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It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. They say never to begin a novel talking about the weather. I guess nobody told Dickens, but I digress…Today I booted into Windows XP MCE for the first time in 24 days. I would like to share my experience. I kept careful notes because I knew what to expect from past experience and I anticipated some of the problems that I will share.

Over the years, I came to appreciate a number of organizations that although not directly linked to free software and open source are of interest for the FOSS community. Pretty much everybody knows the free software foundation, the software freedom law center, the Linux foundation, The GNU project, the open source initiative, Creative Commons or Groklaw. Here is a list of other extremely interesting (mostly US-born) organizations and/or projects.

Canonical, the company behind the highly popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, unveiled its Ubuntu Netbook Remix yesterday at the Computex show in Taiwan. The Remix is based on Ubuntu Mobile Edition and is designed specifically for mobile computers with a subnotebook form factor.

Server consolidation based on Linux for System z offers advantages, but moving existing applications requires some specialized knowledge. In this article, get general advice on how to organize your porting project, including technical details on mainframe virtualization, byte-ordering, and address calculation specific to System z.

Want a version of Linux for your Intel Atom powered “NetBook” – aka Asus Eee PC type subnotebook? Canonical hopes that Ubuntu Remix will fit the bill for OEMs – and presumably users, too - and has launched it at Computex in Taiwan. Will it?

Procedure described bellow installs packages mercurial, dev86, python-virtinst, virt-viewer. Virt-install as well as pygrub and hvmloader appear to be completely functional on Xen 3.2.1 F8 Dom0 and allow to create PV and HVM guests like on enterprise class system. Commands like xm start/stop/shutdown/reboot DomainName provide ability to manage created domains as on native Xen 3.1 F8 Dom0.

Note-taking applications are far from scarce on GNU/Linux desktops. If your needs are simple, you can use KNotes in KDE or Sticky Notes in GNOME. If you want integration with address books and email, you may prefer Evolution's built-in Memos pane. For those who need more than basic notes, the increasingly sophisticated Tomboy may be a solution, assuming they have no objection to running an application built using Mono. However, by far the most versatile note-taking application is KDE's Basket, a tool so flexible and complete that you might prefer to think of it as a personal wiki, a producer of scrapbooks, or even a creator of temporary desktops. The future of Basket as a project is uncertain at the moment, but that doesn't mean that you can't take advantage of its power.

Tony Luckoffered some statistics focused on the frequency of developers that only contribute to the Linux kernel one time,"I skimmed through looking for drive-by contributors (defined as someone who contributes to just one release and is then never heard from again)." Starting with the 2.6.11 kernel, he suggested the following numbers:"63 [developers contributed patches] in version 2.6.11 [and then were] never seen again, 148 in version 2.6.12, 128 in version 2.6.13, 92 in version 2.6.14, 96 in version 2.6.15, 122 in version 2.6.16, 137 in version 2.6.17, 140 in version 2.6.18, 135 in version 2.6.19, 95 in version 2.6.20, 136 in version 2.6.21, 153 in version 2.6.22, 179 in version 2.6.23, 179 in version 2.6.24, and 304 in version 2.6.25".

In an in depth look at Composer, Maurcie Cepeda at Freesoftware Magazine discusses the features of Composer that make it an ideal tool for the job as a capable HTML-based word processor. Read the full story at FSM

I've had this problem on one machine ever since I installed Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. It's a triple boot, with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on one of the other partitions, and I never had this problem with the older LTS installation. Basically, the Ubuntu login screen in 8.04 is too large to fit in the dimensions of the monitor. Once I'm logged in, my resolution is 1024x768, which is exactly how I want it. But the login screen is so huge, I don't get the Options menu on the bottom, which comes in handy if I want to log in with another window manager.

The open-source Linux operating system is seeing major growth in the mobile and embedded space, especially in the smartphone market. Handset makers and mobile carriers are adopting open-source software because it significantly reduces licensing and development costs and also provides higher flexibility. That is why analyst firm ABI Research is predicting that Linux-based mobile devices will account for nearly a quarter of the smartphone market within the next five years.

Acer has stated that it will be pushing Linux aggressively on its laptops and netbooks. The company is already heavily promoting Linux for its low cost ultra-portable netbook range out later this year, but senior staff have said that Acer will also push Linux on its laptops.

images2mpg, a simple utility that's part of the KDE Image Plugin Interface (KIPI), lets you create an MPEG file from image files. Relying on a handful of command-line tools including the ImageMagick suite and mjpegtools, images2mpg creates wonderful videos from your images and even lets you insert your favorite song as the background. It supports SVCD, DVD, VCD, and XVCD video formats. To install KIPI, Fedora and Ubuntu users can respectively use yum or apt. Before you begin experimenting with images2mpg, you will need to install ImageMagick and mjpegtools too.

I hate to be down on Thunderbird, which I use as my default mail client in Windows XP. But today I turn on the box, start Thunderbird, and things don't go well.

With Obama's winning of the Democratic presidential nomination, all indications are that freedom is coming. It's coming in the form of another economic stimulus check. Another economic stimulus check? So soon after the last one? Yes, and here is how it's going to happen. One of Obama's first executive acts will be to standardize all Federal offices to OpenOffice.org

Once again, Freesoftware Magazine's resident Unix tech guru, John Calcote, presents another instalment on GNU/Linux's Autotools. This time it's all about automatically writing makefiles with Automake- and it's detailed! Get the full monty at the FSM website

LXer Feature: 04-Jun-2008

My implicit presumption in this series is that break ins are unplanned, opportunistic occurrences. Break in attempts are triggered by encountering an input form. As I mentioned previously, do not give information away needlessly. Moreover, I strongly suggest you consider becoming passively aggressive by making your presentation of the form and its expected input somewhat unpredictable. Moreover, I advise turning your data input into a simple waste of time and effort for those not trained to use the entry way.

The Firefox 3.0 release has support for microformats in the form of an API that you can access from a Firefox extension. Follow an example of how to use this API from within your extension code. Take a skeleton Hello World extension and give it the ability to store an hCard from a Web page and then use that stored hCard to populate a Web form.

OpenOffice.org takes on PDF import with this new extension (available now). Also the extension introduces innovative, dual-format PDF-ODF files combining portable presentation and editing capabilities in a single file.

Bob Bickel Founder, Ringside Networks alleges that the CPAL is a poison pill for open source code. "The poison pill in this license agreement is that anyone using the Facebook code as part of something else, and puts that up on a website, would need to make all of the code open source," Bickel wrote . First off the CPAL is a bona fide Open Source license approved by the OSI. It fulfills the requirements of the Open Source Definition as determined by the OSI and it is the Real Deal. The ideal of contributions is pivotal to the success and long term survival of the Open Source community, and that shouldn't be thought of as a poison pill in my view.