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More new signs of Microsoft poisoning Free software using sponsorships, acquisitions, and Mono

OpenOffice.org 3.0, the next major release of the open source office suite, is scheduled to be released in September. Which means that it is pretty much guaranteed to be included in the next release of Ubuntu 8.10, Mandriva 2009 and Fedora 10, all of which are due out in October. Until then it is easy enough to test out the beta releases of OpenOffice 3.0 without removing your existing 2x OpenOffice installation. Installing OpenOffice 3.0 beta also means you can test out Sun’s PDF import extension which is also still in development.

Mozilla Corporation has claimed that the transition to Firefox 3.1 won’t be “a major pain-in-the-ass” and pledged developers will not be hit by “surprises along the way”, after royally hacking off users with the 3.0 launch. The company's platform evangelist Mark Finkle said on his blog that extension developers, who suffered their fair share of headaches attempting to update add-ons when Firefox 3 landed last month, will not experience similar problems with the next version of the open source web browser.

Sometimes it's the little things that can cause you to rethink how you look at a company. For much of this decade Microsoft has been the"evil empire" with Apple, Linux and Google on the side of the Force. With Microsoft doing some positive things, Apple's decision to raise iPhone prices, Google's attack on single parents and Richard Stallman's attack on Bill Gates' philanthropy, these entities' images may be changing.

[Be warned, Rob Enderle wrote this. - Scott]

Sun Microsystems lost the first Rich Internet Application (RIA) war when Macromedia (now part of Adobe) ate its applets for lunch following a schoolyard brawl. Now Sun has a second chance. But, to succeed in such an unforgiving market, Sun needs something special. A mature, powerful platform, a buzzing community, some seriously talented people with an eye for visual design, and some butt-kicking WYSIWYG tools so that non-programmers are invited to the party as well.

Part of my "economic stimulus check" went to a 500GB SATA drive. My original intention was to buy two of them, so I could claim, "over a terabyte of disk space!". Alas, I got a little ahead of myself; my system had only one open hard drive bay. With a slightly bruised ego, I returned the unopened second hard drive and began to ponder how to exploit my super-roomy disk space. I quickly settled on one goal: find the fastest journaling filesystem (FS) for my SLAMD64 dual-core computer, with 2G of memory. My testing focused on three main areas: filesystem, disk I/O scheduler, and CPU speed. Frankly, the final results stunned me.

DjbDNS is a collection of Domain Name System tools. It includes software for all the fundamental DNS operations. This tutorial shows how to set it up on an Ubuntu 8.04 AMD64 server.

Normally all applications should be installed using your distro's package manager in order to set up dependencies correctly (like libraries). Once in a while you may encounter a problem with either a broken package database or synchronization problem due to hardware faults or naughty user behavior (like deletion of an application's files manually). The solution to a broken package problem is to first let the package manager try to fix it. But there are limits to what kind of a mess they can fix and sometimes you have to tread into the risky world of tool abuse to get the job done.

LXer Feature: 13-Jul-2008

In this week's Roundup we have a slew of Microsoft related articles ranging from more MS-Yahoo! fallout to keeping a report in the UK from going public. A OpenSUSE 11.0 review, VMware Ousts CEO Diane Greene, The Swiss Army Distro, Xandros buys Linspire - What does it mean for Linux? and on a sad note longtime Linux evangelist Joe Barr passes away.

Updated telnet snoop script to enable tracking of login, password, session and any other information transmitted over unsecure protocols using direct output from snoop.

Password management is a daunting task for most IT users. A large german company deploys the open source password-safe KeePass in order to enable their IT users to execute safe password management.

So you thought Linux was the key to the Eee PC's success? Not so, according to ASUS. "The bulk of the requests and requirements we see in the marketplace are for the model with Windows rather than Linux," says Henry Lee, Acer's senior product manager. "It's a give and take between simplicity of usage for the masses versus full customisation. The Linux version is really only to use exactly what is provided, and someone in the know can easily remove what's been installed. But consumers are accustomed to the Windows environment, and the Windows version will be a stronger player eventually."

The Wine development release 1.1.1 is now available.

Not quite four months ago, I wrote a review for SitePoint's "The Ultimate CSS Reference" for The Linux Tutorial website. I wrote the review based on the online version (which has since been made accessible to everyone) and overall, found the book to be very, very good (if not 100% "ultimate"...I'm kind of hard to convince that any one source of information is all I'll ever need). I since have gotten my hands on the hardcopy of this text and am very proud to own it. When it's "mate", "The Ultimate HTML Reference" arrived in the mail, naturally, I was interested to see how it compared.

Exaile is a wonderful application for listening to music in a GNOME environment. Although it could be considered a newcomer to the music player world and we are not hearing much about it, I have been using Exaile for quite a while now and I think it is the best application of its kind.

Tucked away in Deepshikha Monga's short article, "OLPC looks to World Bank for India funding" is a XO laptop bombshell: "Later this year, the XO laptops are expected to hit the retail stores. Sources say Reliance Communications, which partnered OLPC Foundation to conduct an XO pilot project in Maharashtra last year, is looking at retailing these laptops bundled with its CDMA modems." Might this be the reason for Nicholas Negroponte's visit to India in August for OLPC India Day? Regardless, it would be a shocking yet welcomed shift in strategy for One Laptop Per Child.

Virtualisation is a technology that can work wonders: provide a testing environment, enhance your processing power, consolidate your computing resources, decrease running costs, preserve legacy apps and more! Here’s how virtualisation can benefit you and why the Linux route really beats out the competition.

Nearly a year ago, we looked at the status of SystemTap in the context of Sun's much-hyped DTrace tool. Since that time there has been progress, but the basic problem still remains: Linux does not have a good, ready-to-run answer to those wanting the equivalent functionality of DTrace. Due to an apparent disconnect between the developers of SystemTap and the kernel hackers, tracing for the Linux kernel—never mind user space programs—is not up to the competition.

Online identity management and single sign-on still doesn't work. Not well enough, anyway. OpenID is a good step forward. So are a bunch of other less familiar approaches. But we still haven't arrived. For example, I've been a member of Blogger for the duration. That is, since long before Google bought the company. In the old days, making a comment on a Blogger blog was fairly easy. Now it's a lot more complicated. I'm sure that's mostly because comment spam is a gigantic problem, especially for a gigantic company like Google.

Since I did a look at Ubuntu’s early concept art and since I am usually very impressed by Fedora’s final art, I decided that it would make sense to take a look at what has appeared on the Fedora Art Team wiki. I have actually been waiting a few days to do this, since, as of just a few days ago, there were not enough submissions that I liked to talk about.