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orway on May 11 became the latest European country to gravitate toward mandatory government use of the Open Document Format (ODF). According to a press release from Minister of Renewal Heidi Grande Roys, Norway joins Belgium, Finland, and France to move another step toward a final decision to require ODF.

When somebody tries to do something to promote Free and Open Source Software, one of three things happen. It is either ignored, moderately to fully supported, or outright opposed. Those who oppose it are often not developers and they are merely using FOSS, to which I pose the question: What have you done lately?

A call for papers for OpenOffice.org's annual conference, OOoCon 2007, has been issued, and people are invited to submit proposals by June 1. OOoCon this year will take place in Barcelona from Sept. 19 through 21.

LXer Feature: 15-May-2007

A missing post on Direct2Dell site, especially viewed against the backdrop of their latest arrangements with Microsoft and Novell, prompts questions about the Dell's Ubuntu deal. The deal is definitely still "on".

"As I understand, fair_clock is a monotonously increasing clock which advances at a pace inversely proportional to the load on the run queue," Srivatsa Vaddagiri explained in a review of Ingo Molnar's CFS CPU scheduler, "if load = 1 (task), it will advance at same pace as wall clock, as load increases it advances slower than wall clock."

Looking for yet another reason to hold off buying Vista? Seven weeks ago, when we first reported Vista was causing many machines to stall indefinitely while deleting, copying and moving files, we were sure the problem was caused by a bug that would be fixed relatively quickly. After all, Vista is Microsoft's flagship product. It's also an operating system. And everyone knows deleting, copying and moving files are among the most basic tasks any operating system can set out to do.

[I have run across this already with the one vista host machine I installed and service. - Scott]

A nice lady has seen what the TUX500 Project is all about and she loved what she saw. She also remembers being asked for help from the Mozilla Community when the evangelizing of Firefox. This is what she has to say to them now....

Column After just a couple years of practice, Google can claim to produce the best computer-generated language translations in the world - in languages their boffin creators don't even understand.

After days and days of being able to receive IMAP mail but not send it with mutt, I finally cracked the problem. What took me a little while to understand -- that mutt needed a separate SMTP client to send Internet e-mail -- took a lot longer to actually get working.

Create a working Linux cluster from many separate pieces of hardware and software, including System x and IBM TotalStorage systems. Part 3 provides the first half of the instructions you need to set up the storage backend, including details on storage architecture, needed hardware, and the Storage Area Network.

"What's eating the battery life of my laptop?" Arjan van de Ven rhetorically asked in an announcement about a new PowerTOP utility released by Intel for detecting what Linux programs and kernel tunables are resulting in the most power consumption. "Why isn't it many more hours? Which software component causes the most power to be burned? These are important questions without a good answer... until now."

Today’s news brings the major reason you should run away from depending on Microsoft technology like it had a case of Ebola. What you as a customer are being told, in essence, is that if you use any technology but Microsoft’s (or those of a company paying blood-money to Microsoft), you are likely to be sued. Finally, this is the do or die moment for the FOSS community. There’s a wolf knocking at the door, and everyone who ever committed a line of code to a project has a stake in keeping it out.

"I'll just convert these back to the .DOC format the older versions use. That's most likely the version you have at school." I told her. But when I read the files in Word 2007 and eventually found the "Save As" entry in the new menu system I discovered to my horror it was grayed out.

The FSFLA, the Latin American branch of the Free Software Foundation, is claiming a last-minute victory in Brazil in its struggle to remove the requirement to use non-free software for filing taxes online. Having reversed-engineered a free command-line program for filing taxes, the FSFLA is jubilantly announcing that it has "freed the lion" -- "lion" being a colloquial term in Brazil for taxes.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 87 for the week of May 6th through May 12th, 2007.

The two days of the KOffice ODF sprint were very productive. Most time was spent on group discussions, and designing specific parts of KOffice in smaller groups. Of course, code was written as well, and for an overview of what happened, read on!

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 14 claimed that "Linux violates over 228 patents. Someday, for all countries that are entering WTO [the World Trade Organization], somebody will come and look for money to pay for the patent rights for that intellectual property." With that comment, Microsoft declared war against Linux and open source yesterday... Oh wait. My mistake, Ballmer made that attack in November 2004.

The question was asked on the lkml whether or not memory allocated by kmalloc and vmalloc is swappable. Rik van Reil offered a clear explanation as to why it is not, "unswappable kernel memory is simpler and faster," adding, "there really is no good reason for swapping kernel memory nowadays." He went on to explain..

This trial download for the IBM Component Designer V6.0 includes all of the product’s features. You can try this product as a download or on a DVD.

The third annual Red Hat Summit in San Diego concluded on Friday with a half-day schedule of sessions capped off by the presentation of the first annual Innovation Awards. I missed the awards ceremony in favor of a one-on-one interview with Professor Eben Moglen, during which I learned the secret of how to change the world.