I've been using and advocating free software for around six years. When studying and then working as a freelance writer, migrating an office seemed so simple -- draw up a list of comparable programs and, over a reasonable period, move your staff across. But over the past few weeks I've been trying to use Ubuntu Gutsy on my desktop PC in a Windows-based office, and whilst most things work just fine, it's far from the seamless integration I was hoping for.

There are some things a free desktop just can't do without: a web browser, music player and, oh yes, clipart! Looking at the selection available by default on a standard Linux install, you might begin to envy your colleagues who use Microsoft Word, and then you notice their snazzy font selection. Well worry no more, for two projects are here to supply all the illegible fonts and amusing stick men your hard drive can keep track of.

With the UK Government considering yet another extension of copyright, demonstrating the value of the public domain is a hot topic for free culture advocates. When the copyright expires on creative works they enter the "public domain", a digital wild west with no legal restrictions on their use. The public domain illustrates a classic free culture dilemna: the absence of restrictions is useful, but the ability to get hold of a copy is equally important, and it's difficult to claim you have much creative freedom without both.

In their zeal to denounce certain license clauses, some free culture advocates have fallen back on definitions to advocate their cause. But such definitions make hasty assumptions about the nature of cultural practice. It's just not a proper movement without semantic squabbles. Where would Linux be without the snappy FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) catchphrase?

Hundreds of KDE contributors converged on Dublin in September for the annual KDE conference, aKademy. With two days of presentations, the general assembly of the membership organisation and a five day coding marathon, attendees were bombarded with news, ideas and beer. The main focus of aKademy this year was of course KDE 4, the next generation of the popular desktop, due to be released sometime next year. But with time given over to the OpenDocument movement, human-computer interaction research and the general assembly, aKademy reflected the diversity and maturity of the project.

Like any large organisation, the GNOME Project faces a formidable challenge in maintaining an effective Web site. Trying the balance the demands of promotion, documentation, and community coordination is made all the more difficult when you only have volunteers to do the work. But over the past year the GNOME community has developed and begun to execute a well-defined process to refocus and rejuvenate its much-neglected Web presence.

According to Greek myth, when Theseus went to defeat the Minotaur in Crete, he was able to find his way out of the labyrinth by laying and then following a thread he was given by Ariadne, a Cretan princess. Whilst laying a GPS breadcrumb trail on bike rides, later to be converted into a map, I like to think of myself as a latter-day Ariadne.

A battle over Open Document Format (ODF) and the treatment of open standards is taking place deep in the bureaucracy of the European Commission. The information came to light during aKademy, the KDE world summit, in Dublin last month.

Creative Commons licenses have a totemic status within the free culture movement. Always controversial, yet used for tens of millions of web-based creative works, they have helped bring the ideas of the free software movement to entirely new audiences. But they have also had an uneasy relationship with certain free software communities, in particular the Debian project's legal team. Now, with the drafting of version 3.0 of the generic licenses, issues such as these are being aired.

KOffice has seen a huge surge in exciting feature development in the past year, putting it in the same league as free software giants such as OpenOffice.org and The GIMP, and even surpassing them in places. With version 1.6 due out this Sunday (October 15) it's timely that Krita, KOffice's painting application, is now leading an effort to develop a fairly boring feature, an open graphics file format.