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I read Negroponte's statement presenting the OLPC XO as a platform for Windows in the most ironic circumstances possible: during a week of preparing, under a deadline, to migrate personally to an XO. I made this decision for one specific reason: freedom. The IBM T23s that I have used for many years are adequate in practice, and the system and applications running on them are entirely free software, but the BIOS is not. I want to use a laptop with a free software BIOS, and the XO is the only one.

Ksplice is an interesting open source project out of MIT that automates the process of applying security patches to the Linux kernel without rebooting, and it’s getting notice by the Linux Foundation.

Guess what? You can now use Microsoft to monitor/manage Linux and Unix servers as well as open source databases and webservers. Even more surprising is the fact that Microsoft is using open source to enable their management of open source servers and applications. It's all part of the new Miicrosoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 with cross platform extensions.

Twitter is a popular social networking utility that's gaining popularity as a micro-blogging tool. Registered users can post messages -- also called Tweets -- via the Web interface, but many prefer to use desktop applications that offer additional functionality and move Tweeting out of the browser entirely. Qt Twitter Linux is a barebones KDE client developed with Qt and C++. Since it was built using Twitter's APIs, messages sent via this tool appear instantaneously in Twitter's timeline as if they were sent directly from the Web-based interface (all Tweets show what app the sender uses by default). While Qt Twitter Linux doesn't come with handy features such as search and archive, it's great for dashing off quick messages.

The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.1 Alpha1. With the soft feature freeze in effect, KDE 4.1 provides a first preview of what can be expected from KDE 4.1, due in late July this year.

With libraries of thousands of fonts to handle, designers need a way to quickly locate fonts and organize them into meaningful categories -- such as by the project that requires them -- and to disable fonts when they are not in use so that they don't clog system memory. Although as recently as two years ago the GNU/Linux desktop lacked a font manager that met all these needs, it now has four that either meet them or are likely to.

Client-side migrations are challenging due to their large scale, the potential uniqueness of each client system, and the direct impact on users. Learn the steps involved in migrating your environment to that of a Linux client. This article, Part 3, focuses on the next step: technical planning, after the organizational planning for desktop migration presented in Part 2.

If you want to be notified when and how a Web site has changed, you can turn to either netstiff or urlwatch to keep and eye on things for you. Both of these tools monitor Web sites for changes and allow you to see a diff-like output of exactly what has changed. You can also use netstiff to monitor FTP sites for changes.

Microsoft Tuesday said it plans to become a major management platform vendor to battle the likes of CA and HP and said it would extend its System Center software to encompass Linux and Unix-based machines.

Bill Karpovich, CEO and co-founder of the open source system management company Zenoss, talks about the origins of his company, why IT management is broken, and the role of Zenoss in a world of cloud computing and software as a service.

As thousands -- perhaps millions -- of users seek to avoid Windows Vista, a new myth about Windows XP is emerging. But the myth, much like Windows itself, is full of holes.

Participation by big open source vendors is helping attract new interest in Linux user groups in Asia. Khairil Yusof, president of the Free/Open Source Software Society (FOSS) in Malaysia, said in an interview that the group's members have benefited by sharing knowledge with others from different technology backgrounds during its monthly meetings. New members are able to listen to talks ranging from a wide spectrum of topics such as desktop usage to running an open source software business, as well as "personally meet local and international developers", said Yusof.

There is an air of disquiet again on Planet GNOME - and once again the reason behind it is the way the site is administered. For the second time in six months, a developer from the GNOME desktop project has openly accused the project's media spokesman, Jeff Waugh, of being unresponsive to requests for changes in a GNOME service that Waugh looks after.

This document describes step by step how to set up a Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) desktop. The result is a fast, secure and extendable system that provides all you need for daily work and entertainment.

reStructuredText is a lightweight markup language intended to be highly readable in the source format. With it, you can produce beautiful HTML, PDF, XML, and even S5 documents from plain text files. reStucturedText is a part of Docutils, an open source text processing system for processing plain text documentation into more useful formats. Docutils is written in Python, and you will find a package for it in most Linux distributions, though you can install it from source under Linux and Microsoft Windows.

When I received my super-cool Android PC from Eric Burke he thoughtfully installed a copy of Ubuntu 7.10 for me, so naturally when the new Ubuntu 8.04 (”Hardy Heron”) was released I wanted to upgrade it to the latest and greatest version. “Installation is a snap,” writes Adrian Kingsley-Hughes. Ubuntu is user-friendly and ready for the mass market, so this should be easy, right?

That's the question raised by Britt Blaser in “Oh, if only government went in for an open source make-over…”. It's also one suggested indirectly by Phil Hughes in Our Internet. Democracy is by nature "our government". The open source twist on that we put it together and can hack improvements to it. Think of elected officials as committers and maintainers and you start go get the idea. The analogy isn't perfect, because by nature open source code is purely practical: it has to work. While government often does not. All government is buggy. In the worst cases it crashes outright and is replaced or supplemented by corrupt alternatives.

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GNU Telephony intends to help both national governments and private corporations comply with their obligations to the general public by promoting widespread adoption of secure and intercept free voice and video communication services worldwide using free software.

Syncing the release of distributions has many advantages including unifying Linux and increasing publicity.