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Advanced Micro Devices on Wednesday released the source code aimed at making it easier to build media applications for x86 multicore processors. The AMD Performance Library, which is now called Framewave, is available on SourceForge.

Microsoft today made a major announcement relating to its core products and involving the degree and manner in which it will make the details of those products available to developers. At first glance, this appears to be an important decision by Microsoft indicating a greater willingness to be both open and cooperative, but the devil will be in the not yet available details.

Func had an interesting beginning. It began not in a whiteboard-lined conference room, but in a small coffeeshop in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Greg DeKoenigsberg, Adrian Likins, Seth Vidal, and I were discussing how to make Linux easier to manage for large install bases. That’s when we came up with the idea for Func.

The KDE PIM crew met again at Osnabrück for three days of hacking, discussing and community building. The big topics were Akonadi and KDE 4.1. The team settled on the plan to release KDE PIM with KDE 4.1 based on the traditional backends and include the first platform release of Akonadi as the future base for PIM applications in and around KDE. The meeting was kindly hosted by Intevation and supported by the KDE e.V. and KDAB. Read on for a report or see the notes on the website.

New Categories and eligibility added to previous open voting process

While it may not let you go where no man has gone before, Celestia is an amazing desktop application that lets you go anywhere in the known Universe.You can view any object in the Solar System, travel to distant stars, and even leave the Galaxy, traveling faster than the speed of light, viewing high-res images of objects millions of miles away.

[My Sister who is a teacher in L.A. uses this program in her classroom and turned me on to it, very cool. - Scott]

If you can't go to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting next weekend in Brussels, Belgium, you can still watch live video streams from the Debian Developer Room, thanks to their video team.

How to set up OpenOffice.org to work how you want it with templates and clip art, configurations, shortcuts, and more. You’ve been thinking about it for a while. You’ve seen the PDF converter and sighed longingly; you’ve blushed before the skeptical glances of your open-source and anti-Microsoft friends who say “You’re still using Microsoft Office?” you’re looking at your budget and wondering why you would pay to get Microsoft Office 2007. And you’ve received Word 2007 files and haven’t been able to open them, so you know there’s going to be some file format issues no matter what you do. But you haven’t switched over to OpenOffice.org. Quite yet. I’m here to help.

One undeniable sign of progress among Linux distributions is the proliferation of easy-to-use, graphical package management applications. Tools like yum, Synaptic, and CNR are the rule these days rather than the exception. Mac OS X has free software fans, and a well-maintained collection of software at MacPorts, but for a long time those fans have been limited to the command line for finding, installing, and updating the offerings. Now a new utility called Porticus has arrived to present a slick GUI interface to the MacPorts collection, and it could make some converts.

MySQL chief executive Marten Mickos is surely regarded as a rainmaker among the entrepreneurial wing of the open source movement. Not only did his company pick wisely when it came to endorsing an open source technology, it also convinced a major, publicly traded entity to part with $1bn for no discernable return - despite its own challenges in making money.

Free software programmers are fond of saying that they'd prefer not to reinvent the wheel. Apparently that attitude no longer applies to desktop menus, considering all the new options springing up. A few years ago, just about the only menu choices on the main desktop environments were the ones that shipped with them, or the exhaustive Debian ones. For five years, GNOME didn't even have a menu editor.

Steve Ballmer, in a recent conference call, explained how Microsoft would be providing over 30,000 pages of documentation concerning the Windows API. Open source users are skeptical when it comes to Microsoft's willingness to play nice.

Last time, we spoke about the Linux process scheduler and how it runs in the shadows swapping processes in and out of a running state so everyone gets a stab at the CPU. Today we’ll go over how the kernel keeps track of time and just what it means to do something in a jiffy.

No, I'm not actually going to count, but it was the first title that popped into my head and if I've learned anything about the creative process, it's that your first instinct is usually the best.

An article arguing the reasons why people shouldn't just wait for Windows 7 before switching from XP, and how they should be focused on switching to Linux now.

Microsoft today flung open its software APIs and protocols to all comers. Is it enough to persuade the European Commission to drop anti-trust investigations of the company? In a word, no. The Commission today noted that Microsoft has issued four statements in the past promoting interoperability, and it wants to see if a) the new pledge conforms with EC competition law and b) if Microsoft actually walks it like it talks it.

You might think you need to be familiar with assistive technologies like the Orca screen reader to determine whether your application is accessible. The truth is that with just a couple simple rules and an open-source tool called Accerciser, the task at hand is fairly simple. Before you start diagnosing your application with specialized tools like Accerciser, you should ask yourself a few straightforward questions about your application.

Procedure descibed bellow attaches Solaris DomU to libvirtd's daemon subnet 192.168.122.0 (netmask 255.255.255.0) utilizing interface virbr0 and dnsmasq service as DHCP server. It doesn't require DHCP bridge and external DHCP Server to turn on old fashion xen-bridging on F8 Dom0.

Open Source has won. We've moved into Gandhicon 4. Now what? That's the question that occurred to me yesterday, while sitting in the audience of a tech session at Public Media 2008 in Los Angeles — the big annual conference for what most of us still call public broadcasting. I sat there hearing panelists tell story after story about what stations can do with piles of open code, tools and standards. In cases where the nature or provenance of recommended code was in doubt, questions from the audience went, "Is the source code for that available?" or "Is that open code, or just an open service?"

Webcams are everywhere these days: they're standard on a lot of laptops, LCD monitors are starting to incorporate them, and decent standalone USB webcams can be had for less than $40. In this two-part series we'll set up a Webcam on Linux, and then use it to perform a number of amazing and fun tasks.