Microsoft will be signing up Malayalam movie star Mammootty as one of the brand ambassadors for the Computer Literacy programme that is to be organized soon in Kerala, a Southern Indian State well known for its pro-free software policies. This is an open letter by Free Software Activists, Supporters and Users of Kerala to Mammootty.

I don't quite know how it happened, but my parents finally got the Internet / computing bug. Last year, my Dad bought a Dell Studio and my Mom bought an HP Mini. Slowly, my two senior citizens have been getting the hang of things.

"Linux is hard to install" - You probably bought a computer with Windows preinstalled and bought a new one when it came to a grinding halt. Next time try reinstalling it from scratch, drivers and applications included.

Provident is bought by Paragon, which "continues to strengthen the Microsoft platform business"

We've been debating the merits of a possible IBM-Sun deal for a while now, and even Sun itself seemed to be in the dark as to if it would be a good idea to be bought by IBM. These debates are now all moot: in a suprise move (at least, I didn't see any speculation about it) ORacle has bought Sun Microsystems, at USD 9.50 a share, which equates to a total of 7.4 billion USD.

After Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle, the last one began to fire many ex-Sun's workers. There are two lead developers of ``GNOME Accessibility'' and ``Orca'' (screen reader for blind people) projects among this big quantity of fired people. One of them have written an open letter to Oracle to review their decision.

"Just think about it for a moment. About 20 years ago you got specifications for pretty much every piece of hardware you bought. You were given exact instructions on how to use the hardware you just bought, not only how to install it. Things have changed since then.

Everyone knows what a Linux shell is -- you open up a Linux terminal window (such as Konsole or xterm), type in some commands, and there you are, using your Linux shell. Write your commands to a file, make it executable, run it, and you're a shell programmer. But did you know that there are different shells that you can use, and that each shell operates in a slightly different way?

"For some time I had been trying to come up with an elegant solution for starting all the multiple shells I need when working on my Ruby on Rails projects. I find that if I have the following shells, it really helps with command history..."