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Millions can now be set free of proprietary software and coldly calculated lock-in schemes. You...you accomplished this. And for these accomplishments, for these sacrifices and countless hours of mind-numbing coding and sweat, you are finally going to...

The OpenOffice.org community took Dell's to the word. John McCreesh, the lead of the Marketing Project, wrote an open letter to Michael Dell and invited Dell to work with OpenOffice.org in order to install OpenOffice.org on Dell's computers.

Your feedback on Dell IdeaStorm has been astounding. Thank you! We hear your requests for desktops and notebooks with Linux. We’re crafting product offerings in response, but we’d like a little more direct feedback from you: your preferences, your desires.

Increasingly, open source tools and development methodologies are fundamental to software initiatives.

British-based banking and financial services group HSBC is standardizing its thousands of Linux servers on Novell's SUSE Linux, a direct result of the recent cooperation agreement between Microsoft and Novell.

There are several tasks to which we must attend before actually making use of our freshly installed FreeBSD system. Immediately upon reboot, you will find yourself in the console. While it is possible to setup and use the graphical login managers -- kdm, gdm or others -- it is important to note that this uses extra resources. One of our assumptions is that you might not have all that excess horsepower, so we'll stick with the console login for now.

Despite objects from New Zealand and five other countries, Microsoft's Open XML format will be put to the vote in August

France's National Assembly is staging a revolution of its own: it's moving from Windows to open source. When the Assembly meets next in June 2007, its members will be working on 1,154 new computers running Ubuntu Linux.

SkinnyCorp.com has built a group of community-based sites on a traditional LAMP stack -- Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. SkinnyCorp software engineer Harper Reed credits the open source infrastructure with keeping the business agile. He says the licensing costs of proprietary software would have strangled a business that's growing as quickly as his.

Learn how to debug PHP code from the command line and examine the strengths of PHP as a shell scripting language unto itself. Give PHP a chance on the command-line interface, and you may find that it has become your new favorite shell-scripting tool. There's really nothing stopping you from using PHP as your Swiss Army knife for almost any given programming project.

Welcome to this year's 4th issue of DWN, the newsletter for the Debian community. The Debian listmaster determined as part of the spring cleaning effort several unused and obsolete lists that will be closed down. Tony Mobily noted that the last GIF patent has finally expired. Gustavo Franco reported that Second Life runs on Debian servers because it is suited to scaling massively with a small IT staff.

Simple file encryption is useful, but sometimes it's more useful to encrypt a complete filesystem or disk, such as when you need to protect a large set of files. Or you may need not only to protect, but to completely hide the presence of sensitive data from prying eyes. For these cases, here are several options for securing your systems.

This week on Open News the FSF is on the prowl, more open source adoption stories and now you install Ubuntu without ever leaving Windows.

Sean Moss-Pultz has relayed an announcement email, titled "Crossroads", on the OpenMoko mailing list. They need your help in finding the right wifi vendor, one with free (GPL) drivers, and they have a shortage of developers.

One of the best ways you can participate in the free and open source software (FOSS) revolution is by helping to test software and reporting bugs and issues to project developers to help them improve their code. Even in the wild and woolly, sometimes undisciplined approach to development that we see in FOSS projects, there are ways to test more effectively. Here are more than a dozen tips suggested by testing gurus and developers that can help you become a successful tester.

Tuomo Valkonen, who you may know as the author of the Ion window manager has a rant about the brokenness of the megafreeze development model, where a Linux distribution attempts to stabilize the entire system. As an upstream contributor, I find it highly frustrating to release a new version of my software and have users contact me for about ancient versions I no longer want to support.

In a bid to promote the mainstream adoption of Linux, Canonical and Linspire announced a technology partnership. Linspire will start to base Linspire/Freespire on Ubuntu, while Canonical will in turn use Linspire's CNR application delivery service.

The anti-theft mechanism for the One Laptop Per Child computer has some problems because it depends on a central authority. An alternative mechanism that relies only on the laptops is possible. This alternative relies on biometrics (but doesn't trust those) and information provided by a laptops' peers.

Given a copy of the Linux- based educational software package tuXlab to review, James Archibald revisits school days and gives it a run through.

The joint technology will focus on developing a virtualisation package for Linux and Windows servers that lets customers run SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 as a guest operating system on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 service pack 1 and on the next version of Microsoft Windows Server, codenamed Longhorn.