...the use of free and open-source software is an education issue. What I mean by that is that if we want FOSS to be adopted in a more widespread fashion, if we want projects to succeed (and FOSS-focused companies to succeed), we need to make sure that people know that alternatives exist.

Not many things make the founder of the Ubuntu distro Mark Shuttleworth nervous, but recommending people replace Windows with Linux on their desktop, it seems, is one of them.

Fluxbox 1.0 was released in October of 2007, but its first post-1.0 update has now been released. The source to Fluxbox 1.1 has just hit its SourceForge page, but at this time there is no release announcement nor has their project web-site been updated. There is, however, the change-log that ships with the source package to look at.

I have been using the KDE 4.1 since it was published in late July. I have used it with both, nVidia and ATI videocards, so I think I have pretty good overview of KDE 4’s status with the modern hardware. There are many good things about the KDE 4, but there is also a lot of room for improvement.

Education institutions looking for a low-cost, eco-friendly alternative to stand-alone Windows desktops can now deploy their first 30-station computer lab or classroom free of charge.

By definition, free and open source software (FOSS) is opposed to proprietary companies. But, as Jim Zemlin and Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols have pointed out recently, the FOSS community does not regard all proprietary companies with equal disdain.

I know how cheesy that blog title is, so you don’t need to remind me. The old saying “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is a favourite for primary school English lessons as it uses every letter in the English alphabet. The phrase is also strangely applicable to how the Web browser landscape has changed in recent years since the advent of Mozilla’s Firefox.

More than any technical or political reason, the biggest reason we should hope that Microsoft’s new format, OOXML, is not standardized is simply that it is our best hope for finally achieving one standard document format.