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Of all the theories behind Microsoft's assimilation of Yahoo (I think it's about eliminating a competitor under a mountain of cash), this is the most intriguing I've seen yet: According to Linux-Watch, Microsoft wants Yahoo because no huge Web-based companies use Windows products to run their back-end ... except Microsoft, of course, and this might give the rest of the world a reason to consider Windows for their servers ... or it could crush Yahoo under the weight of a soul-sucking software sea change. ("Sea change" ... that's as idiotic as "change agent" and "best practices" ... sorry for using it ...).

The combined KDE/Amarok booth and developer room at the annual Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brusssels was a great experience (as usual!). Many people showed up from the KDE and Amarok communities, and we had a hard time fitting all our cool hardware and people in the booth. Luckily, the talks drew quite a crowd, and the booth became less busy as the day progressed. Read on for an overview of FOSDEM 2008 from the KDE perspective.

Most portable audio players can play music encoded in the MP3 audio format, but some consumers also have music in Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MPC, or even WMA files. How do you change from one format to another when you need to? Here are some of the best audio conversion tools available in Linux. One of the simplest and most elegant ways to convert audio files is by using the audio-convert script. It makes use of Zenity to display GUI messages and windows, but does the rest of its work from the command line.

What’s this pv_ops business all about? Well, as Dan explained, for a long time we’ve been forward-porting Xensource’s (now 2.6.18 based) kernel tree in an effort to try and have our Xen kernel not lag behind Fedora’s bare-metal kernel. Now that the upstream kernel has gained the ability to run on Xen using pv_ops (but only as i386 DomU, currently) we’ve taken the decision to stop wasting our time forward porting Xensource’s tree and put all our focus into improving the feature set of pv_ops based Xen.

News that Microsoft is to be hit with yet another fine from the European Union has naturally attracted plenty of attention, but it has also raised the old questions of whether such interventions by governments are justified or even do any good.

Even the most basic digital cameras can store a lot of useful information about photos in the EXIF format, including exposure time, aperture settings, focal length, and metering mode. The EXIF metadata can also contain the photo's geographical coordinates, which provide the exact position of where the photo was taken, but only few cameras on the market support this feature. However, you can add geographical information to your photos (i.e., geotag them) even if you don't have a fancy camera or GPS receiver using the Geotag tool.

The 2007 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award winners have been announced. KDE leads the popularity list in the category Desktop Environment with a rocking 52% percent of the votes leaving competing contenders in its dust. Among the users on Linuxquestions.org, KDE is being praised for its high level of integration, for the number of applications and of course for Konqui being the cute mascot it is.

The organizers of Open Source Software Summit (OSSummit) Asia are now looking to hold the conference in mainland China. The event, organized by the Apache Software Foundation and Eclipse Foundation, was originally set to be held in Hong Kong in November last year, but was postponed due to the lack of response.

This document describes how to set up, configure and use Fwbackups on a Fedora 8 desktop. The result is an easy-to-use backup system for desktop usage. Fwbackups creates partial backups which can be stored locally or on a removable device. You have also the option to run scheduled backups.

Imagine standing on the road. An oncoming car is heading rapidly towards you. You have a choice to move, or to stay. Now consider that in business you need to choose a server platform wisely but often Windows shops become entrenched because it is the status quo. A couple of user experiences show why you ought to think about it more.

Kubuntu KDE4 Hardy Alpha is here. There will be two editions of Kubuntu with the 8.04 release, a commercially supported KDE 3 edition and a community supported KDE 4 edition. We recommend the KDE 4 edition to those who want to try this exciting new desktop version and can put up with some missing features. It comes with KDE 4.0.1 and some applications from KDE 3 to fill in any gaps. Screenshots at The Coding Studio

The Mozilla Firefox 3 development team expects to freeze the beta 4 code tonight as planned but will likely have to release yet another beta to address some of the outstanding bugs and blockers in the code.

Version 7.0 of the open source operating system FreeBSD was released early this morning with a host of features that promise significant improvements in performance and SMP scalability. FreeBSD 7.0-release is available for the amd64, i386, ia64, pc98, and powerpc architectures. The version for the sparc64 architecture will become available in a few days.

Last summer, Microsoft said that February 27, 2008 would be the single biggest day of releases in its 30-year history, promising major updates to its server operating system, developer tools and database.

Not much has progressed since Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo on February 1, a proposal that was rebuffed by Yahoo's board as undervaluing the company. Microsoft has countered by saying its offer was fair and urged the board to take a second look. The union of its two biggest Web rivals could eventually loosen Google's grip on online search and advertising, but a messy takeover battle followed by a complicated integration could give Google ample time to build on its advantage.

Those enterprising folks at Game Cube Linux (GC Linux) claim to have developed a proof of concept version of Linux running natively on the best-selling Nintendo Wii games console. The software exploits the Twilight Hack, a quirk in some versions of the Zelda game that lets external software to be loaded without performing hardware modifications. The hack fools the system into loading code from an SD memory card.

The GNOME Foundation has turned its attention to accessibility for people with disabilities. To help improve both Web accessibility within GNOME and the project's long-term direction, the Mozilla Foundation is joining the GNOME advisory board, and plans to help improve integration of the XUL development platform with GNOME. Even more significantly, the GNOME Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, Google, and Canonical are jointly sponsoring a $40,000 outreach program to help improve accessibility in GNOME.

A typical UNIX or Linux machine creates many log files during the course of its operation. Some of these contain useful information; others can be used to help you with capacity and resource planning. This article looks at the fundamental information recorded within the different log files, their location, and how that information can be used to your benefit to work out what is going on within your system.

The GNOME Foundation has announced a new initiative to further boost the development of a11y in the open-source world. A11y stands for accessibility (there’s 11 letters between A and Y.) Development of a11y solutions has important ramifications even if you aren’t an a11y user. Oftentimes a11y solutions become mainstream usability solutions. For example, onscreen keyboards are making their way to embedded applications. Use of keyboard shortcuts and gestures are becoming more mainstream. Screen magnifications, and the list goes on. Myself, I’ve been working on a project recently with FunkyPenguin on getting Cheese to work well with openSUSE. While Cheese has mainstream applicability, it is a tool that directly can benefit Deaf users

Gnuplot can generate sophisticated graphs and output them in vector or bitmap image formats. It can produce many graph types, and you can customize the way the output will look to a great extent. But the customizability of gnuplot can work against it when all you want a simple line graph comparing two series of data points. In those cases, gplot lets you use gnuplot to create simple graphs using more semantic options to customize the appearance of common graph objects.