Hello readers, and welcome once again to Free Software Magazine's fortnightly newsletter, keeping you up to date with all things free software... AND the top 10 FSDaily announcements for this week! Enjoy!

General announcements

Top ten Free Software Daily stories this week

1. Asus to embed Linux into all motherboards --"Asus is to embed a lightweight, instant-on version of Linux called "Splashtop" into all its motherboards, following good feedback from customers." Read more...

2. Make Your Distro Free of Miguel de Icaza's junk code --As the title says, clear your computer of Miguel's crap Read more...

3. Public Service Announcement to Debian and Ubuntu Users --"...A weakness has been discovered in the random number generator used by OpenSSL on Debian and Ubuntu systems. As a result of this weakness, certain encryption keys are much more common than they should be, such that an attacker could guess the key through a brute-force attack given minimal knowledge of the system. Read more...

4. Web frameworks: a free software oriented study --"The web2.0 era has put the web application frameworks at the center of the free software community attention. Various opinions (1,2) and performance (1,2) comparisons have been published by free software enthusiasts trying to rank the quality and the potential of different web frameworks. Read more...

5. You must must sign an End User License Agreement to install or use Firefox RC1 on GNU/Linux !! --It's the the first time i have to sign an end-user license agreement to try Firefox on my Debian GNU/Linux machine! Hum, maybe it's time for me to switch to iceweasel or icecat... Read more...

6. Louis Suarez-Potts: OOXML Has Zero Effect On ODF --ODF as a default format was first adopted by OpenOffice.org (OOo). Naturally, when OOXML’s approval cast a doubt on ODF, we sought reactions of the OOo team, on how they viewed the future of OOo, ODF and OOXML. Thus, this interview, which was conducted over a series of e-mails, with Louis Suarez-Potts, community manager, OpenOffice.org. Read more...

7. Once shunned by academics, Wikipedia now a teaching tool --Wikipedia, the upstart Internet encyclopedia that most universities forbid students to use, has suddenly become a teaching tool for professors. Read more...

8. Kubuntu KDE4 Remix: An Ubuntu User's View --A long time Ubuntu user tries Kubuntu Linux 8.04 live CD with KDE 4.0 desktop and shares his experience. Read more...

9. Opinion: Do you think you’ll be using Ubuntu 3 years from now ? --I remember that a few years ago, the most recognized brand in the Linux world was RedHat. For someone who didn’t know much about Linux, that was the keyword they’d know. Now, it’s Ubuntu. Read more...

10. Petition for Open Standards in European Parliament --The signatories of this petition, representing a Community for Freedom of Choice and Market in the European Union, draw the attention of the Members of the European Parliament to the current situation where the institution’s ICT systems are locked into the products of one vendor, warns about the implications of this for participative democracy and for fair competition, and calls for action to promote Open Standards and Interoperability. Read more...

Thanks to cpoliticas, devnull, can.axis, peacemaker, mads, JRepin, and carlmig for these stories!

Latest content

The Bizarre Cathedral - 5 --By Tony Mobily and Ryan Cartwright. Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral. Read more...

Chapter 2: Project management and the GNU coding standards --By John Calcote. In Chapter 1, I gave a brief overview of the Autotools and some of the resources that are currently available to help reduce the learning curve. In this chapter, we’re going to step back a little and examine project organization techniques that are applicable to all projects, not just those whose build system is managed by the Autotools. Read more...

The 2008 Google Summer of Code: 21 Projects I'm Excited About --By Andrew Min. The annual Google Summer of Code is upon us again. For the uninformed, that’s when Google pays hundreds of students and hundreds of mentors to work on free software projects, ranging from AbiSource to Zumastor. This is where great projects like the GDebiKDE installer were created. And this year looks even better than before, with 175 organizations and 1125 students. So today, I’m going to do a short rundown of some of my favorites. I can’t fit them all in (let’s save some trees!), but these are just some that stood out for me. Read more...

Open letter to standards professionals, developers, and activists --By Pieter Hintjens. You’ve read how Microsoft drove its tank through the international standardization process last year and this year, finally winning ISO approval for its legacy OOXML format. The OOXML event proved that we’re in a real fight, and that money and power can break down the existing polite rules and agreements that constitute the international standardization process. Read more...

Chapter 1: A brief introduction to the GNU Autotools --By John Calcote. I’m going to make a rather broad and sweeping statement here: If you’re writing free or open source software targeting Unix or Linux systems, then you should be using the GNU Autotools. I’m sure I sound a bit biased, but I’m not. And I shouldn’t be, given the number of long nights I’ve spent working around what appeared to be shortcomings in the Autotools system. Normally, I would have been angry enough to toss the entire project out the window and write a good hand-coded makefile and configure script. Read more...

The Bizarre Cathedral - 4 --By Ryan Cartwright and Tony Mobily. Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral. Read more...

Autotools: a practitioner's guide to Autoconf, Automake and Libtool --By John Calcote. There are few people who would deny that Autoconf, Automake and Libtool have revolutionized the free software world. While there are many thousands of Autotools advocates, some developers absolutely hate the Autotools, with a passion. Why? Let me try to explain with an analogy. Read more...

Digital Rights Management (DRM): is it in its death throes? --By Gary Richmond. In this opening salvo, I will reprise the technical terms and history of DRM and thereafter I will try to keep you abreast of the issues for computer users in general and free software in particular. Hopefully, I will in fact be chronicling the death throes of DRM. Read more...

Impossible thing #6: Freedom for all with the One Laptop Per Child project --By Terry Hancock. For many years, there has been a growing concern about the emergence of a “digital divide” between rich and poor. The idea is that people who don’t meet a certain threshold income won’t be able to afford the investment in computers and internet connectivity that makes further learning and development possible. They’ll become trapped by their circumstances. Under proprietary commercial operating systems, which impose a kind of plateau on the cost of computer systems, this may well be true. But GNU/Linux, continuously improving hardware, and a community commitment to bringing technology down to cost instead of just up to spec, has led to a new wave of ultra-low-cost computers, starting with the One Laptop Per Child’s XO. These free-software-based computers will be the first introduction to computing for millions of new users, and that foretells a much freer future. Read more...

Latest book reviews

Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux by Mark G. Sobell --Reviewed by Alan Berg. Maintain your system. Read more...

Perl by Example, 4th Edition by Ellie Quigley --Reviewed by Alan Berg. One for the book shelf. Read more...

Reminders

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