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Gran Paradiso Alpha 2, an early developer milestone aimed at testers and web application developers, has been released. This is the second milestone released from the Gecko 1.9 branch. There are no significant user interface changes. Core layout and rendering changes include support for the Web Applications 1.0 API for changing stylesheets, ACID2 test compliance, and improvements in the Cairo graphics layer. As mentioned earlier, Gran Paradiso the project codename for Firefox 3.

IBM said on Sunday it will offer an open desktop software system for businesses that puts the cost of managing Apple or Linux computers on a more equal footing with Microsoft's Windows software, improving the economics of Windows alternatives.

Welcome to Free Software Magazine’s fortnightly newsletter, keeping you up to date with all things free software! Enjoy!

The One Laptop Per Child platform was always going to present some interesting security challenges. Millions of identical, network-attached systems will be deployed into some remote parts of the world, where they will be managed by people who are not security experts. The systems will be obvious targets for theft, self-propagating malware, and the creation of botnets. None of these activities feature highly on the OLPC project's list of educational objectives, so it stands to reason that some significant thought needs to go into how to prevent them.

In this article we are going to discuss how to create a PHP-based RSS reader. It would be helpful if you know something about XML, but not really necessary. RSS documents have three main tags: Title, Link and Description. And they all do exactly what their names suggest. I will go into detail about these tags in my second article dealing with “building an RSS file.” For now, we will only focus on the “reading” part of the article.

It's a mixed bag this week from Studio Dave. I'll skip the preliminaries and just invite you to dive in and check out some of the latest news from the ever-expanding world of Linux sound and music software. There's far more going on than I can possibly cover in my allotted space, but here's a quick survey of some recent remarkable activity.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Much-requested "Page scaling" zoom mode introduced to KHTML. Work on the XPS document format backend, and intergration of a Phonon-based audio player for embedded document sounds in okular. More maps added to KGeography. KMines becomes the latest game to move toward a scalable graphics interface, with continued work on KBlackBox and KGoldRunner. scuba and wmap datasource additions to Kst.

Today, in a friendly 3-hour long meeting, the location of the Debian annual conference for 2008 was chosen, and it will be the city of Mar del Plata, Argentina.

LXer Feature: 11-Feb-2007

Here is a review of some the events and people I talked too on the second day of SCaLE 5x in Los Angeles.

James Ketrenos announced a new 80211 based driver for the Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection adapter. He explains, "this new driver uses the new d80211 subsystem previously only available as part of the wireless-dev tree." An earlier incarnation of the driver code was much criticized for its inclusion of a userland binary-only daemon [story], prompting the OpenBSD project to create their own blob-free driver for the card [story]. "The [new] iwlwifi driver for the 3945 does not require the user space daemon, but does require a new microcode image," James explained, "over the past year we were able to make the necessary changes to the microcode used with the 3945 such that we were able to remove the regulatory daemon."

OpenOffice is a good suite, yet I'm betting that most of us who get to see, and work with, Office 2007, as I did with the beta version, will suffer from "applications envy." The menu format of Office 2007 is for me rather compelling, delivering a cleaner, crisper interface. The new Word 2007's tools make it easier to do more things with a document quickly, creating impressive formats.

Kodak said Thursday that it had created a new extension in conjunction with Mozilla that would make it easier for users of the popular alternative browser Firefox to upload and share their digital photos. The application supports drag and drop functionality, photo albums, and the ability to add captions directly in the browser window for use when the album is uploaded to Kodak's online gallery.

Today the Southern California Linux Exposition's fifth iteration kicked off with all-day mini-conferences on free and open source software in the health care industry and women in the free/open source software community. Since the sessions on women seemed to be the less popular, least business-friendly, and most interesting of the two subjects, that was the series I decided to sit in on. It was a life-changing experience for all who attended.

LXer Feature: 10-Feb-2007

Here is a review of some the events on first day of SCaLE 5x in Los Angeles.

OpenDocument format was approved as an ISO standard in May 2006. This was important for the free software community because there are free software applications for reading and writing OpenDocument files.

The European Commission has resisted efforts by Microsoft to make it abandon its report into open source software, it was revealed this week. But the EC was swayed into allowing a 10-day period for feedback before completing the report.

O'Reilly Media this week published the third edition of Using Samba: A File and Print Server for Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X. The book targets those needing to support Windows clients on Linux/Unix networks, or access Windows network resources from Linux/Unix clients.

VirtualLogix will demonstrate a multimedia-enabled Linux-based mobile phone reference design powered by a single ARM9 processor, at 3GSM next week in Barcelona. The NXP Nexperia 7210 design could spawn some of the world's first single-core mobile phones running open, "rich" operating systems, such as Linux.

Ubiquiti Networks is shipping what are claimed to be the first-ever mini-PCI-based WiFi radios to boast 600mW transmit power, and the first to support operating temperatures from -45 to 95 degrees Celsius. The ExtremeRange WiFi modules have both been tested extensively under Linux, the company says.

Following the release of the 2.6.20 kernel Andrew Morton posted a list of patches in his -mm kernel, summarizing for each his plans as to whether or not they will be pushed upstream for inclusion in the upcoming 2.6.21 kernel. Andrew commented,"I'm getting fed up of holding onto hundreds of patches against subsystem trees, sending them over and over again and seeing nothing happen. I sent 242 patches out to subsystem maintainers on Monday and look at what's still here." In response to some confusion as to what happens to these patches, he went on explain,"once a subsystem has a subsystem tree (git or quilt) I basically never merge anything which belongs to that tree. It's always originator->mm->subsystemtree->Linus".