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Microsoft going around threatening customers with patent litigation does not make good business sense, says Red Hat's David Postel, who was speaking in Johannesburg last week.

Could it be because the move actually makes sense for both the Linux companies and Microsoft?

It's wild, but for a company that has continuously pointed out their lack of interest in getting into the desktop market, Google sure has been pushing the application side of things awfully hard lately.

Russell Southwood caught up last week with Antoine Van Gelder, who is part of OLPC's South African developer programme, to get a better idea of what's being done to get the machine into use in Africa, including a pilot programme in the Eastern Cape.

These days, virtualization options are a dime a dozen. VMware, Parallels, Win4Lin and so on. But what about running applications natively on a different platform from what they were originally designed for? Ah, now there is the real question: is their enough demand for this?

An open, XML-based standard for displaying and storing data files (text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations) offers a new and promising approach to data storage and document exchange among office applications. A comparison of the two XML-based formats–OpenDocument Format ("ODF") and Office Open XML ("OOXML")–across widely accepted "openness" criteria has revealed substantial differences, including the following:

[Note: Excellent review about the differences between ODF & MS OOXML. -Abe]

A brief introduction to the various methods of running 32-bit applications on a 64-bit Debian GNU/Linux system.

Eager to hop onto the 3G network, James Archibald had to first bang his head against a few hardware compatibility issues. After longer than he would like to admit and many dead ends, he brings these handy pearls of wisdom for anyone in a similar situation.

Sometimes it can be handy to set up your own repository to prevent from downloading the remote repository over and over again. This tutorial shows how to create a CentOS mirror for your local network. If you have to install multiple systems in your local network then all needed packages can be downloaded over the fast LAN connection, thus saving your internet bandwidth.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work on engine configurability, data management, a packaging system for Plasmoids and themes, and new refinements in desktop icon interaction in Plasma.

You would think that Skype would be doing all it can to keep us Linux users happy, what with the painfully slow progress in developing a Linux client to date and the release of Skype for Linux 1.4 over the weekend. But customer support at the Skype Linux forums seem to suggest otherwise.

The Light edition of the Mint 3.0 Linux distribution is now available. Compared to the regular version of Mint, the Light edition ships without proprietary software, patented technologies, and support for restricted formats. We took a peek this afternoon at this GNOME-based LiveCD distribution.

It took me over a decade to figure out that I wanted to promote Free and Open Source Software. I have one person to thank for getting the gears rolling, and inspiring me to be what I want to be and nothing else that I didn't want to be. Thank you Dad, and Happy Father's Day.

LXer Feature: 17-Jun-2007

First off, Happy Fathers Day to all you Fathers out there, especially mine. It seems that Microsoft is all over the news this week. Between the Linspire deal, getting help from an old friend in the Justice Department to yet another one of their shills stating that OpenXML really is an open standard. Not to worry though, I have lots of other articles for you to check out.

The NCA has been working on Linpro's complaint for a year, looking into both the technological and legal aspects. – We made it clear to Microsoft that we were preparing sanctions, as the school agreements excluxded competitors from this market. Now that they have met our demands, we dismiss the case, says NCA department director Jostein Skaar to Norwegian daily Dagbladet. From now on, schools will only be licensed for PCs actually using Microsoft software, and not for all computers, including PCs using software from competitors like Linux, Mac and Openoffice.org.

The Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez announced the launch of their "Bolivarian Computers" last week, consisting of four different models produced in Venezuela with Chinese technology. The new computers will run the open-source Linux operating system and will first be used inside the government "missions" and state companies and institutions but eventually are expected to be sold across Venezuela and Latin America. .......
With respect to the operating system, Venezuela has taken a strong position in favor of open-source software in order to "promote technological development" and help "reach technological independence." For this reason the computers will use the open-source Linux, but the components are also compatible with the Windows operating system.

According to the debian.org mailing list three security vulnerabilites have now been fixed with the release of numerous updates for Linux kernel 2.6.8 as detailed in Debian Security Advisory DSA 1304-1.

IBM acquires software governance

[Not specific to GNU/Linux or FOSS, but might be of interest to some in our audience - dcparris]

SAN JOSE, Calif., June 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Availigent, a leading provider of Application Service Management software for Linux-based dynamic data centers, has named Silicon Valley information technology expert Mark Egan to its board of directors.

Getmail is a program for retrieving emails from remote servers; it is very similar to fetchmail, but more flexible. For example, it can be configured to deliver mails directly to a Maildir or mbox mailbox without the need for an MTA such as Postfix, but of course it can also pipe the mails through an MTA if you want. Getmail can use so called filters such as SpamAssassin and ClamAV to scan the mails, and you can even tell getmail to delete mails on the original server only after a certain number of days.