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As with Firefox, you can extend Thunderbird's functionality by installing extensions. Mozilla's official extension repository has quite a few nifty tools on offer, and which ones you choose to install depends entirely on your needs. There are, however, a few extensions that you might find indispensable no matter how you use Thunderbird.

With his older notebook starting to show its age, Alastair Otter decides to upgrade to a ThinkPad X60 running Ubuntu and learns how far Ubuntu has come in the past two releases.

If you need XFCE desktop with window eye candy, speed and reliability, checkout Zenwalk Linux 4.8 Beta.

LXer Feature: 03-Sep-2007

If my math-fu is anything to go by, it looks like Microsoft's Office Open XML will not become an ISO standard today. Various websites around the world are all busy tallying the votes as the news is dripping in. If their tally is correct then OOXML has been turned down by a very narrow margin. OOXML needed 2/3 of the P members to vote "yes", after subtracting abstains. With 5 abstains out of 41 P members, that means 24 "yes" votes. With 13 "no" votes already cast that means only 23 possible "yes" votes remain. Talk about a narrow margin.

[ Update: ISO confirmed Sander is good in math, and was right! - hkwint ]

The target of this posting is to make mentioned installation easy for any person regardless his Solaris Administration experience. Create Solaris HVM VM profile - /etc/xen/vm/Solaris.hvm

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma continues to take shape. Continued improvements in KGPG and KDevelop. More KVTML format conversion work across KDE-Edu applications. Theme improvements in KDE Games. A new game, KSimili, is imported into playground/games. Initial work on a Kalzium KPart for 3d molecular viewing. A redesigned configuration module for colours in KDE. Support for autodetection of gphoto2 cameras using Solid in Digikam. Annotation DRM support in okular. Work on threading in Mailody. Orca screenreader support through Kross scripting in KSpread. Continued development on KChart 2. Initial work on a Sonnet-based spellchecker for KOffice. Development on Eigen 2 is restarted to follow a different implementation strategy. Blitz is renamed QImageBlitz. The release schedule for KDE 4.0. is officially pushed back two months. KDE 4.0 Beta 2 tagged for release.

From reader feedback, the author of "6 Great Linux Productivity Apps" returns with four more highly-suggested applications, bringing the total to 10. This time, he adds on more applications specific to certain jobs and hobbies, with applications such as Scribus and OO.org

Technical Committee 182 decided on August 30th to accept Microsoft format Office Open XML as an ISO standard. Another committee already voted against OOXML last week, but the KT 182 decision is the final vote of Poland (most likely).

The open source instant messaging (IM) program Pidgin is now available in Afrikaans, thanks to the efforts of Translate.org.za.

This is the story of Free Software in the state of Kerala in India. I wrote this for a book edited by Antony Palackal of Loyola College, Thiruvananthapuram, and Wesley Shrum of Louisiana State University. It is published under a free licence, as mentioned at the end of the article. I am putting a slightly modified version here so that any interested person can make use of it.

James Purser, a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) supporter, committee member for Linux Australia, and ICT consultant, is running for the Senate in the next federal election as an independent for New South Wales. With limited resources, Purser's campaign is fueled by the power of Linux and the Internet, which he is using to build networks and communicate with the public. Purser spends most of his time promoting Open Source Software, but his senate campaign is bigger and broader than technology.

What, another Nmap tutorial? Yes that's true, but I am hoping to approach it a little differently than what I have seen available. I want to describe Nmap from the viewpoint of a hacker and at the same time give a clear, step-by-step method of attaining a good level of proficiency. After completing this 2 Part Series and having practiced the techniques described, one should not only be able to sit at a "roundtable" discussion with advanced security professionals and "hold their own" in a discussion concerning Nmap, but also utilize this great tool in their own network.

Previously in ITWire we put forth the view that one reason people stick to Windows is because they have to run specific applications that only exist for that platform. We’d like to introduce you to two tremendous web sites which help find open source equivalents for proprietary Windows software.

As Mono continues to evolve, solid convergence with Windows programs (or at least API/SDK) seems like a matter of time. With the release of Mono 1.2.5, there are some new features that help bridge the existing gap. This short article from Ars Technica also talks about Novell’s focus on Mono. Novell chooses Mono-based applications for the GNOME desktop which it develops. This strategic, it’s not a side effect. We try to piece together its implications w.r.t. patents, programmers’ direction, and a plethora of other factors.

Continuing on the topic of open source storage from last week, I would like to wish a belated happy birthday to the Aperi project, the first anniversary of which passed last month. I probably was not the only one to miss marking the occasion, as its first public update on the project went generally unnoticed.

Today is a very special day here at Sun Microsystems, and especially for the Project Darkstar team in Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Project Darkstar has been open sourced today and is available for immediate download! Project Darkstar is the video game industry's ONLY enterprise grade, highly scalable, fault tolerant, open source server solution available today. Designed from the ground up to be flexible, Project Darkstar can be used for virtually ANY type of online game.

Welcome to this year's 36th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! If you have only recently discovered this web site and the joy of testing the hundreds of different distributions and live CD available on the market, then you need to learn one essential skill: how to correct a faulty screen resolution that many of these products fail to set up correctly. Today's featured article lists the necessary steps. In the news section, Canonical has announced Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" LTS, FreeBSD has unveiled the first alpha of its all-new point-and-click system installer, Debian has updated the backend of its package database infrastructure, and the German Mandriva user community has released the first English issue of "MagDriva", a magazine dedicated to all fans and users of Mandriva Linux. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the DistroWatch.com August 2007 donation is the lighttpd project. Happy reading!

In addition to Chris DiBona’s words about NVIDIA and ATI binary display drivers, Google had also made an interesting splash at the first-ever Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (which they had kindly hosted at their Mountain View campus) during a presentation by the Google Linux Client Team. What was it? Well, there are some “significant accomplishments” and other new Google desktop applications coming out this year for the Linux platform.

The company manufacturing the One Laptop Per Child notebook played down the impact of component shortages in the industry, rebutting local reports that the shortages will affect supplies of the computer when it ships in October. Strong sales of notebook computers and a massive battery recall are causing shortages of many key components, including screens, certain kinds of chips and other parts, analysts and companies say. The production schedule for OLPC's laptop is also problematic because it's starting in the peak season for notebook demand. OLPC shipments are slated to begin in October.

There's been a lot of debate in the community about how OSI should properly handle Microsoft's planned submission of some of its licenses for OSD certification. That debate has been been going on within OSI, too. OSI's official position, from the beginning, which I helped formulate and have expressed to any number of reporters and analysts, is that OSI will treat any licenses submitted to Microsoft strictly on their merits, without fear or favor. That remains OSI's position. But...But I find that my resolve is being sorely tested.