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!

There is some important news about YOUR ability to post in Free Software Magazine--read on!

General announcements

YOU can create contents in Free Software Magazine's site NOW!

Hopefully the heading got your attention! That's right: we now allow our readers to create "posts", just like our columnists. Thanks to our custom module (soon to be released), you can even "respond" to another person's posts--a columnist or another community member.

Your posts will appear in the "Community posts" section of the web site. The posts which will get the most votes will be promoted to the home page!

Please keep in mind that posts are not like comments: they should be self-contained. That is, they should make sense even if they are read "alone".

To create a new post, just click on "Create content" and then "Post" in your user menu (you need to be logged in!); to post a response, click on "Write a full post in response to this!" underneath an article's title.

If you have an opinion, a tutorial, an idea, a rant, or anything else, this is the right time to write it down: you will reach thousands of readers interested in free software.

(Abusive content will most likely get voted down, and will disappear from the system. Did you have any doubts?)

Top ten Free Software Daily stories this week

1. OOXML Vote: Irregularities in Germany & Croatia and a Call for an Investigation of Norway --If Microsoft gets this OOXML format "approved", it will be by irregularities in the voting, it seems. Here's more on what happened in Germany and a report on what is being called a scandal in Norway. And another odd process in Croatia. Read more...

2. The World Sighs as ISO Becomes Irrelevant --From this point onwards, it is worth starting to argue in favour of ODF because of its merits rather than its ISO rubber stamp. Microsoft has single-handedly redefined the meaning and significance of ISO. It rendered ISO moot. Read more...

3. 20080401: ISO announces radical reforms --"Geneva, 1 April 2008. The International Organization for Standardization announced at a press conference that its processes are "broken" and "need radical reform". ISO president Håkan Murby told journalists that "the Microsoft OOXML process was a near-disaster and we want to make sure such a thing never happens again." Read more...

4. Debian GNU/Hurd K16 Snapshot Released --Debian GNU/Hurd K16 Snapshot Released Read more...

5. Norway asks to suspend its 'Yes' vote on OOXML --Due to 'serious irregularities,' Norway's OOXML vote could be suspended pending an investigation, adding further intrigue to the ongoing standards debate Read more...

6. KDE 4.0.3 Released --The third bugfix release of the KDE 4.0 series is available. KDE 4.0 is mainly targeted at users who live on the bleeding edge. As a dot-oh release it might have its rough edges. The KDE Community releases a service update for this series once a month to make those bleeding edge users' lives easier. The changelog for KDE 4.0.3 is, although not complete, quite impressive. Read more...

7. Richard Stallman, Live and Unplugged --It’s almost 8 PM on a Tuesday night, and the lecture hall here at Virginia Tech University is filled nearly to capacity. The students – many of them computer science majors – have come to hear Richard Stallman, the grand forefather of GNU/Linux. The crowd is chatty and seems in a good mood. Read more...

8. Setting up a nice looking KDE - For Beginners --KDE is my preferred choice of desktop and every time I install a distribution I spend around an hour customizing it to my taste. Most of the distributions provide customized KDE but most of the customization go into the functional aspect of KDE(which should be the case) . This guide does not intent to point out to a specific choice but rather tells what can be done with a fresh KDE. Read more...

9. ISO Feels OK With Corruption, Officially Approves OOXML (Updated) --So, as we already expected and knew yesterday, ISO has just declared Microsoft’s OOXML an international chaos standards, despite the fact that stories about misconduct around the world continue to flow in and numerous antitrust concerns have been raised. Let’s take another quick look. Read more...

10. With Vista Breached, Linux Unbeaten in Hacking Contest --The MacBook Air went first; a tiny Fujitsu laptop running Vista was hacked on the last day of the contest; but it was Linux, running on a Sony Vaio, that remained undefeated as conference organizers ended a three-way computer hacking challenge Friday at the CanSecWest conference. Article and video. Read more...

Thanks to peacemaker, can.axis, aboutblank, milliams, mads, volvindia, and estherschindler for these stories!

Latest content

Getting help: the powerful man(ual) --By Andrew Min. Let’s face it: GNU/Linux software is not always easy to use. Especially command line software (at least the GUI programs have buttons and tooltips). Sometimes, the program will have a manual or some documentation at its homepage, but that is not always the case. The solution? The magical man. Read more...

It's the data, stupid --By Richard Rothwell. I know I have a similar tendency, and it comes into play when I attempt free software advocacy. As a result I’ve been working on my own version. My sign looks like this: Read more...

Beyond Synaptic - using apt for better package management --By Ryan Cartwright. I’m a Debian user and—like many—I use apt and its associated tools. If you haven’t yet discovered apt here’s a brief summary of some of it and some of its tools which can make your package management even more powerful. Read more...

The Asus Eee PC (Part Three): The Alternative Distros --By Gary Richmond. In Part One of this four parter on the Asus Eee PC I looked at the technical specifications and in Part Two I looked at how to get the default Xandros up to speed as a full KDE desktop. In this third instalment we come to what is perhaps the most fun part of the experience. Read more...

What is the free software community? --By Tony Mobily. In this video, I try to answer the question “What is the free software community?” Comments, or even community posts in response to this, are most welcome! Read more...

Impossible thing #5: Open hardware, from the LART to the C,mm,n --By Terry Hancock. So far, I’ve identified examples of free, commons-based production of just about every category of pure information product which exists. And that leads to the next question: what about the material marketplace? Can community methods be used to design, prototype, and manufacture physical products? The answer, according to a growing boom of open hardware developers is a resounding “Yes!” From computer hardware to automobiles, the open hardware revolution is on. Read more...

KWordQuiz: An amazingly useful flash card tool --By Andrew Min. Since I was home schooled, I never had homework (homework and classwork were one and the same). And since I never had homework, I… never really had to learn how to study until high school. But when I did learn how to study, I found flash cards to be extremely effective. So I fell in love with KWordQuiz, a KDE Education project for flash card lovers just like me. Read more...

Reminders

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