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Microsoft and LG Electronics, best known for its DVD players, home theater systems, and cellphones, announced on June 7 that they have entered into a patent cross-license agreement to enable LG to use Microsoft patented technology in its product lines, including in its Linux-based embedded devices.

Remember Netscape - the very web browser which once enjoyed a major browser market share and which was nearly killed by Microsoft's anti-competitive practices by its release of Internet Explorer ? The very Netscape navigator whose code base was then released as open source and which lead to the eventual development of the stable and increasingly popular Mozilla and then Firefox? Guess what, it has re-incarnated as Netscape Navigator ver 9.0.

The most critical battle in the wireless world is to take the reins of the mobile internet as it evolves, and that means all the majors are trying to create a software platform that will make the web even more usable on a small device than it is on a PC, and so drive new applications and revenue streams.

Windows is not slow. Some Linux distros are. On new hardware, you might not notice. On old hardware, you will. I'm talking mostly about Windows 2000 here, and to a lesser extent Windows XP. I've run Win 2K on many, many platforms, and I'm continually surprised on how well it runs, even with low RAM. It may not be secure at all, may need lots of add-ons just to be usable and may be orphaned by Microsoft in a few years, but for now it's blazingly fast.

There is in the net new community portal art4linux.org storing artworks about the Linux desktop.

Novell didn't win many friends in the open-source community with its Microsoft partnership. However, that deal, along with Novell's growing partnerships with enterprise software players such as SAP and now Capgemini are bound to win it friends in big business.

Code was written, language extensions were debated, robots danced, and much beer was quaffed -- by all accounts this year's JavaOne developer conference was a success. Find out what Sun's reinvestment in the client means for Java-based rich Internet application development in the year ahead.

I couldn't help approaching the interview from an open source perspective and in the end I walked away thinking "What a waste!".

Wringing the value out of every processor cycle on your machine required a variety of approaches. Sure, your code has to be efficient, but you also have to have your disks configured correctly, and a multitude of other things.

Andrew Morton submitted some documentation explaining the use of the "Signed-off-by" and "Acked-by" tags added when patches are submitted for conclusion into the Linux kernel. "The Signed-off-by: tag implies that the signer was involved in the development of the patch, or that he/she was in the patch's delivery path," the documentation explains, "if a person was not directly involved in the preparation or handling of a patch but wishes to signify and record their approval of it then they can arrange to have an Acked-by: line added to the patch's changelog."

Nowadays, half the free software world seems to be building Gecko-based browsers (and the other half writing plugins for them). With so many available, you might think the Kazehakase browser would hardly rate a mention. However, Kazehakase breaks away from the pack by being one of the few browser projects that is actually thinking of new features and ways to enhance old ones. From its interface to its features for bookmarks and tabs to its customization options for keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures, Kazehakase is crammed with nonstandard features. You may not want every new feature offered by Kazehakase, but chances are you'll appreciate some of them.

After upgrading to etch recently, I had a plaintive email from a user saying that some Fortran software she had downloaded now wasn’t compiling any more (when it had been previously). The error message was pretty clear that the problem was with g77 not being able to find the relevant include file - but there it was, right in the directory.

Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Edition will permit multimedia and power management on Intel's minitablet PC platform.

Read User Friendly's daily cartoon. After speaking with the "Smiling Man", we thought it would be appropriate to link to User Friendly.

[We look forward to your comments on linking to User Friendly's Daily Static - dcparris]

We are very excited to announce the release of Mirth 1.5. This new version offers improved performance and reliability. Additionally, Mirth 1.5 delivers useful new features and bug fixes. Mirth now supports several internal databases including MySQL, Oracle, SQLServer, and PostgreSQL to better integrate with your existing systems. Mirth 1.5 also includes a more robust and responsive administration and development environment along with a new utility for managing the Mirth server configurations.

SourceForge has teamed-up with Wikispaces to integrate wikis directly into SourceForge.net. The addition of wiki functionality into the open source software repository will allow the community to mass-author the documentation needed to support its open source projects.

This document describes how to install a Postfix mail server that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. I will also demonstrate the installation and configuration of Courier (Courier-POP3, Courier-IMAP), so that Courier can authenticate against the same MySQL database Postfix uses.

The hardware specs are reasonable (considering it's an XPS) but what's more interesting is whether Dell bundled Ubuntu as-is or tailored the distribution for its kit.

The Vim editor allows you to modify its behavior via scripts, and the Vim community has produced hundreds of scripts that may help you be more productive, or add functions to Vim that you've always wished it would have. Here are five that I find particularly useful.

OSBC Open source is increasingly driving enterprise development projects and installations, but big customers still rely on start-up software providers for support.