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Microsoft is talking to Yahoo! about an alternative transaction that doesn't involve an acquisition, the world's largest software maker said Sunday. Yahoo said it is open to "pursuing any transaction which is in the best interest of our stockholders." The announcement comes two weeks after Microsoft abruptly stopped its pursuit of Yahoo, withdrawing a sweetened $46 billion offer and saying it would not make a hostile bid for the Internet company.

wine-1.0rc1 was released on Friday, May 9th, 2008. Wine is now in a code freeze in preparation for the 1.0 release. According to http://wiki.winehq.org/WineReleasePlan, wine-1.0.0-rc2 will be due out Friday, May 23rd, 2008. It will be something like be the next to last release candidate for 1.0. Alexandre is on vacation, so git is a bit stale. In particular, Photoshop CS2 and DNS 9 don't install properly due to a regression introduced just before his vacation started; here's the fix. Some effort has been put into making it easy for people to automatically report "make test" failures; see MakeTestFailures for info and results.

How quickly the mighty retrograde their product line. And in the end, it is pretty funny. It wasn't a multi-billion dollar coalition of global competitors that banded together to make Microsoft retreat. It was a ragged band of developers, users and Advocates who spend as much time ripping into each other as they do fighting off Microsoft. It was an entity that doesn't even have a physical address or even a real leadership presence that forced Microsoft to all but abandon their billion dollar Vista venture and re-issue XP. How it is being done is even more amusing.

With LiMo’s recent announcement that Verizon had hopped onto their Board of Directors, things are starting to heat up between the LiMo platform and Google’s competing product, Android. Both are open-source Linux-based platforms, and both are aiming to rock the handset market sometime in the next year or so.

I have already written on this topic once and I thought that sufficed. Nonetheless, I soon found myself when pressed shirking my duty, by not making it easy for the reader to view (or not) the footnote contents and easily return to the same section of text. In my case, the reasons were I kept forgetting the syntax, partially due to the lack of constant use. The second reason was my trying to create descriptive, unique names in both directions. And the third, I was being pressed to do too many tasks, hence, I neglected some.

LXer Feature: 18-May-2008

This week we have MIT students showing the power of open cell phone systems, a Linux ThinkPad, W3C 'clarifies' HTML 5 v XHTML, why your internet experience is slow and reviews on 7 Desktop Distros, 5 Linux Browsers and some great Linux programs for kids. Also, Carla Schroder shows us how to become system rescue gurus, fixing Debian OpenSSL, a Asus Eee PC review, Linux gains action RPG and we have a couple of funny articles for your reading pleasure, STFUbuntu - The HOT New Linux Distro and an advert on the Novell website, Taking the Vista leap?

An independent effort to develop the software originally designed for the $100 laptop has been launched. Sugar Labs will take the laptop's innovative interface, known as Sugar, to the "next level of usability and utility", according to its founders. It is intended that the free software will be made available on other PCs, such as the popular Asus Eee.

Zattoo has developed a software program that allows you to watch TV on your computer. All you need is a broadband connection and a current operating system (Windows XP or Vista, Mac OS X, or Linux). The service is legal and free of charge.

This document describes step-by-step how to set up a Fedora 9 desktop (GNOME). The result is a fast, secure and extendable system that provides all you need for daily work and entertainment.

Call me old fashioned, but one complaint I have about Kubuntu 8.04 — aka Hardy Heron — is the lack of a traditional desktop trash icon on its KDE desktop. Fortunately, this is easy to fix!

This article reviews 7 of the most used audio players for Linux, 2 KDE players (Amarok and JuK) and 5 GTK players (Banshee, Beep Media Player, Audacious, Exaile and Rhythmbox). I tried to keep the reviews objective, however the scores are (and I can't possibly think of a way to do this another way) subjective.

Operating systems seem to have received more attention these days than they have ever before, and while there are numerous available discussion points, in relation to new versions of these operating systems, one of the biggest trends that has been fascinating to watch is how people are switching operating systems like crazy.

If there is one area where the Linux desktop has done very well, it has to be the variety of solutions for subscribing to RSS feeds that has been made available to us. In this piece, I will be sharing some of these applications and my thoughts on them.

Ever since Wubi first hit the scene for those of us who wanted to install Ubuntu on their Windows systems, it has been a great success. What a number of people do not know is that Wubi is but one of many similar options that embrace Linux as a whole, not just Ubuntu.

As you might remember from my previous piece on gOS, some people have felt like the current gOS offering provided on Everex machines were simply not good enough for casual use.

Software piracy statistics scream for attention every May when the Business Software Alliance (BSA) releases its piracy report. Its angst is understandable when it rues that almost half of the estimated one billion personal computers (PCs) have pirated/unlicensed software, resulting in losses of $48 billion — an increase of six times over the 2007 figures. In India too, while piracy dropped by two percentage points, in value terms, it rose to $2 billion in 2007 as compared to $1.28 billion in 2006.

I have this notion to write a series of columns from time to time under the title "Reality Check" -- columns intended to explain how the world of Information Technology actually functions. Because like any other entrenched, complex, and often closeted industry, things in IT don't really work the way many people think they do. I'm guessing the Vatican is a bit like that, too. So I'll be looking at various IT players and their roles and trying to put them into perspective, much as I did recently with a column or two about the role of computer consultants. This week the topic is Gartner Inc., or rather all the Gartner-like operations that give advice about technology to America's largest businesses: what do these guys actually DO?

[Not Linux-related, but an interesting "analysis of analysts", those who make us laugh so often -J.]

Leslie Hawthorn, a Program Manager in Google's Open Source team, gave a talk at BSDCAN 2008 on Google's ongoing Summer of Code project. She started by explaining what the open source team does, including enforcing license compliance, hosting over 700,000 open source projects with Google Code, academic research, funding open source development, and community outreach including the sponsorship of conferences such as BSDCan. She went on to discuss how she got started running the project after its initial launch in 2005.

KDE is attending this year's LinuxTag in Berlin with a wide selection of talks. Starting with Aaron Seigo's lecture about KDE in the mobile world and a KDE-related series of presentations on Friday. There are also some stalls where you can meet people from the KDE community.

Quite a few reviews of new Linux releases these days try to determine if a distribution is "ready for the desktop." I myself have probably been guilty of using that phrase, but I think it's time we officially retire this criterion. What defines an operating system as being ready for the desktop? Surely everyone has a different opinion on the actual definition. While my search for an official definition or list of guidelines has failed, to me this phrase means that the OS is usable by everyone, meets everyone's needs, and is able to do everything that everyone wants it to do. In that regard, is any operating system truly ready for the desktop?