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Sunbird, Mozilla's calendar application, supports extensions just as Firefox and Thunderbird do. What kind of extensions work with a calendar? How about being able to get a weather forecast when you're setting up a golf date, or exporting your desktop calendar to a Web service? World Weather+ is a great extension that grabs weather data from the Weather Channel. It displays the current conditions on the left side of Sunbird, below the task section. To get started, download and install the add-on, select the add-on's preferences, and provide it your ZIP code. It will then display your location's current weather conditions along with the option to view the forecast for the next nine days.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Support for alternate direction layouts (vertical, horizontal) in Kickoff. Improvements in the Device Notifier applet, with support for window icons in the Pager Plasmoid in Plasma, with the "Trash" applet moving into kdebase, the "Luna" applet moving to extragear, and the "Contacts" and "Converter" runners moving into kdereview. Support for online play (using the GGZ network) in the KSquares game. A new default theme for the KSame game..

OLPC is a lost cause. It's amazing how an otherwise interesting project with headline-grabbing mission could spiral out of control with disastrous results. The project has always had noble intentions. I can't fault them for that.

There is no question that most Linux distributions are too much for most people. I say this as a PC power user who happens to be a full-time Ubuntu/Fedora user. And back in 2004-2005, Linspire was indeed, the best overall beginner-friendly Linux option in the market. Then came improvements to Mandriva, new options like Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS (based on Mandriva), and recently, the new Fedora 8.

Asterisk is an open source private branch exchange (PBX) originally created by Mark Spencer of Digium. A PBX, is a type of phone switch, that allows multiple attached telephones to make calls to one another, and to connect to other telephone services including the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Not totally unlike routers that connect multiple computers to a network. As the guest speaker at the Triangle Linux User’s Group (TriLUG) in Raleigh, NC on Thursday Mark recounted how he built the open source Asterisk project and the for-profit company Digium.

Hardware compatibility has long been a problem for Linux—though it has gotten much better over the years—so it will be surprising to some to see a kernel change that will make some hardware cease working. For others, who follow kernel development a bit more closely, it will come as no great surprise that NDISwrapper was disabled by a change made to the kernel back in January. NDISwrapper has never been very popular with kernel hackers, but, because it is GPL licensed and allows more hardware to be used, there are folks on both sides of the argument. For a while, it looked like NDISwrapper had lost that argument, but the 2.6.25-rc4 release restores the functionality it requires.

Ken Starks and Larry Cafiero answered a number of questions about Lindependence 2008, an ambitious, multifaceted new advocacy project they have started recently.

The splash screen can be a useful way of providing visual feedback that OpenOffice.org is starting. However, some people don't like the splash screen, and others prefer to customize the splash screen to match the system theme.

Introduced in Ubuntu 7.10 was install-time encryption support where using the alternate installer one can fully encrypt their disk in an LVM using dm-crypt. Unfortunately, the Ubiquity installer in Ubuntu 8.04 continues to lack LVM and encryption support, but using Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 6 we have looked at the performance cost of this encrypted configuration on Ubuntu Linux. Rather than looking directly at the disk read/write overhead caused by the encryption process, we have provided some benchmarks to see how the real-world performance is impacted in both gaming and other desktop tasks.

If you’re a heavy command line user then you probably find that on most days your desktop quickly disappears under multiple terminal windows. Or your one terminal window has tons of tabs open and you can no longer tell which is which. Sound like your desktop? Then take a look at Terminator, a terminal window that can be split up into multiple windows that sit side-by-side.

LXer Feature: 16-Mar-2008

In this week's Roundup we have several Microsoft related articles, how to back up Linux with ease, a petition for open standards in the European Parliament, 10 Linux commands you’ve never used, OLPC: one virus per child and the future belongs to Linux. Ken Starks tells us "You only know good when you've seen bad..." and our own Carla Schroder replies with the "Care and Feeding of Baby Linux Users" and we have a couple of FUD articles for your enjoyment as well.

This tutorial will help you understand how to manage Logical Volumes with the LVM Manager.

This document describes how to install preload on Fedora 8. preload is an adaptive readahead daemon. It monitors applications that users run, and by analyzing this data, predicts what applications users might run, and fetches those binaries and their dependencies into memory for faster startup times.

While viewing the SEO presentation from Microsoft's Mix08. I noticed that the presenter preferred Firefox when ever he need to do anything really useful.

At the CeBIT convention in Germany the other week, Asus unveiled a new edition of its flash-based Eee sub-notebook PC, nominally running a custom version of Xandros Linux. New models, Asus said, will run Linux ... and now Windows XP. According to Asus' press release, Microsoft Works and many of the Windows Live applications will come preloaded with the system. It claims it has sold 350,000 units so far and is on track to selling anywhere between 3 and 5 million by the end of the year.

One community in Brazil is creating their own OLPC alternative: a touchscreen desktop. Is this solution better or worse than a little UMPC like the OLPC?

Excellent write up on Bill Gate's testimony for the education committee in Washington D.C. I have to say I totally agree with this article. This is visa program has directly effected my life and what it boils down to is these corporation do not want to pay American salaries and benefits when they can outsource the work and get excellent tax breaks from the Bush administration. But gee us dumb Americans just can't seem to do math or science - go figure.

LXer Feature: 15-Mar-2008

This brand-new Linux user, this refugee from the Redmond wastelands, was stretching her wings and trying to fly. She edited xorg.conf all by herself, though not quite the right way. She exposed a bug in Ken's customer support (don't use writable CDs for recovery disks). Now how many new Linux users can even find xorg.conf, let alone have the boldness to muck with it? Or even experienced users? The Ubuntu forums are cram-full of command-line fear and loathing; the very sight of a text file drives them into seizures. I think Paula's eagerness to explore and try new things should be rewarded.

The klik developer team has named a few distinct areas where new contributors could join in and create new features for the current klik2 development effort. Amongst the most interesting ideas are these: klik2 Updater; Enhancement for fakechroot (or a replacement); Porting klik2 to *BSD and OpenSolaris; Automate klik Recipe Testing; Replacing Server-side APT with Server-Side Smart, klik2 Security Framework; Packaging the klik2 Client with OBS. "We know some high-profile people and organizations are keeping an eye on klik's progress, and wishing us well. See for instance this statement we recently found: [...]"

It looks as if Wine might be supporting Adobe's Flash CS3 as well as Photoshop CS3 on Linux in the near future.