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Setting your desktop's wallpaper is only the beginning. Before we get started, "centre" is how KDE spells the word using UK English. Localisation is a wonderful thing, and it's one reason Linux and KDE are so popular in Europe and Asia. Here in Wales, about a million of my fellow citizens prefer Welsh to English, and there's a KDE for them too. We'll discuss regions and languages another time, but for now, if you are reading this in the Americas, please forgive my UK spell-checker! (Look out for colour and favourite too.)

PC vendor Lenovo has promised ThinkPads with pre-installed Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 for some time now. Lenovo will deliver the goods the week of Jan. 14. Lenovo will release pre-installed SLED 10 on its Intel Centrino processor-powered ThinkPad T61 and R61 14-inch-wide notebooks. In February, Lenovo's pre-integrated Novell Linux offering will expand to include some Penryn-based ThinkPads.

The Asus Eee PC has been heralded as a groundbreaking new computing experience and great for children. While the computer didn't bowl me over, my kids were another matter. When you hear about how small the Eee is, believe it: the unit measures approximately nine by six inches and weighs a mere two pounds. It's hard to take something that small seriously because it looks like a toy (and its name sounds like a sneeze). Open the lid, however, and you'll find power and features that belie its diminutive size.

There's been a lot of blog noise lately about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), Asus EeePC, Everex Cloudbook and other laptops that sell for anywhere for $250 to $400 ... if you can get your hands on them at all. But this is the first I've heard of a planned $75 laptop being spun off of the OLPC project. There's a new company called Pixel Qi that exhibited at CES and is run by Mary Lou Jepson, the founding chief technology officer of OLPC.

For the last 15 years, Internet service providers have acted - to use an old cliche - as wide-open information super-highways, letting data flow uninterrupted and unimpeded between users and the Internet. But I.S.P.’s may be about to embrace a new metaphor: traffic cop.

The wealth of applications on a modern Linux system is phenomenal, but sifting through screen after screen of menu items is no fun. Likewise, it's convenient to have all of your files in one place, but the more you have the longer you have to look for the one you need. Blacktree software's free Quicksilver Mac OS X utility won over users by letting them start typing the name of the file or app they need, and popping up the best matches in a launcher. Quicksilver went open source recently, but you don't have to wait for a port to start using it on your Linux machines. Two clones already exist: Katapult for KDE (which we looked at in July) and the newest competitor, GNOME Do

AHT, a new Dutch set-top-box manufacturer, today releasesd a new generation set-top-box which connects the TV to the Internet. It can also be used as hard-disk recorder, for Internet telephony and for digital TV. The product's software is released under open source license, and runs an embedded LinuxOS.

[ I checked the webshob. €310 ($458) for a fully hackable developer box, including Linux desktop and support from two universities when using P2P; that's neat! - hkwint ]

There is an individual who goes by the name Bogdan. He has created one of the most interesting *nix distributions out there. They call it.... NimbleX!

Standards wars? Mini-Poll
Long, long ago, in an industry far, far away, a number of large companies struggled to decide whether to adopt a document interchange format as a global standard.

Today I discovered that Red Hat Linux has created a new social networking site call Mugshot. This site is promoted as an “open source” site. I checked the site FAQ to find out that all the software powering Mugshot is, in fact, open source. And indeed it is.

Several years of design, development and testing came together today for the release of KDE 4.0. This is our most significant release in our 11 year history and marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the start of the KDE 4 era. Join us now in #kde4-release-party on Freenode to celebrate or come to the release event in person next week. Packages are available for all the major distributions with live CDs available currently from Kubuntu and openSUSE. Read on for details or take the KDE 4.0 Visual Guide to find your way around.

Xen Virtualization is a new book from Packt that helps Linux administrators to use XV for development, testing, virtual hosting or operating systems training.

Not really open source news, but still it might be valuable for those running a Win/(Lin/BSD) dual boot: PandaLabs detected a new kind of trojan (has to be Windows) that overwrites the Master Boot Record, and upon inspection of the MBR passes the original MBR of which it made a backup. This master boot 'virus' could run too if you boot Linux, before Linux is started. You can fix it by running 'fdisk /fixmbr' from some kind of Windows bootdisk PandaLabs suggest, but of course you could also do this using GRUB from a Linux/BSD LiveCD.

One great thing about Linux is that you can transplant a hard disk from a machine that runs a 32-bit AMD XP processor into a new 64-bit Intel Core 2 machine, and the Linux installation will continue to work. However, if you do this, you'll be running a 32-bit kernel, a C library, and a complete system install on a processor that could happily run 64-bit code. You'll waste even more resources if your new machine has 4GB or more of system memory, and you'll be forced to either not use some of it or run a 32-bit Physical Address Extension (PAE) kernel. Cross-grading to the 64-bit variant of your Linux distribution can help you use your resources more wisely.

Tristan Nitot is founder and president of Mozilla Europe. He talks about the past, present and future of Mozilla in Europe, the threats facing open source, and how to help Firefox gain even greater market share.

The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era. Screenshots at The Coding Studio.

You probably remember the SplashTop instant-on, Linux-based OS from past posts or perhaps developer DeviceVM's demo at last October's reader meetup in San Francisco. It's well known that this embedded feature will ship standard on select ASUS motherboards, but as we were cruising around the PC manufacturer's booth today, we happened to catch a rather unexpected application for SplashTop: running on the EeePC.

A GNU/Linux system does not normally load modules that are not released under an approved licence. So why should Australia’s national Linux conference take on board a sponsor who engages in practices that are at odds with the community? What am I talking about? A company which should not be in the picture has poked its nose in as a sponsor. Novell, which indicated the level of its commitment to FOSS by signing a deal with Microsoft in November 2006, will be one of the supporting sponsors for the conference.

There’s no denying that the widespread growth of Linux was due in part to the raw enthusiasm of advocates meeting together under the broad banner of a “LUG” – a Linux User Group. LUG members were pioneers and cowboys, early adopters and passionate hobbyists. Today, the LUG is different. With the rise of commercial backing, the ease of distro installation, and the omniscience of Google do LUGs still have any role to play in the Linux world?

What is the greatest threat to Microsoft's dominance: Google Inc. or open source? The answer is both, especially when they're working together. The search giant is always careful to squelch speculation of any looming clash of the titans. When Google added a presentation app to its online office suite, for example, CEO Eric Schmidt adamantly stated it was not a rival to Microsoft Office. Google's bevy of Ph.D.s came up with the perfect solution: a way to fight Microsoft without appearing to do so. Open source lies at the heart of that strategy.