Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the winners of the OpenOffice.org(TM) Community Innovation Challenge designed to fuel innovation and community around OpenOffice.org, as the community prepares for the imminent launch of its next-generation productivity suite, OpenOffice.org 3.0. The contest was part of Sun's million-dollar Open Source Community Innovation Challenge Program, a multi-year program supporting several Sun-sponsored open source communities. "It has been a pleasure to contribute QATrack, which gives the OpenOffice.org Community the ability to track the qualification of the many releases being worked on," said Gold Medal winner Per Eriksson. "I look forward to future involvement with this truly innovative, global project."

Military IT folks wondering if their use of Apache, Perl, Linux and other open source software is copacetic with the brass will soon get some answers from the Defense Department's Office of the Chief Information Officer. The office is preparing a memorandum that further clarifies how open source may be procured and used within the services. The memo should answer many lingering questions still surrounding the open source, said Daniel Risacher, the data strategy leader for the Office of Secretary of Defense who is drafting the memo. The draft may point out some potential benefits as well.

These days there’s a lot of buzz about “Web 2.0” and making websites more interactive, but what’s really going on is a reconnection to the community nature of the internet. Collaboration, cooperation, and the information commons are all ideas that pre-dated the world wide web in the form of older internet technologies. In today’s distributed computing environment, though, these technologies have really flourished. Here’s a guide to eight that you should consider making use of in building a community around an information commons project of any kind, from multimedia, to hardware, to software. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Debian project leader Steve McIntyre has dismissed claims that the next stable version of Debian – codename Lenny – could be delayed until June 2009. Based on the number of outstanding release-critical bugs and the time it has taken to fix them on previous releases, Debian developer Bastian Venthur estimated it will take a further eight or nine months to bring Lenny up to release quality.

After introducing the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop to the teachers and then the third and fourth grade students involved in our OLPC pilot project in Ouéléssébougou, Mali, we finally got to see how exactly the kids use the XO laptops. We found out in the fifth and sixth weeks of the program lots of good news: the kids love the XO, especially since they have now started taking the small green laptops home at night. In addition they have really taken to navigating the Sugar OS and have become speedy typers. Even better is the collaboration that takes place in the classroom to teach each other how to use certain applications.

Let's face it: Linux can save companies money. It can do lots of really serious work well on machines that can't even minimally run a current version of Windows. Linux can allow companies to leverage the existing, aging systems and extend the productive life of hardware they already own.

Posting bellow describes setup Ubuntu Hardy PV DomU via attacment block device to Ubuntu Hardy HVM DomU at the same CentOS 5.2 Dom0. Standard debootstrap procedure has been used to create initial image on this device. This step allows to avoid “scp” image files from remote Ubuntu HH box to Dom0 and use /dev/sda(X) with prepared image immediately on the same box,referencing the same device from Ubuntu Hardy PV profile.

Virtualization software can help you run programs that your native Linux distro wouldn't. While Linux users have many virtualization options, none comes close to the all-encompassing VMware Workstation 6.5. Introduced last month, VMware Workstation 6.5 continues the tradition of outshining and outpacing the competition with a host of useful new features, and boldly goes where no virtualization software has gone before -- into the realm of virtual machines with accelerated 3-D graphics. Despite the advances, some of the new features are still in beta, so Workstation 6.5 might not be the best virtualization option for everyone.

Just as I brought you the Ubuntu 8.10B ScreenShots, I now bring you the Kubuntu 8.10B ScreenShots from the install to the installing of updates to using Amarok and transfering files using sftp in dolphin file manager.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Oct 10, 2008, with your host, me, Marcel Gagné. Today's stories include the opening of Oktoberfest, beer, Mandriva 2009, beer, Opera 9.6, more beer, Google on the defensive, and comparisons of jail cells from Hamburg, Germany.

Yesterday, I looked at the major applications in the first beta for KOffice 2.0. Now it's the turn of the rest of the beta: The KPlato project manager, KChart, the vector graphics editor Karbon, and the raster graphics editor Krita. These four graphical and charting programs have always been among the best-regarded of the KOffice programs. All of them have matured much faster than the traditional office applications KWord, KSpread, and KPresenter. In the case of KPlato and KChart, they have done so because they were limited applications with relatively few features. By contrast, the graphics editors Karbon and Krita have done so by attracting users who were not interested in office applications so much as design.

Flash memory drives the size of your thumb are dirt cheap and offer gigabytes of storage. It's tempting to fill one of them with important computer files, clip it to a key chain and hit the road. However, what if you lose it while fumbling for change at Starbucks and the hacker in the corner finds it? This is not a good thing. That's where a new breed of flash drives comes in.

With the ip command you can assign multiple network addresses to a network interface, without creating aliases like ifconfig requires. Carla Schroder shows you how.

The temptation to compare the FreeRunner and the Apple iPhone can be overwhelming. They both run a Unix-like operating system; they both have GPS, wi-fi, and accelerometers; they are both cell phones. In spite of their similarities, their differences are even more striking. Anthony Taylor takes a look at the features of FreeRunner and discovers that it is not the iPhone, but a handheld computer with GPS and cellphone capabilities and runs on free software. You can read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Charlie Schluting's video tutorial shows you how to set up a Samba server on Ubuntu, and test it from a Windows PC, all in just a few minutes.

This article is a short introduction to running Linux Live-CDs with MobaLiveCD. MobaLiveCD is a standalone Windows application (i.e., you do not have to install it - it runs by clicking on the executable) that uses the Qemu emulator to run Linux Live-CDs on your Windows desktop.

Mozilla Labs recently offered a sneak peak and download of Geode. Geode is one of the first applications to use the new W3C geolocation specification API. It is currently available as a plug-in for Firefox 3 (and seems to only support Windows and Mac systems at this time). Mozilla Labs indicates it will likely be a new feature integrated in an upcoming browser release.

Founded in 1998, EZ Prints is an Atlanta-based provider of digital image fulfillment technology for retailers, portals, ISPs, digital content owners and professional photo services. About 500 online and offline retailers in the U.S. and Europe, including six of the top 10 online photo sites, use EZ Prints' technology platform to offer services that allow consumers and businesses to personalize digital content.

French software firm Mandriva has released its Mandriva 2009 Linux distro, moving to KDE 4 as the default desktop. Other new features include a revamped installer and "Control Center," netbook compatibility, and a variety of updated applications. Although KDE 4, or more specifically 4.1.2, is now the Mandriva default, the GNOME desktop has also been bundled and upgraded to version 2.24. Other updated applications include OpenOffice 3.0, and Mozilla Firefox 3. It now includes version 2.6.27 of the Linux kernel.

Whether you believe that punctuality is "the politeness of kings" or "the art of guessing how late the other fellow is going to be," you can count on your Linux box for information about local times across the globe, so that you can plan a punctual VoIP call, stock transaction, or meeting. Here are some world clocks that work well on the desktop. World time is a topic fraught with complexities and exceptions: Daylight Savings Time, fractional hour discrepancies, exceptional time zones, today, tomorrow, or yesterday. Some tools handle these difficulties well, and others not so well. On a practical level, however, what you need to know comes down to two basic questions: What time is it right now in Rubovia? And is it a good time to call Mary?