town earlier this week.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a gOS 3.0 Gadgets desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. gOS is a lightweight Linux distribution, based on Ubuntu 8.04, that comes with Google Apps and some other Web 2.0 applications; gOS 3.0 Gadgets uses the GNOME desktop.

The HP Media Vault 5150 is a Linux-based network-attached storage (NAS) device that aims to be the end-all-be-all for home and small-office network file management and media service. It boasts not only a large capacity (700GB or 1.4TB depending on how you allocate it), it also has a hardware RAID-1 option and USB ports for attaching additional storage. Its internal drive bays use SATA drives, and the internal capacity theoretically is upgradable to the limit of SATA drive technology, and it hooks into your network through Gigabit Ethernet. Running out of bandwidth, therefore, is not in the cards.

Today Linux Magazine, the Linux Foundation, and CeBIT organizers announced that they are taking applications for a limited number of free booths at the CeBIT 2009 conference. The global IT tradeshow, taking place March 3-8, 2009, in Hannover, Germany, will focus on open source software as a central theme for the first time.

13 members of the TC in Norway has left their Standards Body in protest. They say that the Standards Body has lost its credibility in the IT area. Remember that Standards Norway was voting Yes with the support of only 2 companies (Microsoft and Statoil), and against the will of the rest of the technical committee (read our previous article "Norway: 21 "No", 2 "Yes" and Microsoft still gets its way?"). Here is a rough google translation of the letter sent by the 13

Foxmail is a compact, yet very powerful email program with many useful features and a pleasant interface. Foxmail supports POP3 accounts as well as Hotmail accounts and offers support for HTML email, mailbox encryption, multiple accounts and more. Foxmail also comes with a WYSIWIG tool to compose nice looking HTML emails from templates or scratch.

These packages contain Broadcom's IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n hybrid Linux® device driver for use with Broadcom's BCM4311-, BCM4312-, BCM4321-, and BCM4322-based hardware