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In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A Sonnet-based spellcheck runner, and icons on the desktop in Plasma. Continued work revamping KBugBuster, more work towards KDevelop 4. GetHotNewStuff support for downloading maps in Marble. Image and audio dockers in Parley. The start of Glimpse, a new scanning application based on libksane. The beginnings of a generic resource display framework for NEPOMUK. Various work in KHTML. Music Service configuration work, and the integration of last.fm code in Amarok 2.0.

The Asus Eee PC challenges many conventional assumptions about mobile computing. The daring, diminutive device combines a svelte subnotebook form factor with a unique Linux software platform and a budget-friendly price—factors that could make this unprecedented product a mainstream marvel. Last week, my colleague Jon described the Eee PC as game-changing: a characterization that we will put to the test in this review.

Adobe Acrobat is expensive, but that doesn’t mean you have to live a life without portable documents. What many people don’t realize is that PDF is a Federal Information Processing Standard, which means the specifications behind the format are widely published. Numerous developers take advantage of this fact and create programs that offer effective alternatives to Acrobat. Check out our list of these programs and take advantage of these tools that are full of some of the best PDF features and functions.

Is it possible to have training materials that are developed in partnership with the community, available under a CC license, AND make those same materials available through formal training providers? We’re trying to find out at Canonical with our Ubuntu Desktop Course. It’s already a 400 page book which gives a great overview of the Ubuntu desktop experience, a very valuable resource for folks who are new to Linux and Ubuntu.

This is something very interesting I found out not too long ago, while hashing out some work with a colleague. As most administrators (or users) who do a fair amount of shell scripting know, the error status or return code (Generally referred to as "errno" in all the man pages) of a process is a fairly common method to use in determining the process flow of a script. The one thing about the value of "errno" (or, literally, the variable "$?" in most shells) is that it's erased with each consecutive process that gets run. Here's how to work around that.

In San Francisco's Tenderloin district, amid liquor stores and boarded-up buildings, a partnership of nonprofits earlier this month sponsored the first "Tenderloin Tech Day." The half-day workshop was open to anyone in the low-income neighborhood with a tech problem. CNET News.com's Kara Tsuboi stopped by and chatted with people about their broken laptops, software-less hard drives, and their first-ever Internet experiences.

Picture this: It's late at night. You've restarted your computer. The optical drive is whirring contentedly, but you have butterflies in your stomach. Tonight is the night you install Linux for the first time. You choose your language, and then your keyboard layout. This is pretty easy, so far. A partitioner works its magic on your hard disk, either resizing your Windows partition or wiping it completely. Suddenly you are blindsided by the question: Which default desktop environment would you like to install?

Packt has released a new book on Qmail. Written by experienced author Kyle Wheeler, Qmail Quickstarter is a fast-paced and easy-to-follow guide that gets a Qmail mail server up and running quickly.

As far as the good old days of computing with x86 PCs is concerned, Robert Shingledecker and his team have been tirelessly evoking that nostalgic moments. Unsurprisingly, there is much more sweetness in this new version of Damn Small Linux 4.2. This timely-released version will definitely add more cheers to the New Year and Christmas festivities.

Intel has released source code for a server software project that lets Fibre Channel communications run on a more ordinary Ethernet network. Fibre Channel is a higher-end network technology used to connect storage systems to servers. Intel and networking giant Cisco Systems are among those working to adapt it for ordinary and ubiquitous Ethernet technology, a technology called Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), appropriately enough.

Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 2 is now available for testing. The second beta of the next major Firefox version offers around 900 bug fixes over Beta 1, including several feature enhancements and fixes to improve speed, stability, security and memory usage.

Dell has caught up to the Ubuntu release machine, adding the latest version of the operating system as a standard option with Linux-friendly laptop and desktop.

I received this update from Sun Microsystems on Tuesday on the ongoing ZFS patent litigation with NetApp. While colored by its source, the news seems positive for Sun (and, given the importance of ZFS, for the open-source development community). Sun has succeeded in getting the venue changed to California and it appears that its public request for examples of prior art have yielded fruit.

People often talk about getting average home users to use Linux, but that may not be the best group of people for Linux to market itself to. This multi-part story goes through the various groups of computer users and why they might or might not want to switch to Linux.

When Richard Stallman announced the GNU Project back in 1983, he launched a movement that would, in time, transform the software industry. The Free Software Foundation, also created by Stallman and now sponsor of the GNU Project, has become a driving force behind the adoption of the widely used GNU GPL software license. We discussed some of the more recent developments with Richard Stallman, whose passion for freedom in computing remains intense. The following Q & A explores the goals of free software, progress that has been made, and ways to maintain or instill freedom in software that we use.

In the recent accusations that the GNOME Foundation has been supporting Microsoft's OOXML format at the expense of ODF, KDE has been presented as a counter-example. Based on a KDE News article, Richard Stallman suggested that "major KDE developers" had announced "their rejection of OOXML" and urged GNOME to do the same. More recently, a widely linked story on ITWire used the same article to declare that KDE has taken a "principled stand" against OOXML. However, if you go the source, the story is more nuanced than these claims suggest.

QDisk bolsters the quorum of small count clusters. This article outlines when and how to use QDisk. Note: QDisk was added to RHCS and GFS starting with the updates in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.4 and 5.0.

If you're running a Linux-powered laptop and you want to switch off the screen, without waiting for the laptop to go into sleep mode, then this is a great tip from Tombuntu. Switch the monitor off instantaneously with the command: sleep 1 && xset dpms force off. Making this into a desktop shortcut is also easy.

Ideally, every Web application should be tested to ensure that it will work perfectly on every browser that might access it. That might sound impossible, but you can come closer than you might think.

Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 2 is due out tomorrow, and while we'll have more extensive testing as the Hardy Heron release nears in April, today we are publishing our first -- very initial -- benchmarks of Ubuntu 8.04 using the 12-19-2007 daily build and comparing these results to Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. These tests are focused upon OpenGL gaming, encoding, disk, and memory performance.