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Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales and Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth are backing a scheme to make publicly funded education materials freely available on the Internet. The backers of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, announced on Tuesday, said the initiative is designed to echo the disruptive effect that open source had on the proprietary software world by opening up the development and distribution of educational materials.

Microsoft has just announced it will contribute millions of dollars to train students and teachers worldwide how to use its software. That means less exposure to Linux for our children and a continuation of the dependence on the Windows XP and Vista. Of course, before receiving any of this funding, the school must be using Windows XP or Vista. Microsoft has used this tactic in the past to crush competition, including its decision to give away Internet Explorer to starve Netscape out of the industry.

If you are like me, you have a ton of passwords you have to remember. I have different login names and passwords for bank accounts, forums, blogs, email, and other stuff. How do you deal with it all? How can a person possibly remember them all, especially the ones that only get used once every month or two, or just a couple of times in a year? Thankfully, I found a cool program called Revelation Password Manager.

Hearing the terms "free software" or "open source," you might imagine that they referred to a single school of thought. Even "free and open source software" (FOSS) suggests only two different outlooks: Free software, which values political and philosophical freedom, and open source, whose main interest is enhanced software quality. Yet all these impressions would be misleading. When you look, there are at least seven different types of FOSS supporters.

Last night I opened my laptop and Outlook got mad at me. It went all sorts of crazy, trying to configure itself, not finding insertion points, and internal errors. I closed it down and killed all outlook procs but it still haunted me. Every time I opened a new app Outlook would try to configure itself and fail miserably. So I deleted it and downloaded Thunderbird. I forgot how much I hated Outlook. But now that I had Thunderbird installed, I had to make it work with our Exchange server. I got quite farther than I expected.

[Including read access to Exchange calendar data! - Sander]

It’s been about 18 months since Slashdot linked to Tim O’Reilly for linking to Jason Kottke for linking to Cory Doctorow for linking to me for switching from Mac to Linux. (Best comment: “this is just another A-list blogger circle-jerk.” As if that was my fault!) At the time, Jason said, “Nerds are a small demographic, but they can also be the canary in the coal mine with stuff like this.”

While all the drama is unfolding before the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva at the end of February and the subsequent 30 day period while countries can still change their vote, I thought I would point out something that I assume is fairly obvious to most people: Saving your documents in OOXML format right now is probably about the riskiest thing you can do if you are concerned with long term interoperability. The “official” ECMA OOXML that was submitted to ISO is not what Microsoft implements in Office 2007. So unless your application reverse-engineered Office 2007’s support, you’ve got interoperability problems right there.

A market research study released in December finds embedded Linux has become as dependable for developers as real time operating systems. The Embedded Market Forecasters (EMF) study compares the outcomes of hundreds of design projects that used embedded Linux to those that used commercial RTOSes, and further compares outcomes with non-commercial "roll your own" embedded Linux.

So most of us with a LAN setup have run into this situation. We wish to connect to our LAN remotely while at work or at the coffee shop. Our firewall is setup and ready for NAT on our desired ports and our internal computers/servers on the LAN have the appropriate services running. But our ISP gives us our IP dynamically so it may stay the same for a month or maybe a couple, or maybe it will only stay at the current address for another day. Well let's figure out how we can find our IP in the sea of addresses when far from the comforts of the LAN.

Last week OpenSuSE 11.0 Alpha 1 was released, and in addition to including KDE 4.0, PulseAudio integration, and various package updates, Alpha 1 features improvements to the OpenSuSE installer. This installer uses Qt4 and is much improved, which warranted us taking a closer look.

Linux and other open-source software should provide the model for development and distribution of educational materials, according to Ubuntu. The backers of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, announced on Tuesday, said the initiative is designed to echo the disruptive effect that open source had on the proprietary software world by opening up the development and distribution of educational materials.

While Slackware isn't as hard to use as some would lead you to thing, it is different enough from Ubuntu, Debian and Red Hat that a how-to is in no way a bad thing. In fact, a lot of things are easier in Slackware than in other distros because Slack's command-line tools do more of the work for you than many Slackware users would have you believe. (I love xwmconfig, netconfig and pkgtool and wonder why Debian doesn't have similar utilities ... although apt probably makes up for all other omissions.) Still, if there were any up-to-date books on running Slackware, I'd be the first in line to buy one or all of them. Alas, there's nothing out there.

My dirty walk-through to setting up an external modem in Linux using wvdial to dial into an ISP connection. I had some trouble finding a single place with a good write-up for doing such a task when I was setting up a Linux box for someone that had previously been using Windows and a little OS X. Finding dialing info, modem configuration, or slight troubleshooting, alone wasn't too difficult, but finding them in one place in a concise manner was. So I have attempted to compile what I have found, my tweaks and adjustments, and other hints that enabled me to setup a Linux box to use a dial up connection via external modem.

Is the real challenge for PR just "influence"? Or is it something bigger than that? If so, are there ways we can help PR move past its history of spinnage and into a future of usefulness? Those are the questions raised for me by "Distributed influence: quantifying the impact of social media", an Edelman paper posted several days ago by Jonny Bentwood on his blog. It's a worthy effort, with good people involved. It is also a work in progress.

I half-expected today's massive Debian Lenny update to solve my Nautilus-crashes-when-I-try-to-get-the-properties-of-a-file bug. It did not, but I'm not disappointed. I went back to the original bug report, which was filed with GNOME, not Debian, but is clearly a Debian-only bug. I saw the "solution," but didn't understand it until now. I still don't know how to actually "do" the solution, and for now I'm content to let it ride and see if Debian Testing catches up.

XMPP is an open technology for instant messaging and presence information. It provides the opportunity to build an open source and free messaging server to handle many applications in varied environments. We are going to setup a XMPP server on a LAN to handle communications between LAN and WAN contacts. By running our own server we can gain some insight into how XMPP and Jabber work, create an efficient and easy to use internal communications setup, connect our server to other servers and services including WAN communications, and last, but not least, we can have our own private communications using SSL. Read on for more on XMPP and how we actually set it all up.

With today's release of Zend Studio for Eclipse, Zend has made Zend Studio, which we reviewed last year, even better. This release of Zend Studio introduces a number of terrific features and as a whole provides you with the most feature-rich release of Zend Studio to date. One of the notable features is Zend's use of the Eclipse as the base platform. Eclipse is by default a Java IDE, but should be looked at more like a platform or framework.

Earlier this month, the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) announced a major staff reorganization, which included the departure of founder Mitch Kapor as head of the OSAF's flagship project, Chandler. After almost seven years of effort there is finally a release remotely resembling something a casual user might consider giving a try.

"The following patches have been in the -mm tree for a while, and I plan to push them to Linus when the 2.6.25 merge window opens," began Theodore Ts'o, offering the patches for review before they are merged. "With this patch series, it is expected that [the] ext4 format should be settling down. We still have delayed allocation and online defrag which aren't quite ready to merge, but those shouldn't affect the on-disk format.

Bazaar is a distributed version control system (VCS) available under the GPL; it is similar to Subversion (svn). Bazaar is sponsored by Canonical, Ltd., the company that develops the Ubuntu Linux distribution, and therefore the Ubuntu project is the most prominent user of Bazaar. This article explains how to set up and use Bazaar on a Debian Etch system, and how to configure an SFTP-/HTTP server to host your Bazaar repository.