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Microsoft recently survived a bruising battle with the open source community over the ratification of Office Open XML (OOXML) document format as an ISO standard, a process that is now facing a number of appeals. The company also recently announced support for the competing Open Document Format in its forthcoming products. Here Paulo Ferreira, Microsoft South Africa's Platform Strategy Manager, talks to Tectonic about the future of XML, Microsoft's relationship with the open source community and why standards are important.

I was offered the chance to have an initial look at Novell's latest Linux offering openSUSE 11. It's a distribution I've tried in previous versions but often had trouble settling on. It seems very popular on enterprise desktops along with Red Hat. I got a copy of the KDE4 LiveCD and gave it a spin.

Red Hat has a desktop Linux plan. It’s just not the same desktop Linux plans that everyone else has. As Jim Whitehurst told me in an informal gathering of Red Hat executives and press, “There are companies that sell hundreds of products for millions of dollars and there are companies that sell millions of products for hundreds of dollars. Guess which kind of company Red Hat is?”

If you're used to a "standard" *NIX shell you may not be familiar with bash's array feature. Although not as powerful as similar constructs in the P languages (Perl, Python, and PHP) and others, they are often quite useful. Bash arrays have numbered indexes only, but they are sparse, ie you don't have to define all the indexes.

One of the things I both love and hate about my job is getting assigned new projects. They can be about anything and everything. A few months back I was given an assignment to create some chroot jails for a group of customers so that they could securely upload files with sftp. The requirement was that the customers needed to be able to upload file, but in a secure and private way. Customer One should not be able to see Customer Two's files, for example. And neither customer should be able to browse the filesystem of the server. I was also asked to define a process whereby our support staff could add new jails as needed.

Learn, step-by-step, how to configure and encrypt the built-in Wi-Fi network that comes with the Cell Broadband Engine-based Sony PlayStation 3. And, as a little bonus, discover 16 quick steps that explain how to switch from a wireless network back to a wired network on the PS3.

Speaking on the first day of the Linux specialist's annual user conference in Boston, Whitehurst said his company need to work on its approach to "mundane" issues such as its own internal systems and managing customer records. "There is still a lot we need to do around execution. One thing I have heard from customers and partners over the last few months is that we are basically kind of tough to do business with — great technology but not necessarily the easiest company to do business with," he said.

AMD has now evolved their Linux support by taking it a large step further. AMD is in the process of pushing new high-end features into their Linux driver -- such as Multi-GPU CrossFire support -- and with the ATI Radeon HD 4850 they have even begun showing off Tux, the Linux mascot, on their product packaging and providing Linux drivers on their product CDs!

Novell announced the official release of OpenSUSE 11 yesterday. It's the latest version of the community-driven Linux distribution and includes significant new features like the KDE 4 desktop environment and the PulseAudio sound server. We tested both the GNOME and KDE flavors of OpenSUSE 11 by installing from the Live CD images. These work reasonably well and provide an installation experience comparable to that of Ubuntu and Fedora.

Back in March we had looked at the Radeon HD 3200 graphics found on AMD 780G motherboards. With the Catalyst Linux driver the Radeon HD 3200 had performed about the same speed as the discrete Radeon HD 2400PRO graphics card, which we were quite pleased with considering its integrated and low-power design. The Radeon HD 3200 also offers support for DisplayPort and HDMI, but it's up to the motherboard vendor which output connections they wish to utilize. The Radeon HD 3200 / 780G certainly impressed us, but today we are looking at NVIDIA's latest IGP offering for AMD's Phenom platform. While not all of these features are available to Linux customers, the GeForce 8200 supports DirectX 10, PureVideo HD, GeForce Boost, Hybrid SLI, and other leading edge features. Though between the Radeon HD 3200 and GeForce 8200, which IGP offering reigns supreme under Linux? In this article we'll tell you our thoughts.

One of the main community-driven projects that prompted Red Hat to open source its Satellite code today was the Linux boot server, Cobbler. Cobbler is a nifty piece of code that assembles all the usual setup bits needed for a large network installation like TFTP, DNS, PXE, installation trees etc. and automates the process. It can even generate DHCP configurations to assign specific IPs to MAC addresses.

Businesses are not philanthropists. They are not, intentionally, educators or evangelists for ideologies. However, from time to time their business models just happen to coincide with their more idealistic customers own interests. Asus is one such company. When they launched the little EeePC they could scarcely have imagined the extraordinary reaction it would cause. They say that any publicity is good publicity but the reaction to the two pound wonder was almost universally favourable. It was hot. I mean nuclear hot. And it was GNU/Linux.

NFS version 4, published in April 2003, introduced stateful client-server interaction and "file delegation," which allows a client to gain temporary exclusive access to a file on a server. NFSv4 brings security improvements such as RPCSEC_GSS, the ability to send multiple operations to the server at once, new file attributes, replication, client side caching, and improved file locking. Although there are a number of improvements in NFSv4 over previous versions, this article investigates just one of them -- performance.

One of the interesting aspects of Microsoft's long-running pursuit of Yahoo has been the potential knock-on effects for open source. Although the company doesn't make much of the fact, it uses a lot of free software, and has helped open source projects by employing some of the top hackers.

Dominic Sartorio began his career as a "traditional" software developer, but his career path has been indelibly marked by two things: a solid appreciation for the open source method, and a desire to understand the big picture of open collaboration and how that can ultimately create long-term benefits for the industry and for customers.

MontaVista announced that its Mobilinux 5.0 Linux distribution for mobile devices has been optimized for the Freescale i.MX31 system-on-chip (SoC). The optimization brings the total number of Freescale processors supported by MontaVista distributions to ten, says the company.

There are tools available to allow anyone to create and distribute a completely customized Ubuntu Based distribution using the Gnome Desktop. Many Kubuntu users would like to do the same thing but such tools are not fully compatible with KDE and the Kiosk tool does not change or remove all of the Kubuntu defaults so that a program like Remastersys can create a customized ISO with the defined changes. This How To is designed to address these issues and allow those interested in creating their own customized distribution based on Kubuntu.

Finally, the so called 'stable' version of Wine, 1.0, has been released on June 17, 2008. The last Wine review I made was to 1.0RC2 (release candidate 2), in which I already tested World of WarCraft, mIRC and DC++. I had no issues with World of WarCraft (tested using a trial account) which performs very well, without any visible problems, DC++ has minor stability problems and the mIRC scripts editor crashes, but otherwise, mIRC behaves good enough.

The Intel Atom powered Asus Eee PC 901 arrives before the month is out, with price drops for the existing 900 and 701 models. But when will Australia see the Eee 1000H model with real hard disk and larger keyboard? The Asus Eee PC revolution kicks into higher gear with the impending release of the Eee 901, an enhanced version of the recently released 900 series, replacing the Celeron 900MHz processor with the new Intel Atom processor running at 1.6Ghz – or in a turbo charged 1.9Ghz mode.

I was a little surprised to hear Nokia vice president of software Ari Jaaski's comments last week. Not long ago, Nokia got off to a great start by embracing open source for its mobile device business. But now, according to Jaaski, it's the open source developer community that needs to adapt to the ways of commercial software vendors, not the other way around.