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Everex has confirmed plans to ship a UMPC (ultra-mobile PC) with a 7-inch screen, similar to competitor Asus's EEE PC. A source close to the company revealed that the device -- codenamed "Cloudbook" -- will ship with the Google Apps-oriented "gOS" Linux distribution early next year.

Nemo is the latest effort to provide a new paradigm for file managers. Its approach, at least in its first early development release, is to combine file management with calendar views. Questions remain, however, about whether the concept will scale, and whether it is an improvement on traditional file managers, or simply different.

Three cheers for the developers and management of the K Desktop Environment. They have taken a principled stand on the divisive issue of OOXML, the Microsoft Office Open XML document format. And for this the KDE folk deserve a round of applause.

Those who have experienced free software projects firsthand know that they depend on innovation and genrally foster it. And although this isn't a highly innovative era for the computer industry as a whole, free software is an exception--and likely to become more of one as it continues to come into its own. In fact, the very idea of free software is one of the most innovative ideas in the history of computing.

OpenOffice is the darling of the FOSS office suites, and it is a nice suite. It's cross-platform, and OpenOffice Writer is a first-rate word processor with a lot of advanced features. But it's not the only good option for Linux users: Abiword and KWord are excellent lightweight word processors with good feature sets, and both are licensed under the GPL. All three are wonderful. In this two-part series we're going to dig into KWord 1.6, and mine some of its hidden jewels.

Sysreport is a diagnostic utility. It collects information about the running system, which is used for Red Hat Support to analyze current problems with the system. While sysreport is generally considered non-invasive, diagnostic utilities should always be run with caution.

LXer Feature: 10-Dec-2007 Back in 1999 I remember the first PC entered our house coming preloaded with Windows 98. One of the things I liked about it was the defragmentation screen where blocks presenting 'datablocks' on the harddrive were moving over the screen for almost eternally. I remember at that time it seemed like a logical maintenance requirement for any filesystem.

However, when I started using Linux four years later, I was told that with Linux I didn't need to defragment my filesystems anymore, since Linux filesystems don't get fragmented in first place. At that time it left me puzzled, but after a few years of using Linux without defragmenting my filesystems - and without any problems! - it seemed defragmentation was something antique. Nonetheless I still wondered how on earth it was possible the 100k+ files in Gentoo's portage system - updated every time I synchronize the portage tree - didn't fragment my filesystem. Or was my filesystem fragmented and did I not know?

Only recently, I found a script that is actually able to put numbers to all this gut-feelings, and the results were quite surprising in my opinion.

The Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum has announced the completion of the LiPS Release 1.0 specifications, aimed at setting up interoperable standards for the development of applications on Linux-based cellphones.

"That is why Microsoft is handing out $100m checks to studios just embrace the HD DVD and not the leading, and superior Blu-ray," he continued. "They want confusion in the market until they perfect the digital downloads. Time will tell and you will see the truth."

SourceForge has launched a free online marketplace for buying and selling service and support for open source software (OSS). Building on its well-established position as a free software distribution and development site, the site has already attracted more than 600 service listings, further undermining the old argument that one can't get support for OSS.

In 1980, Microsoft was a small software vendor that had built its business primarily on downsizing computer languages created for mainframes to a point where they could be used to program the desktop computers that were then coming to market. In that year, its total revenues were $7,520,720, and BASIC, its first product, was still its most successful. In contrast, Apple computer had sales of $100 million in the same year, and launched the largest public offering since the Ford Motor Company had itself gone public in 1956. And ten years later? What a difference a decade can make.

A pseudonym by the name of "Paul Murphy" over at zdnet blogs writes a pretty poor FUD piece about Linux/Linux users, and creates a straw man argument using linux.org. This article by HackFUD debunks and tears the article apart.

The world of Linux moves quickly with new releases every day. Here are a couple of the releases that caught our eye this past week: OpenSuse 11.0 alpha and Geubuntu Luna Nova.

Nokia has filed a submission with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) objecting to the use of Ogg Theora as the baseline video standard for the Web. Ogg is an open encoding scheme (On2, the company that developed it, gave it and a free, perpetual unlimited license to its patents to the nonprofit Xiph foundation), but Nokia called it "proprietary" and argued for the inclusion of standards that can be used in conjunction with DRM, because "from our viewpoint, any DRM-incompatible video related mechanism is a non-starter with the content industry (Hollywood). There is in our opinion no need to make DRM support mandatory, though."

Although most Eee PC owners are satisfied with their $350 to $399 USD purchases, they have been faced with the prospect of voiding their warranty by simply removing two screws from the bottom access panel to upgrade the memory. ASUS covered one of the screws holding the access panel with a yellow "WARRANTY VOID IF REMOVED" warranty sticker. As pointed out by Cliff Biffle, this action violated the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act with regards to "unacceptable tie-ins."

Cebu is scheduled to hold an international open source conference next year, following a visit from an open source advocate, the Cebu-based executive director of an information and communications technology group has said. Bonifacio Belen, executive director of the Cebu Educational Development Foundation for Information Technology (CEDF-IT), said the open source conference is slated for June 2008.

Addictive 3D games for Linux users to fill their time with. These games are really good and some have won awards or have been featured on magazines. Most are cross platform and all of them completely free. You don’t have to use ‘Wine’ to be able to play as they come with Linux installers.

Google has a preview release of Picasa 2.7 for Linux. The previous version launched last year didn't include the features from Picasa 2.5+ for Windows (like the Picasa Web integration), so this is a good opportunity to add these features to Linux. Here's what is new in Picasa 2.7 for Linux:

The best innovations tend to be cheap and disruptive. Hand in hand as they're usually found, these characteristics go some way to explaining why I like the EeePC (Asus's new laptop) so much. The other reasons are obvious, it's small, it's light, it has WiFi, Firefox and Open Office, and judging by the reactions of those who saw Paul and I with them at Bar Camp Leeds, it's cool enough for everyone to want one!

Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, talks to ZDNet U.K. about the security of Firefox and Internet Explorer, online privacy, and the future of open source.