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I came away from the second annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit with mixed feelings. I mean, it's hard not to support the group that pays Linus Torvalds to spend his time continuing to lead the poster-boy project for free and open source software. But at the same time, those golden chains are my biggest concern about the Linux Foundation.

As the release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS rapidly approaches, the all important question is beginning to form in everyone's mind. Upgrade, or freshly install. It's always an interesting discussion to have with fellow Linux users, because there seems to be an almost religious divide between the two camps. Some feel that to really get the full experience of a new version, a clean install is the only way.

They say that every dog has its day. Could the growing popularity of Asus's low-cost EEE notebook launch Puppy Linux into the limelight? The EEE (pictured at right) comes with Xandros Linux, by default, with Windows XP also an option on the newest model. But there's a third dog in the race now, and one that's capable of running circles around either of the weightier contenders.

The annual conclave of free graphics software developers, users, and artists known as the Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is set for May 8-11 in Wroclaw, Poland, this year. LGM organizers are holding a fund-raising campaign this week to help volunteer developers travel to the event. Now in its third year, LGM gathers programmers, users, and designers representing all of the major free graphics applications -- the GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, Blender, and Scribus -- and other apps, plus related projects like OpenICC and the Open Clip Art Library. The conference allows the developers to collaborate, share ideas and code, cooperate on cross-application standards, and simply get to know one another. End users and artists are an integral part of LGM, too, participating in meetings with developers, showcasing work, and contributing tutorials.

Linux, long the laggard to the Windows desktop, is pushing into emerging markets, onto mobile devices and other client form factors, and is poised to give Microsoft something to really compete against, according to attendees at the annual Linux Foundation Summit.

When we looked at Flock 0.9 last year, the social Web browser showed a lot of potential. Now that it's over the 1.0 hump, the Flock team has made good on the application's promise. Maybe too good -- while Flock serves up a lot of content on a single page, you practically need super-powers to take it all in. Once you cut back on the sensory input a bit though, it's a pretty slick Firefox alternative for anyone with a ton of cyber friends.

The ISO has taken over control of the Open XML specification and started a committee to consider harmonization with the OpenDocument Format (ODF). Wednesday was the last day that all resolutions to the new standard, called ISO/IEC 29500, were accepted, according to Brian Jones, a program manager for office at Microsoft who has been involved in the standardization process.

An online retailer specializing in mini-ITX boards, systems, and accessories has started selling mini-ITX and pico-ITX systems pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux. Logic Supply says that as a Canonical Solution Provider partner, it has staff ready to support approved systems under the popular desktop and server Linux OS.

A visiting Red Hat executive has said that wariness on the part of a number of government CIOs over adopting open source is not a reflection of Australia's tech savvy, but the result of a"lack of understanding" of the software and its community.

I'll never forget attending the first LinuxWorld trade show in San Francisco in 1999, and getting a marketing hand-out from the Abiword team that was printed on re-used office paper. Almost 10 years later, the nimble Word clone has gotten to be "as good as they come," writes Myank Sharma in a detailed Linux.com review.

Most of what we offer in Breaking News are roundups of the day's news — a convenient place to find the most important developments and have a chuckle at the same time. It's not that often that I get to do first-hand, on-the-scene reporting, so I was somewhat surprised last week to open an email from one of Cisco's PR reps, offering the opportunity to report an announcement of interest to the Linux and Open Source community. Being the curious sort, I couldn't pass up such an opportunity.

Over the past year, the OOXML debate launched a worldwide discussion about what an open standard should be, how it impacts the technology industry, and why open standards are important. Last week, OOXML–an XML format designed for Microsoft’s office suite–was approved as a standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). In past articles1 2, we have discussed problems with voting irregularities, the use of a fast-track process without adequate industry review, proprietary Microsoft technologies used without specification, and other problems. Now that OOXML has been approved despite these objections, let’s take a look at the standardization process and the impact that OOXML’s approval will have in the office suite space.

Watching the evolution of open source tools for video editing and manipulation over the last 10 years has been less than a thrilling experience. But are things about to change for the better in the near future? Can even the people most disenchanted with the current state of affairs feel tempted to regain a spark of hope?

Hewlett-Packard's Unix team has rolled out a fresh release of the HP-UX operating system, and has yet again fiddled with the various flavors of the software that customers can acquire. HP-UX 11i v3 Update 2 (no, seriously) features some tweaks to the kernel and elsewhere, providing what HP claims is a 20 per cent performance boost over v3's initial release. HP also claims Update 2 can double the network speed for certain workloads.

Power management on computers has three parts: selecting devices that are more power-efficient, tuning your systems to run more efficiently, and configuring systems to use less power during periods of inactivity. Servers, desktop machines, and laptops usually need different power management schemes; there isn't a one-size-fits-all.

What sort of impact can you expect from switching a machine from the Gigabit Ethernet NIC that come on its motherboard to a higher-end Intel desktop NIC? I benchmarked two common gigabit NICs found on motherboards against two Intel PCIe desktop gigabit NICs, targeting the specific purpose of accessing an NFS share over the network. The short version: throughput for sequential read/write operations didn't improve much, but latency was much better, allowing anything that needs a network round trip, like create, delete, and seek, to work much faster.

Software teams must act to protect systems and development projects from revenge attacks by disgruntled current and former employees. So says Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute's CERT, which is advising organizations take basic steps including code encryption, enforcement of code-change and access controls, reading their log monitors and denying access to non-project staff, such as systems administrators.

If you're looking for a GNOME desktop for the popular PCLinuxOS (PCLOS), then newly released PCLinuxOS Gnome might be for you. PCLinuxOS Gnome is a community-developed Linux distribution built on the official PCLinuxOS MiniMe 2008 distribution, which is a minimized system containing the bare-bones necessities for a running system, a skeletal window manager, and a remastering tool. PCLinuxOS itself, known for its ease of use, beauty, and functionality, is loosely based on Mandriva Linux. It retains the RPM package format, ports the Mandriva Control Center and live installer, and focuses primarily upon KDE. It also contains components from Gentoo, openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu. The distro's developers tend to adapt the best elements of some of the best distros available for their own distribution. They tweak, customize, and rebuild each package for PCLOS, creating a fast and stable environment.

You can install and run Ubuntu from within Windows without any risk of accidentally deleting your existing programs and files by using Wubi, an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users. Unlike UNetbootin, which installs Linux on a hard disk partition, Wubi works by installing Ubuntu within a file stored on your Windows drive, and adding itself to the Windows boot.ini file to allow you to choose between Windows and Linux at boot time. Wubi is based on Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support (LTS), which will be released this April. Both Wubi and Ubuntu 8.04 are available now in stable beta versions.

In this age of multi-core processors and 3-D desktops, some people still get work done on old resource-strapped single-core machines, thanks to programs like the AbiWord word processor. The latest stable AbiWord 2.6.0 release was unveiled last month, two years after the software's last stable release. Feature-wise, the little cross-platform word processor has closed the gap with heavyweight OpenOffice.org Writer, but it suffers from the oldest Linux ill of all -- it's a pain to install.