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Last weekend a group of developers gathered in Berlin at the KDAB office for an Akonadi sprint. The goal was simple, getting Akonadi in shape for the first public release of Akonadi when KDE 4.1 is released. In the couple of days they met, they made an amazing amount of 270 modifications to the KDE repository, and worked on average from 10am to 3am to make a big step into reaching that goal.

Filling out tax returns has traditionally been an area where Linux comes up short compared to the proprietary platforms, but you actually have several options for using commercial income tax products on a Linux platform. Here's a quick look at three commercial tax offerings I found that work just fine using Ubuntu 7.10 and Firefox 2.0.0.12, even though two of the three vendors warn Linux users they are not supported. Translation: Don't look for vendor help if you run into problems.

The SourceForge OpenEMR group would like to announce the recent addition of two board members, Dr. Michiel Bosman of the Netherlands and Dr. Mark Leeds of Florida.

Twenty-two organizations across 60 countries are taking part in DocumentFreedomDay (DFD) to raise awareness about what happens when formats are no longer supported by proprietary software. Inspired by the five-year-old SoftwareFreedomDay, the DFD initiative is being driven by supporters of the OpenDocumentFormat Alliance and other organizations such as the Free Software Foundation Europe, which is currently hosting the DFD's Web site.

["guerrillas", is an interesting choice of words.. - Scott]

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), which provides legal representation for free and open source software (FOSS) projects, is extending its services with the creation of a new law firm called Moglen Ravicher LLC. Named after the SFLC's legal directors, Eben Moglen and Dan Ravicher, the new firm will offer the SFLC's existing services to for-profit clients.

To sum things up: The letter from PKN recommending KT to abstain has been kept secret, Currenlty there is no (required) concensus about OOXML in KT182, There is still no official decision of PKN concerning the OOXML, A couple of lawsuits are possibly on the way, EU investigation is in place. Stay tuned, things are boiling!

This document describes how to set up iTALC on Ubuntu 7.10. iTALC is an open-source classroom management solution that lets you view and control other computers in your network. It lets you remote-control other computers, show the teacher's screen on all students' computers, lock workstations, send text-messages to students, power on/off and reboot remote computers, etc.

OpenOffice.org 2.4 is now released and ushers in new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements.

Texmaker is an editor for the document markup language LaTeX. It lets you concentrate on the content of a document, while the underlying LaTeX engine takes care of the layout. Whether you are experienced with LaTeX or just starting out, Texmaker makes LaTeX easier to tame. It is GPL-licensed, cross-platform (running on Linux, Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X), and extremely stable

CodeWeavers, developer of software that makes it possible to run Windows applications on Mac and Linux operating systems, yesterday announced CrossOver Games. Crossover Games is a tool allowing users to play Windows games, including World of Warcraft, Guild Wars and many Steam games including Team Fortress 2, Counterstrike Source, Civilization 4, Peggle, and many others.

Adobe today announced an online, free, version of its popular Photoshop application. The Flash-based Photoshop Express application is a stripped down version of Photoshop allowing users to manipulate and store their images online. And because Photoshop Express is Flash-based the application will run across most operating systems including Linux, Mac and Windows.

It's the most anticipated matchup in the hacker world: Linux versus Mac OS X versus Vista. Who will get hacked first? That's what organizers of the CanSecWest security conference hope to discover this week as they give show attendees a shot at hacking into the three laptops they've put on display here in Vancouver. The catch? They have to use a brand-new 'zero day' attack that nobody has seen before. The prize? US$20,000, plus you get to keep the laptop.

Open source has gone mainstream, but now what? That’s what I asked leading open source investor Larry Augustin and Harold Goldberg, chief executive of Zend, at the InfoWorld Open Source Business Conference, which just wrapped up. All the evidence suggested open source has arrived: This year, some 40 percent of the conference came from the IT departments of large, traditional tech companies. But….is that all there is? Even Goldberg, optimistic overall, conceded he was disappointed when he heard that MySQL, rather than going public, had been purchased by Sun.

Asustek's 8.9-inch second-generation Eee PC lineup will include touchscreen panels and possible GPS support, with shipments expected to begin in May or June, according to Kevin Lin, vice president of Asustek's sales department. Pricing is projected to reach NT$15,000 (US$500), Lin added. The 8.9-inch Eee PC will adopt Intel's low-cost notebook platform and the lowest memory capacity will be upgraded from 512MB to 1GB, while the SSD (solid state drive) capacity will be upgraded from 4-8GB to 8-12GB, according to industry sources.

At the Mozilla "open house", Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla Corporation vice president of engineering said that beta 5 of Firefox 3 will come out next week. It will be the last beta before release candidate 1, which is due for May; Firefox 3 should ship in June or before, if possible. Schroepfer said, Microsoft’s stated support for open standards (like CSS 2.1) is "a huge win for the Web." But "I wouldn't call it 'vigorously embrace,'". Lots of old standards are still not used. Firefox will support HTML 5, which has a spec for offline access. This will make Google Gears obsolete, he said.

Jon Williams, CTO at Kaplan Test Prep & Admissions, gave today's opening keynote at the OSBC conference in San Francisco. But this was not the usual boring vendor keynote seen at many conferences; this presentation was absolutely on target for the audience. And more importantly, Jon's story is a good example of what's happening increasingly across the industry: open source is being used for strategic as well as tactical applications. One of the key observations Williams made was that Kaplan's use of open source software is not because it's free, but because it works.

NFS was designed by Sun Microsystems in 1984 to connect their systems, and in the process revolutionized the storage industry by allowing file systems to be connected, creating a common view of all the files within an environment. NFS has had some limited updates since then, some for performance, but most of these were minor. Well, the good news is that the future of NFS is almost here.

Linux has always supported Thinkpads pretty well, though the onboard modems and sound are chronic trouble spots. In this article, Carla Schroder focuses on her Lenovo T61's integrated fingerprint reader, to see what is involved in getting it to work on Linux.

Sun Microsystems developers are working on a version of the Lustre global file system that can run on the company's own next-generation Zetabyte File System (ZFS), said Peter Bojanic, director of Lustre engineering at Sun Microsystems. Lustre is an open-source global file system that is heavily used in the supercomputer community. Seven out of the 10 supercomputers at the top of last November's top 500 list of the world's fastest computers use Lustre, as do 30 percent of the systems in the top 100, Bojanic said.

This is a guide with code samples, screenshots, and two screencast of how to install Microsoft Office 2007 on Linux with Wine. Microsoft Office 2007 (officially called 2007 Microsoft Office system) is the most recent version of Microsoft's productivity suite.