According to this story, a Linux company, Mandriva, had sold computers with a customisable, open source operating system to the Nigerian government at a very low price. According to the head of Mandriva, the reason the Nigerian government chose their solution was because it could be customised to suit the customer's needs. The machines were tested, the government signed for a consignment of 17,000 computers, and the company started delivering. Suddenly, TSC, the company handling the contract on behalf of the government said to Mandriva, "we will pay you for your software, but after you supply the computers with it installed, we will delete it and install Microsoft Windows".

Now, Windows is not customisable, and there are several undocumented little programs that can send information back to Microsoft if you don't take steps to stop them. Fortunately, someone at the government funding agency in Nigeria, Nigeria's Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF), seems to have their head screwed on right, saw through the scam that the arrangement is, and stepped in to shut it down. Did I hear you say "Hooray!"? Well, it's not quite as simple as that.

It turns out that "Microsoft is still negotiating an agreement that would give TSC US$400,000 (£190,323) for marketing activities around the Classmate PCs when those computers are converted to Windows" according to Microsoft's Nigeria Country Manager, Chinenye Mba-Uzoukwu (see here). Mandriva's François Bancilhon, in a sarcasm-laden letter to Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, says the deal got "more competitive". Others might say it got dirty. Others may even say that Microsoft is bribing TSC. Or what would you call a situation where someone is paid to replace a perfectly good operating system with a bloated, buggy, and insecure one?

The Nigerian government, or its anti-corruption agency, the EFCC, must investigate who has been offered and obviously agreed to take money in exchange for compromising not only the security of Nigeria's IT infrastructure, but perhaps more importantly, potentially lock in the next generation of Nigerians into an operating system that other countries are rejecting in their national IT infrastructure. Anybody found guilty should be charged with nothing less than treason.

The One Laptop Per Child (laptop.org) is a US$100 laptop that promises to revolutionise education and development among some of the world's poorest children. According to the OLPC Foundation, "starting November 12, One Laptop Per Child will be offering a Give 1 Get 1 Program for a brief window of time in North America. For $399, you will be purchasing two XO laptops—one that will be sent to empower a child to learn in a developing nation, and one that will be sent to your child at home." In other words, $400 gets your child a laptop, and another one is sent to a needy child in the developing world. And, your child gets a pen-pal in that child, since they can stay in touch via e-mail. You can donate here.

As they say, touch a child's life and you never know what other lives might be touched in turn. Read more about the OLPC and the "Get 1 Give 1" program in this New York Times article.

There has been a lot of negative comments about what's wrong with the laptop — no hard drive, no CD/DVD drive, etc. But until you see one in operation, you have no idea what a powerful idea this rabbit-eared laptop represents, and about its potential to change the world. This YouTube video review by David Pogue of the New York Times also shows what a powerful kid-magnet the OLPC is.

According to Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC founder and former chairman of MIT's Media Lab, complaining about the perceived shortcomings of the laptop is "as if people spent all of their attention focusing on Columbus’s boat and not on where he was going". Walter Bender, a computer researcher who served as director of the Media Laboratory after Mr. Negroponte and now heads software development for the laptop project, likens the XO to a Trojan Horse — “the soldiers inside this Trojan horse are children with laptops.”

Note: I'm assuming that you've already paired your mouse to your computer

FC6 has two startup scripts in /etc/init.d which make the Bluetooth mouse work — bluetooth and hidd — and these are both enabled by default. hidd is the daemon / program that's really responsible for connecting to the mouse — type man hidd for available options and commands — and the startup script of the same name simply wraps the command to fit into the usual command <start | stop | restart> format. It uses an environment variable HIDDARGS located in /etc/sysconfig/hidd.

HIDDARGS is set by default to "--server". However, this only serves to start the server (duh) and does nothing to actually locate and connect to the mouse. This requires either the hidd --search or hidd --connect XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX command (XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX is the address of the Bluetooth mouse. [I prefer to use the --connect command, as I don't want to connect to any random device that is found with the --search command.]

However, it seems that these commands cannot be passed to hidd simultaneously with the --server command.

With the upgrade from FC5 to FC6, I decided to also upgrade Adobe Acrobat Reader from version 7.0.5 to version 7.0.8. However, I found that when I start this package from the menu, it appears as if nothing happens. I use KDE, but as far as I know, the behaviour is the same under GNOME.

Starting the program from the command line gives an endless output of

syntax error
syntax error
syntax error

I found the fix on Remi Collet's website. The posting is in French, so for the sake of those who don't understand French, simply login as root, and type the commands below.

cd /tmp 
wget http://remi.collet.free.fr/files/acroread.patch 
cd /usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/bin 
patch -b < /tmp/acroread.patch

I upgraded from FC5 to FC6 a few days ago (Dec. 17, 2006), and although the process was mostly painless, I found it tough to track down information about resolving some issues. So, I thought I'd collect some of what I've found here, in the hope that others might be helped:

Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0.8

If you start this package from the menu, you don't see anything happen. I use KDE, but the behaviour is the same under GNOME. Starting from the command line gives an endless output of

syntax error
syntax error
syntax error

I found the fix here. The posting is in French, so for the sake of those who don't understand French, just give the command below as root.

This HOWTO describes the installation of the USB Ralink WLAN + Pen Drive wireless adapter for Fedora operation, using ndiswrapper and the Windows XP drivers for the device.

The information here is likely to be of benefit mostly to people in New Zealand (and possibly Australia), as the device in question is sold by Dick Smith Electronics (DSE) in New Zealand as the DSE 802.11g WLAN (USB), with a product code of XH83344.

UPDATE: You'll probably find that the information available on the ndiswrapper website on this topic is more than adequate to meet your requirements, so I've just updated the known working cards wiki with specific information for the adapter described here. However, should you need further help, you can post a comment here.