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This might make me sound like an old fogey, but I really do miss the old games like Space Quest, The Curse of Monkey Island and Return to Zork. The problem isn't that I don't have the games anymore, but rather that they were designed for my 386 computer running DOS. Thankfully, I'm not alone in my fits of nostalgia. The developers over at http://www.scummvm.org have reproduced the “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion” developed by Lucas Arts and packaged it into a virtual machine (thus, ScummVM). That virtual machine is open source and available for just about any platform you can imagine.

In a desperate last gasp bid to stop Oracle buying Sun Microsystems and its precious MySQL kit and kaboodle, the database's co-creator - Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius - has launched a campaign to "help keep the internet free." As we reported earlier this month, the European Commission welcomed a series of promises made by Oracle about the future of the MySQL database, all of which signalled that the company's planned $7bn takeover of Sun Microsystems may now get the all-clear from regulators in the New Year.

Hardly a day goes by without yet another news story about creative uses of copyright, the DMCA, and generic attack lawyers to stifle free speech, criticism, and competition. It seems that money can buy all kinds of creative "justice." For example, in the increasingly bizarre Apple vs. Psystar drama, in which Psystar commited the awful crime of selling a tool to help customers install Mac OS X on the hardware of their choice, Apple have prevailed yet again in court, and Psystar cannot do this anymore.

Packet Fence bundles many useful and powerful network protection tools into an attractive, integrated package. Such as network access control, monitoring, intrusion detection, VLAN isolation, DHCP fingerprinting, and captive portal. Eric Geier introduces us to this protective powerhouse.

The best thing about Firefox is that just when you think you know everything there is to know about the browser, something new comes along and surprises you.

Most people have tended to dismiss the OpenOffice.org project as a distant runner-up to Microsoft Office, and certainly not a serious contender. Microsoft seems to feel otherwise judging by a new job ad for a “Linux and Open Office Compete Lead". According to this, competing with both GNU/Linux and OpenOffice.org is "one of the biggest issues that is top of mind" for no less a person than Steve Ballmer.

The new year is almost upon us, so it's a good time to wrap up the year 2009 and ruminate over the best open source software and hardware this year brought us.

NNTPGrab 0.6 Beta 1 now has support for plugins. With this it will be easy to add new functionality to the program in future releases. Right now several plugins are already available. The yEnc decoder, PAR2 repair and automatic unpack functionality have been moved to individual plugins.

For those of you that still have time off of work from the holidays, there is a new release of the Alien Arena first-person shooter if that piques your interest. Alien Arena 7.33 has been released, which is coming just two months after Alien Arena 7.32.

RAIDCore VRA solutions support Windows and Linux and offer a storage "system on a chip" that provides the same functionality as hardware-based RAID. The technology uses the power of multi-core server CPUs to provide integrated storage capabilities and process RAID tasks without compromising performance.

Your editor wishes to take no position on whether Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems should be allowed to proceed by the European Union. Such a decision certainly involves a number of antitrust considerations which go beyond the free software community. That said, some of the positions being taken around this acquisition shine an interesting light on how parts of our community work.

Speculation is a part of technical news as prophecy is to religion. Its only important, valid or genius if it turns out to be true. However, we dare not have technical news without any speculation at all since this will surely hinder the creativeness of individuals and corporations to explore avenues influenced by ideas expressed in speculation.

The annual O’Reilly Open Source Convention won't roll around for another six months, but the time is already here for those who want to get their foot in the door and their message on stage. Conference organizers are ready to hear what you want to say, and they want to hear it now.

A few annoyances, and I really hope this will be fun. Some things which don't work as they are supposed to, or some things which may be annoying - Linux forever, I love it, but sometimes it's not so funny fun as it should be.

-kde respects bugs. bugs in kde3 have their equivalent in kde4. rule of thumb in developing kde is 'we do not fix bugs. ever.' the worst part is that important bugs in kde3 were not fixed in several years. it's been two years now and kde4 doesn't even provide the features kde3 did (oh yes, instead it is providing hundreds of new features, which all make it a very productive environment - especially if you know how to kill kdm every 2 hours)

[ This is part of a series. See also

• Part I and
• Part II - hkwint ]

The KMyMoney team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.95. After 8 months of hard work, this release is the first version developed upon the KDE 4 Platform. We are confident that it is stable enough for use by early adopters. We would like to get much needed feedback from the community in order to make the new KMyMoney as rock-solid as previous releases.

The other day I read an article on the web that said that "Firefox, Adobe top buggiest-software list" and which stated that Firefox had reported the most "vulnerabilities" of all the "application programs".

From the Chinese pirate masters of the non-sea-faring variety comes ... Ylmf OS! Not happy with pirating Windows XP itself, these creative Chinese have gone one step further and hacked Ubuntu to look exactly like Windows XP. Why have they moved to Ubuntu? Because their previous release -- a pirate version of Windows XP itself -- is being cracked down on by Microsoft.

A few days ago The Dot received an invite for the KDE community to FOSS Nigeria. FOSS Nigeria 2010 will be the second Free Software conference in Nigeria, following the successful event last year (as reported on The Dot). Again, Free Software developers and community members from around the world, but of course especially those from Africa and Nigeria, are invited for a 3-day conference in Kano at the Bayero University Kano.

OK, so it might not be quite as talked about as the mythical Apple iTablet, but the Google Chrome OS-based netbook is also creating quite a stir - especially now the tech specs have seen the light of day.

I would like to share with you my short experience with Google Chrome on openSUSE 11.2. Although it is in a beta stage, it is stable and fast. I like many things in it and I even tried to emulate them in Firefox (thanks to Firefox add-on). In this post, I will state my personal thoughts about Google Chrome and I will refer to Firefox in any comparison.