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According to a report in the French language publication 01net, the French General Directorate of Public Finance (DGFiP) is switching to Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client for 130,000 users. The switch is happening as part of a merger of two French tax authorities which had different email systems, The Directorate General Tax (DGI) which used Lotus Notes and the Directorate General of Public Accountancy (DGCP) which used Microsoft Outlook.

Since Gnome 2.28 they decided that applications’ menus should be text only, without any icons. I actually like icons in Gnome and don’t think that they were abused in menus. Luckily there is a way to revert to the old behaviour by setting a gconf key.

A Qt developer has brought a piece of KDE to Maemo. After plasmoids, this week brings the Plasma desktop. Also a KDE Maemo mailing list.

Freescale Semiconductor has begun taking orders for a Power Architecture development platform for Android-based products, opening a new category of embedded devices to Google’s open-source mobile operating system.

This update includes enhancements to the JIT compiler, garbage collection technology, JVM serviceability, and an updated XML parser for Java.

An open memo from the U.S. DoD declares that open source software is no worse than traditional software, perhaps even useful.

In response to the news this week that the city of Los Angeles is going Googlefied with a $7.25 million, five-year deal to adopt Gmail, Google Calendar and other applications, Novell’s blog has an interesting rebuttal. Of course, the reason for the city’s switch to Google’s corner of the cloud is to save money that it would otherwise spend on expensive software licenses, and it will save. Still, the Novell blog post is intriguing because it’s a missive from an open source-focused company criticizing the Los Angeles decision with barbs frequently aimed at open source solutions. It claims that L.A. should have opted for Novell’s fee-based Groupwise solution. Huh?

The mobile phone market suffered a six percent drop in shipments year to year, but saw a 5.6 percent improvement over the previous quarter, says IDC. Meanwhile, Motorola, which showed a 6.4 percent yearly drop, according to IDC, posted 3Q earnings that beat analyst predictions.

Despite claims by advanced users, confusion abounds when trying to run two OSes. Matt Hartley offers some possible solutions.

When running a modern Linux graphics driver stack in a composited environment there is a lot less tearing — particularly with regard to video playback, but OpenGL applications too — now than there was in the past, but there is still room for improvement. One of the ways to improve this is by properly controlling the display of buffers with how often the swaps occur and to sync them with the monitor’s refresh rate or the rate at which the compositor is running.