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As the open-source movement gains momentum, patent companies are suing.

ARAHUAY, Peru - Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago. These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops — people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books — can't get enough of their "XO" laptops.

Many people have created prediction lists for 2008, but I want to know what you want to happen in 2008. I will compile a list at the end of the year with the most popular/interesting suggestions.

In 2005 we started our annual AYiR (A Year in Review) articles for looking at the progress of the proprietary ATI and NVIDIA Linux display drivers over time. Now in our third year of doing this, it's time to see how NVIDIA's binary driver has panned out over the past year. NVIDIA had introduced GeForce 8 support this year as well as a few other features, but nothing major like in past years, and how has the OpenGL performance changed? With benchmarks in hand, we have the scoop for you today.

MEPIS has released SimplyMEPIS 7.0. This release contains a new desktop theme and a detailed user manual, both developed and contributed by the MEPIS community. Screenshots by The Coding Studio.

The release schedule for KDE 4 is now clear, and it will be released during the development cycle of Kubuntu 8.04. Since KDE 4 is a major change to the platform, it is not currently at one of these natural rest points so would not be suitable for long term support. Instead, due to the very high interest, development efforts will be directed towards KDE 4 and releasing Kubuntu 8.04 with the option of using either KDE 3.5 or KDE 4.

The development team of VectorLinux have announced the release of VectorLinux 5.9 Final GOLD edition. This is the fruit that has resulted from several months of coding, debugging and testing by the core development team and the Vector community. This release follows our legendary tradition of stability (inherited from SlackWare-12), blazing speed on even modest hardware and simplicity of design and function.

Mozilla has released the latest beta of Firefox 3 today, and the Linux efforts behind it are starting to show even more. This release, being a beta, is surprisingly stable. Here’s the killer that makes this beta release amazing: more GTK support.

It was expected by some. For the third year in a row the Dutch Cartel Office (NMa) decided there were no reasons to look into the Dutch software market, despite requests made by people in the field of commerce and education and by the Dutch parliament. In a letter send to me (and perhaps the other writers as well, link to Dutch text), the NMa explains that there is no evidence to suggest an abuse of the domination market position by Microsoft in such a way that it prohibits other operating systems and software to compete.

paint-mono is a port of Paint.NET. The only way it could be built in the past was using a development version of MonoDevelop and there was no way of generating packages for it. Since then, MonoDevelop has progressed to the point where it can generate standard Unix makefiles and generate the proper scripts, pkg-config files and produce code that conforms to the Mono Application Deployment Guidelines from a Visual Studio solution. It is now easier than ever to try Paint.NET on Linux

The Ubuntu development community has officially announced the release of Ubuntu 8.04 alpha 2. Ubuntu 8.04—scheduled for release in April 2008—is a long-term support (LTS) release, which means that it will be supported on the desktop for three years and on the server for five years. This second alpha, which is available for download from Ubuntu's mirrors, is a development release that is primarily intended for testers.

Norway has established a new policy mandating government adoption of open standards. Starting in 2009, all documents published on state-operated web sites will have to use HTML, PDF, or ODF formats. The policy aims to stimulate competition between office software vendors and make government documents more accessible to the general public. Under the terms of the policy, HTML will be the standard format for all publicly accessible web content, PDF files will be used when the original appearance of the document needs to be preserved, and use of ODF is mandated in cases where a user needs to be able to modify a document downloaded from the government.

A mediocre e-mail client is one of the major weaknesses of Nokia's Internet Tablet products. Nokia's mail program chokes on my IMAP inbox, hanging and crashing when more than about 200 messages are present. Some relief may be in sight for those who want an e-mail client that is open source and made of sterner stuff. The first beta of the new open source Modest e-mail client for Maemo has officially been released.

Yes, I’m talking about amaroK, the free, open source music player, currently only for Linux and Unix, but soon to be available for Windows and Mac OS X. As the saying goes, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who use amaroK, and those who don’t. amaroK is the ultimate music management software, and for a casual music buff like me, it’s the best you can get out there. What separates amaroK from the other popular players in the market are its features which are targeted to make music management and playback easy, and a pleasing experience. Here, I’ve highlighted some of the key features of amaroK.

Joomla!, a popular content management system (CMS) for Web portals, is easy to install and maintain, and has thousands of components, modules, and Mambots for almost every thinkable function a Web site could possibly need. All of the extensions are open source, as is the CMS itself. Here are a few extensions that I find indispensable.

GIMP is the undisputed king of image editing in Linux platforms, and is next only to Photoshop in popularity in Windows and Mac platforms. With a large community of developers and an even larger pool of users, it is no surprise that GIMP is very popular. Much like Firefox, GIMP’s strength lies in its plugins, which are developed by the open-source toting community. Since the users themselves develop them, they know all the needs and conceive a plugin for everything.

Released just in time for the holidays. SimplyMEPIS 7.0 arrived at ReviewLinux.Com so we thought we would take a quick look at this new Linux OS. Check out our flash video of SimplyMEPIS 7.0 in action.

LXer Feature: 23-Dec-2007

It looks like people are starting to get their hands on some OLPC's and the reviews have started coming in too. We also have a review of Carla Schroder's new book, KOffice takes a stand against OOXML, screenshots of the BBS's new iPlayer and Damn Small Linux 4.2, Open Source alternatives to Adobe, how to make a holiday slideshow and one of our readers has a Debian adventure of their own.

A report generator to visualize query results with gnuplot has been added. Exception handling has been improved. The Snellen Chart has been reactivated. KVK handling has officially been included. More hooks and an improved example hook script were added. Demographics handling has been extended to now really support multiple names, addresses, comm channels, and external IDs. Furthermore, there are lots of GUI-accessible configuration options that were always there in the backend but didn't have a frontend to them. File format handling in document management has seen improvements.

I may have said that part 3 would be the last one, but there were just so many good comments. This part highlights a few great comments along with my response to them.