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Venezuela became the latest in a string of countries to appeal the approval of Microsoft's Office Open XML file format as an international standard. The format was approved in an international vote after a fast-track process that several participating countries say was flawed.

Ramping up its efforts to build search market share, Microsoft signed a deal to embed a Live Search toolbar on all Hewlett-Packard consumer PCs in North America starting next year. In addition, Live Search will be the default search engine on browsers on the computers, the companies said. Both features will be included in HP PCs in January 2009. While the deal could boost use of Microsoft's search platform, it could also boost support of Silverlight, Microsoft's new browser plug-in and development runtime for adding multimedia to Web applications.

If you're anything like the average System Administrator, you are understaffed, underfunded, and overworked. By now, you've also gotten used to the idea that no one knows you exist until the mail server goes down, then you're suddenly on America's Most Wanted. In this article, I'm also assuming that you have many servers that you are responsible for. I'm also assuming that you don't really want to work as hard as you are; if you do, you should become a Windows server manager and begin worrying about frequent patches from Microsoft, security vulnerabilities, virus protection, a clumsy user interface, and lack of native scriptability. I'm not saying that Linux is perfect, but there are a lot of things about Linux that just makes it easier to administer.

When I read that Asus was to embed DeviceVM's GNU/Linux-based Splashtop Linux on millions of mainstream motherboards, I wasn't particularly impressed. It's all very well putting this stuff on motherboards, but quite another thing using it – how many times have you poked around the ROM on your motherboard? It seemed more or a gimmick to me – a box on the features list that could be ticked.

In May of 2007 I wrote a post called Open Source and Microsoft Free. Little did I know that this post would show up on Digg, Slashdot, Craigslist, and several other popular web sites and become a platform for both the Linux and Microsoft camps to wage yet another flame war. This whole "Microsoft free" experiment started when a colleague of mine challenged me to eat my own dog food after reading many of my posts about my dabbling with open source technologies. The next day, after a few blue screens of death and various issues with Outlook, I grabbed a Ubuntu CD and installed it on my laptop....at work! From that day forward, I have not used a single Microsoft product at work. It has been one year now and I have survived with Thunderbird and Evolution, Open Office, Firefox, and many other open source replacements for Microsoft products.

When it comes to monitoring your Linux system, few tools can rival Conky. This lightweight system monitoring utility can help you to keep an eye on virtually any aspect of your system, and it offers a huge list of options to choose from. But this flexibility comes at a price: all Conky's settings are stored in the .conkyrc file, which you have to create and tweak manually. The good news is that once you understand the inner workings of the .conkyrc file, you can easily create powerful Conky configuration profiles.

The trouble with having a huge market share is that the only way to move is down - and that's exactly what's happening to Windows and Internet Explorer, according to an new report. The question is how much further are they going to fall?

Some quick background: Researcher Nitesh Dhanjani responsibly reports to Apple than it is possible for a malicious Web site to litter the user’s (Windows) Desktop or Downloads directory (~/Downloads/ in OSX) with executables masquerading as legitimate icons.

Apple is nearing 8 percent market share in the PC industry, according to the latest research. But Apple doesn't deserve all of the credit for the Mac's success. The open source industry is a big reason why Mac sales are booming. Here's why, according to The VAR Guy.

Now that there have been at least three official appeals filed against OOXML, by South Africa, Brazil and India, as well as a letter of protest from a participant entity at the BRM over the way matters were handled in Denmark, I thought this might be an excellent time to take a moment and remind ISO of its published Code of Ethics [PDF]. Here's just a bit of it, some words to live by, or at least words I hope they will live by, as they decide what to do with the appeals. And then some information on what happens next.

If you need robust graphing software, consider aiSee, a cross-platform graph package that supports nested graphs, exports to many bitmap and vector formats, and handles graphs with as many as a million nodes. aiSee is free for noncommercial use under its own license.

Education provider Scholars International Academy (SIA) has opted for open-source software and thin client systems, in a bid to save parents the cost of proprietary software. Sharjah-based SIA chose a number of freely available open-source programs - including OpenOffice and the Solaris 10 operating system - to run on top of its new thin clients and servers from Sun Microsystems, which it finished installing last year.

Journaling filesystems come with a big promise: they free system administrators from the need to worry about disk corruption resulting from system crashes. It is, in fact, not even necessary to run a filesystem integrity checker in such situations. The real world, of course, is a little messier than that. As a recent discussion shows, it may be even messier than many of us thought, with the integrity promises of journaling filesystems being traded off against performance.

As chief operating officer, Whitehurst was widely tipped to succeed the outgoing Delta chief executive but despite turning around the corporate basket case his day in the sun never came. About two months after resigning in late August, he received a call to meet Red Hat head honcho Matthew Szulik for the top job at the open source software and services company.

Open-source solutions used to be adopted quietly by company boffins who snuck in an Apache Web server or an open-source development tool suite under the philosophy "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission" (not to mention "It's easier to do it with open-source tools than to get an IT budget").

LXer Feature: 02-Jun-2008

Where computers are concerned, I like to think of myself as cool, calm, and technically proficient. I got my first microcomputer (a Color Computer with 16K RAM) in 1983, and before I moved on to a bigger and better machine I'd learned to program it in assembly language. I've given up on learning assembly since then (the chipsets keep changing) but I still build my desktop computers from scratch. So I'm a tad embarrassed to report that when I first saw an ad for the Eee, in NewEgg's Valentine's Day newsletter, my initial reaction was, "Oh, wow! It's PINK!"

Contrary to some reports, everything that makes Android “Android”, including all the core platform components and libraries needed to port Android to new devices will be open sourced under commonly used, industry standard licenses, says Google.

ComputerWorld Denmark is reporting that a strong letter of protest has been sent to ISO from Open Source Leverandørforeningen in Denmark (OSL).

What's your normal routine when you log on in the morning? It's probably something along the lines of: pour cup of coffee, fire up Thunderbird, check your email, check your other email accounts that Thunderbird can't access, pour another cup of coffee. Well, here are a few Thunderbird extensions that may make your mornings go a little more smoothly.

The main problem with Pulseaudio and Skype on Fedora 9 (maybe also on other distributions) is stuttering, crackling sound. This document describes how to fix the sound issues between Skype 2.0 and Pulseaudio on Fedora 9.