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Hi,
I had translated the official answer of Sergio Amadeu to the press regarding this issue. While there is no proccess, Amadeu received an offical judicial notification asking for an apologize in 48 hours. The original note is on the site of the CIPSGA, a local NGO commited to free software. There are other related news on CIPSGA site as well, including a microsoft answer (I will not loose my time translating that - use the fish).

Notice to the Press- Sérgio Amadeu
In attention to the national and international press demand, which supports the brazillian government in this moment without precedent in History, in which the director of an important puclic institution in this country sufferes personally the action of those interested in keeping an hegemonic model, write, after hearing my lawyers, state that the justice act enacted against me is, in itself, so unexpected and outrageous, that it doesn't deserve an answer.

On the other hand, I'd like to state that the contraction of software preserving the values of freedom and opennes fis, for the Brazilan Governent, a question linked to the very core of the democratic principles. And why a long and painfull path has passed for we to get at the current status of democraticy on this Country, we shall stand firm in our fight.

If democracy is a value filled with ideologies, it is never an insgnificant factor. If democracy is a dream, it is a dream from which this Country will nerver wake again.

The future is free.

SÉRGIO AMADEU DA SILVEIRA
Diretor-Presidente
Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia da Informação

Hi,
I had translated the official answer of Sergio Amadeu to the press regarding this issue. While there is no proccess, Amadeu received an offical judicial notification asking for an apologize in 48 hours. The original note is on the site of the CIPSGA, a local NGO commited to free software. There are other related news on CIPSGA site as well, including a microsoft answer (I will not loose my time translating that - use the fish).

Notice to the Press- Sérgio Amadeu
In attention to the national and international press demand, which supports the brazillian government in this moment without precedent in History, in which the director of an important puclic institution in this country sufferes personally the action of those interested in keeping an hegemonic model, write, after hearing my lawyers, state that the justice act enacted against me is, in itself, so unexpected and outrageous, that it doesn't deserve an answer.

On the other hand, I'd like to state that the contraction of software preserving the values of freedom and opennes fis, for the Brazilan Governent, a question linked to the very core of the democratic principles. And why a long and painfull path has passed for we to get at the current status of democraticy on this Country, we shall stand firm in our fight.

If democracy is a value filled with ideologies, it is never an insgnificant factor. If democracy is a dream, it is a dream from which this Country will nerver wake again.

The future is free.

SÉRGIO AMADEU DA SILVEIRA
Diretor-Presidente
Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia da Informação

Hi,
I had translated the official answer of Sergio Amadeu to the press regarding this issue. While there is no proccess, Amadeu received an offical judicial notification asking for an apologize in 48 hours. The original note is on the site of the CIPSGA, a local NGO commited to free software. There are other related news on CIPSGA site as well, including a microsoft answer (I will not loose my time translating that - use the fish).

Notice to the Press- Sérgio Amadeu
In attention to the national and international press demand, which supports the brazillian government in this moment without precedent in History, in which the director of an important puclic institution in this country sufferes personally the action of those interested in keeping an hegemonic model, write, after hearing my lawyers, state that the justice act enacted against me is, in itself, so unexpected and outrageous, that it doesn't deserve an answer.

On the other hand, I'd like to state that the contraction of software preserving the values of freedom and opennes fis, for the Brazilan Governent, a question linked to the very core of the democratic principles. And why a long and painfull path has passed for we to get at the current status of democraticy on this Country, we shall stand firm in our fight.

If democracy is a value filled with ideologies, it is never an insgnificant factor. If democracy is a dream, it is a dream from which this Country will nerver wake again.

The future is free.

SÉRGIO AMADEU DA SILVEIRA
Diretor-Presidente
Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia da Informação

I'm a big Galeon fan, have been since early days, but am currently running 1.2.5, so I haven't seen the 1.3 problems. I also keep a fairly popular Nix Browser Reviews page.

I'm not much of a GNOME fan, and note the extensive GNOME deps as a misfeature of Galeon -- recently rediscovered as it turns out that some user.js prefs are ignored and need to be set through gconf instead (user-agent). Though I can see some benefits in principle, the results of GNOME in terms of the actual desktop are not to my personal liking. Fortunately, this doesn't get in the way of running WindowMaker instead.

There's a lot of assumed knowledge about the 1.3 issues in the interview. Could someone point to where this has been discussed?

Pitching my own $0.02: I've got lightweight browsers. I'm not looking for that in the niche Galeon currently fills. I'm also not looking for the fscking kitchen sink (browser, mail, news, composer...). A browser, but a solid browser, with user-friendly preferences, giving solid user control over presentation, privacy, security, with stability and decent performance. But wait, I already covered that rant....

If Galeon's seriously fscked up (and its slavish devotion to GNOME has always been more a detraction than a benefit), I'll be happy to move on. Pity losing a few years of accomodation, configuration, and utility.

Strongly recommend the core team listen to its users.

> These machines was simple, using standard and cheaps technologies

MS Windows CE is anything but standard and cheap. Make it proprietary, non-standards-compliant, not-so-popular and expensive. The previous system was based on a proprietary VM DOS clone.

> The paper trail was used on some machines on the last election, and as the only moving part of it, was the main defect source.

Well, that is exactly one of the advantages of mechanics: unlike software, it tend to fail badly enough to be noted by humans. Software can introduce or allow all kinds of errors without anyone noticing.

> The only concern with these machine are that the rom code aren't public available, due to problems with vendor's copyrights, but are audited by well know and trusted Universities like Unicamp.

Far from being the only concern, since computer illiteracy and lack of audit trail were also big concerns. Also it was not the ROM code, but the whole system from firmware to application software, including MS WinCE in between, wasn't properly audited. Universities aren't trusted in Brazil, being underfunded and having generally low standards of achievement if compared to Europe, North America and Far East. And not "Universities", but several individuals representing Universities, companies and political parties were allowed only a few days in a clean room under NDA. IBM's representative even refused to sign the NDA, since it made the whole process innocuous.

Search CIPSGA for more information, if you can read Portuguese (or Spanish, it's similar enough.

Yes well I'm sure I could write a browser that really kicks ass, if, like NS3 it ignores all stylesheets, screws up tables and frames and only parses a handful of tags.

Don't bother, someone else already has. It's a GTK-based browser called Dillo.
And it does kick ass.

If you like your browser simple and fast try Phoenix. However if you want SIMPLE and FAST then Dillo is the one to go for. Though perhaps not on Win32.

As fo web browsers, you could always use Dillo. It may be lacking in feutures(such as frames) but it is very lightweight. Only other option I would think that you have is useing Lynx. Or you could always pick up a Pentium 2 for $50 =)

Please do not blame Opera for not being open source. [snip] I am not using Opera, because I have strong computer and I can waste resources for such product like Mozilla. But there are places when Mozilla is not a right thing.

The whole "web standards" debate is stupid, and most especially one sided sites like Zeldman's webstandards.org. All that Zeldman and his cronies are doing is try to push new standards ahead of sane development, probably just so that he won't have to deal with standards like HTML. He has a point, though, as the older standards are lame and the newer standards are better. But he lacks the ability to understand that browser development and deployment will always lag behind, and why. The sad thing is that his kind of suckered lots of web developers into believing that all they have to do is blame the user for having an old browser and all will become better because all users will upgrade. Truth is, that's not always possible or feasible.

A tour of web sites using the Zeldman style with an older browser will generally work, as he does not advocate breaking them. But what you do get is less than what that browser is capable of. For example, browsers have for ages supported setting a background color or even a background image in HTML. Zeldmanistas refuse to set the background color, or in some cases, intentionally set it to something different than what is set in CSS. So while the site looks fine with CSS, without CSS you get maybe stark gray, or worse, black with black text over it. So what's actually going on here is not a case of these developers adhering to web standards, but rather, they are picking and choosing the standards they want to use, such as by not making use of HTML completely and correctly. So why should he any right to expect that others will choose to use newer standards like CSS or XML or whatever.

There is also a very good reason to make a web site that works with older browsers. Many groups are now operating in lower income urban areas carrying out programs to get older computers donated to them from businesses that are doing the upgrading. Because of the economy, the number of businesses doing upgrades has dropped off and most donations are rather old. What this means is that most of the people receiving these computers are getting something in the late 486 or early Pentium range, and at best a copy of Windows 95, which is usually all (other than BSD or Linux, which hasn't made it to these programs that I've seen yet ... something for us to get more involved in I suppose) that these old machines with slow CPU, small memory, and limited hard drive capacity can handle. So they end up with usually an old Netscape version 3 browser (Java and Javascript are hopelessly broken, and CSS is non-existant). Newer browsers overwhelm the machine, if they even fit at all.

This "economic accessibility" isn't yet addressed by law, and may never be. Private business does not have to cater to them. So the banks and other financial institutions listed with specific browser requirements aren't in violation. And besides, we're talking about people who can't afford a computer and have to use limited time community access ISPs just to get online (if the phone and electric bill are paid up). I'm sure the financial institutions have no interest in extending them credit.

While businesses probably should have a free choice in what, and who, they support, governments OTOH should not. People should have a right to expect their government internet based services to be accessible to all, not just those who can afford a bigger faster computer that can handle the latest obese and overloaded software. And since it is possible to make web sites that not only work well with new standards, but also work well (as well as those standards allow) with older standards that the smaller browsers support, governments should be required to do this in all citizen-facing web sites. In other words, if it can be made to work in a minimal set of standards, it must be made to work that well when that's what's available. Then if it works even better in newer standards in ways that the older standards could never do, that's fine, too.

What I think might be a better approach to this would be to support the development of a not-so-obese web browser, as well as programs to get systems like Linux deployed onto more of the computers being donated to the economically disadvantaged (aside: why are politically correct words so long?).

For PDA use, you should consider porting "dillo". It doesn't do frames or javascript, but it can render most other sites and the executable sizes is about 230k.

From the article:

Overall, the greatest challenges we face are with the International audience -- especially the French, Germans, and Japanese.

I would say they will face a pretty strong challenge here, in Brazil. Recently we have elected a new president, Lula, and he was the only candidate to specifically say the words "Software Livre" (Free Software) while on campaing.

Besides, there are many other points:

1) Our strongest organization that promotes free software, Cipsga, was based at a state (Rio Grande do Sul), that had a governor from the same party as Lula (PT);

2) São Paulo (Brazil biggest city) uses Linux a lot on governamental projects. Over 250 "Infocentros" (info-center) are being built or are already done and they run Linux exclusively. São Paulo's mayor (Marta Suplicy) is from the same party as Lula;

3) Connectiva is from Brazil, it's a profitable Linux company that owns a lot of the South American market share. Also, a Conectiva employee, Marcelo Tosatti, is the maintainer of the version 2.4 of the Linux kernel (but we all knew this, right ;-));

4) Lately, there has been going a lot of speculation about who will be part of the governament. The top contender for the most important Tech and Science position of the governament, the minister (sp?), is a strong advocate of free software;

Here's an evidence that will put a lot more reason into what I said: One week before winning the elections, favorite in every survey, Lula received an invitation from Bill Gates to go to the USA and have a meeting with him. True! This means uncle Bill already understand the "threat" that Lula represents to his company, and its business model.

On a side note: I have a website called Inércia Sensorial with news about technology here in Brazil, and looking at my referers log, I see a lot of Google searchs that have been increasing lately, associating Lula and the free software dream and fight. Check it out what some people have searched:

Lilus Lula

Mr. Gates and Mr. da Silva (actually, that's a title from an article which I linked at my website)

So, look at Brazil for the next couple years. I am sure a lot of pro-active actions will be taken by our governament.

called Dillo that works for casual browsing. It has much fewer bugs and still retains all the functionality needed to have a decent web experience. Unfortunately there are no Windows or Mac ports.

The style of web browsing I use is to load all the links I want to read in new windows by clicking on them with the middle button. Then they can be loading in the background while I read the first part of the article. It forms a kind of queue of pages to read, so when I've finished reading the first page I just close that window and go on to the next (which is ready instantly). The result is up to a hundred browser windows open at once - but I know that I'm not the only person who browses like this. Of course, it helps to have a browser which can open lots of windows without thrashing and slowing the machine to a crawl (like Dillo) or one that has tabbed browsing.

This style of following links can also work well with offline browsing and a proxy server designed for offline use like WWWOFFLE. If you go online briefly and click on all the links you want to load, the proxy remembers to download them. Then a few minutes later you can go online again and all the pages will be loaded ASAP. Once they've loaded you can disconnect again and continue browsing. This makes the most sense for people whose internet access is metered (hmm, I wonder if something like this could work for palmtops).

But what I'd really like to see in a browser is an explicit 'to read' queue. When you click on a link with the middle button, it doesn't immediately open in a new window or tab but instead is added to the queue and starts downloading in the background. On the browser's toolbar there is a 'next page' button which goes to the next URL you have marked for reading.

Automatic prefetching of all links from a page, la wget -r, would be crazy for many heavily-linked sites. But you could have heuristics for it or specify particular sites where the link following should be more aggressive.

You want absolutely raw speed in a graphical browser? One word... Dillo. Without a doubt, the smallest, fastest browser I've ever used. It loads in about 0.03 seconds here, and renders all of Slashdot's main page in about 0.8 seconds.

This is why they are working on a fully modular implementation for 0.5, so that you can get the browser, only the browser, but also get mail and news if you want it, and maybe those who like Chatzilla can get that, too.

In a way I think that Phoenix is a great idea - I've always wondered why Mozilla needed to be so huge and slow compared to my old favorite Opera. However, I can't help but think it's really Skipstone done rong. If they're trashing Mozilla compatibility for speed, why keep XUL? I love GTK+ and I think Skipstone makes for a great browser, although it does need some bugs fixed, and it's still too big. I think Dillo is for me, but not functional enough to be usable.

BTW I ran into a really annoying bug with Mozilla's mail client (1.1) the other day. Some of my accounts can't send mail because Mozilla ``can't find SMTP server %S''. Changing things in the accout setting didn't help, so I edited my prefs.js by hand (I had only one SMTP server configured, so I just did a s/smtp[0-9]/smtp1/g. This fixed the problem for a while, then it reappeared. I edited my prefs.js again, and now the mail client allocates outrageous amounts of memory on startup (hundreds of megabytes). I can't really file a bug report because I don't know what triggers either bug, can anybody help me?

---
One day, authors will be judged by the content of their sites, and not the color of their characters.

If you like Dillo, but it doesn't have the features you need, try Links. No, it's not Lynx, it's a graphical browser, and it's fast.

Anyone know if it's faster that Galeon / Skipstone ? I've been looking for a good browser for my old laptop, Dillo is the only thing fast enough, but it doesn't support JavaScript, CSS, SSL, etc.

"One thing that I found kind of a pain was that when you first start up Phoenix, it doesn't go straight to your home page. You go to a user menu where you select a username to launch the browser."
That is dumb. Since all modern OS's (even Windows) are now multiuser, each computer user should have their own user-name anyway.

It's small, (300K), fast, and free. What else could you possibly want?

Unfortunately, the Brasilian electronic voting system reliability and security are flawed. Brasilians are trusting it more out of hope in fundamental human goodness and general political progress, meaning sure, no one will attempt electoral fraud nowadays, coupled to general technical illiteracy, than because it was proven good. Because it was not.

Only a few computerised ballots leave a paper trail for vote audit. Many of them run a customised MS WinCE version. There were only five days to only a few accredit technicians from the political parties to audit the whole kabooza. Requests for proper auditing went unheeded by the electoral authorities, which are astoundingly technical illiterate and moreover refuse to educate themselves.

Here are a proven flaw on the self-auditing portion of the system, a first-person account of the absurdity of the audit attempt, and an analysis of some failures in the auditing process. All in Portuguese, use the Fish!

Unfortunately, the Brasilian electronic voting system reliability and security are flawed. Brasilians are trusting it more out of hope in fundamental human goodness and general political progress, meaning sure, no one will attempt electoral fraud nowadays, coupled to general technical illiteracy, than because it was proven good. Because it was not.

Only a few computerised ballots leave a paper trail for vote audit. Many of them run a customised MS WinCE version. There were only five days to only a few accredit technicians from the political parties to audit the whole kabooza. Requests for proper auditing went unheeded by the electoral authorities, which are astoundingly technical illiterate and moreover refuse to educate themselves.

Here are a proven flaw on the self-auditing portion of the system, a first-person account of the absurdity of the audit attempt, and an analysis of some failures in the auditing process. All in Portuguese, use the Fish!

Unfortunately, the Brasilian electronic voting system reliability and security are flawed. Brasilians are trusting it more out of hope in fundamental human goodness and general political progress, meaning sure, no one will attempt electoral fraud nowadays, coupled to general technical illiteracy, than because it was proven good. Because it was not.

Only a few computerised ballots leave a paper trail for vote audit. Many of them run a customised MS WinCE version. There were only five days to only a few accredit technicians from the political parties to audit the whole kabooza. Requests for proper auditing went unheeded by the electoral authorities, which are astoundingly technical illiterate and moreover refuse to educate themselves.

Here are a proven flaw on the self-auditing portion of the system, a first-person account of the absurdity of the audit attempt, and an analysis of some failures in the auditing process. All in Portuguese, use the Fish!

I'm having a heck of a time finding a lean browser to run on this thing. I haven't even attempted Mozilla. Galeon is too big, sending my poor machine deep into swap. I tried downloading Opera, but it kept complaining about not finding the right version of libXm.so, even with the statically-linked version.

I see lots of talk about how fast this Phoenix is, but I've yet to see *any* mention about its memory footprint. Is it really lean, or is it simply lean as compared to Mozilla?

I now have dillo running, and it looks promising. Any other suggestions?

(No, buying a new computer is not an option. I remember running browsers on my old 486, so this shouldn't be impossible!)

Use Dillo:

Dillo

It's not perfect, but it is extremely fast, and very useful. It even got a mention on Linux Today:

Linux today article on Dillo.

I agree with you...to a point. I myself hate bloated browsers. If you want to have easier-to-manage bookmarks, then pull the functionality out of the browser and integrate it with the window manager menu system. Tabs are nice if you want tabs, but multiple windows are fine with me as long as I can minimize the ones I'm not looking at momentarily. Email? Just give me a setting that directs mailto: tags to MH or whatever I use for email. But above all, give me a fast, secure web browser that doesn't require a lot of memory and take 45 seconds to load on a PIII. That's why I'm excited about Dillo. Galeon, despite the hours it takes to build (thanks to the mozilla engine and gnome), is on the right track. But Dillo is even better.

Dillo is faster.

Have you ever tried Dillo?

I'm guessing not. Try it, and you will realize just how much time is wasted rendering in most browsers.

It needs work, but Dillo is the fastest graphical browser I've ever used. As fast if not faster than a text-only browser like lynx, links or w3m. Galeon feels incredibly slow next to Dillo, and Galeon usually feels pretty fast to me.

Most people seem to think that there is just a choice of Netscape(tm), Mozilla(tm), Opera(tm), or Lynx(tm)...

Not so! This browser is the best I've ever seen:

http://dillo.cipsga.org.br/

I'm browsing this with dillo and it can't do copy/paste of the url, so links are always usefull to some people...

While Dillo is still missing some features like Java, and JavaScript, it is by far, much faster then Opera. Besides being fast it is very light.
Check out of the screenshots from this wonderful browser.
PS: I'm posting this in Dillo, too!

While Dillo is still missing some features like Java, and JavaScript, it is by far, much faster then Opera. Besides being fast it is very light.
Check out of the screenshots from this wonderful browser.
PS: I'm posting this in Dillo, too!

Obligatory browser-plugging comment: Dillo is free and very fast. It doesn't support frames or Javascript, but they suck anyway. I'm using it to read Slashdot and post this comment now (while pouring hot grits down my pants ;-)).

Sure. Just about any UNIX desktop environment is as flexible as LiteStep. Roll your own...don't feel like you just need to use KDE or GNOME or something like that. I've got a rather nice desktop with sawfish, the sawfish pager, all status information being shown via gkrellm, and programs launched via the keyboard using xbindkeys. No GNOME or KDE flavoring necessary.

AfterStep is probably the closest in functionality to LiteStep, but I personally prefer Enlightenment if you're looking for flash, Sawfish if you're looking for functionality, and Black Box if you're looking for speed.

Steps in roll-your-own:

Choose a base desktop environment (keep in mind that you can just mix and match bits of them...I used to use the GNOME panel without the rest of GNOME, and a roommate uses GNOME apps with the KDE environment):
None
GNOME
KDE
ROX
foXdesktop
Perltop
Equinox
XFce
Once you've chosen a desktop environment (or the lack of one), and possibly removed the parts of it that you don't like (with GNOME, I wholeheartedly suggest trying it without Nautilus, possibly without anything but the panel), then you get to choose a dock. Your current desktop may or may not include a dock/panel/wharf.

If it doesn't, icedock provides an environment-independent wharf for the afterstep-style wharf system -- swallowing apps.
gkrellm (seems to be currently down) makes for a nice status-monitor style dock.
Or you can make your own impromptu dock...I've built them before by starting xload and xlock with proper geometry arguments to stack them on top of each other, and having sawfish make the windows sticky and slap 'em at the edge of the screen.
Now a window manager. There are so many of these that I'm not going to list them all. I'll mention a few notables:
sawfish is a fairly fast, *extremely* flexible (everything's written in lisp, much like emacs) window manager that uses gtk. Currently GNOME's default. I love this thing, but it doesn't come with a pager, so you either need to use a base desktop environment with a pager or use spager.
enlightenment is, at least until the next major release, still a window manager and not a desktop environment. Lots of emphasis on eye candy.
ion, a novel window manager that's designed to be managed entirely with the keyboard and never overlap windows.
blackbox is what I'd suggest if you needed a fast environment that still looked nice.

Most WMs support launching programs with given key combinations. I'd advise against this. The excellent XBindKeys is window-manager independent, quite capable, allows you to kill off your window manager and still use keys to start programs, etc. Plus, there's a nice benefit to using a different program than your window manager to launch programs. If you never launch external programs with your WM, you can renice -10 `pidof sawfish` or whatever your window manager is. Making your window manager (and X) meaner with respect to CPU scheduling makes for a much more snappy environment when edge flipping or the like. Sure, it might take a sec for the mozilla windows in the background to finish redrawing when I flip to a new desktop, but in the meantime I can do my work without waiting around for them.

The reason you don't want to make your WM meaner if you use it to launch programs is that then all the programs will also be equally mean.

Decide on the Big Four applications of any X desktop. Text editor, web browser, file manager, and terminal emulator.

Text editor:
I can't possibly cover this holy war here. My personal preference is xemacs, which is a bit of a learning curve for new users from Windows, but well worth it in power in the long run. You may want something that meshes more with the rest of your chosen desktop environment.

Web browser:
Just because KDE uses Konqueror and GNOME uses galeon by default is no reason to stick with those. Of course, you also can use either Konq without KDE or galeon without GNOME. You're rolling your own environment!
mozilla is now (after years of work) a good web browser. Big, still slow and still RAM-hungry, but usably so.
dillo Lightweight, very fast, pretty stable, very screen-space efficient...I can't say enough good things about dillo. If you use dillo as your primary browser, be aware of the fact that it has fewer features than the large browsers, that it doesn't currently (without a patch) support SSL, that it uses a UNIXish config-file preferences interface, and that it doesn't lay out nested tables or wrap text around images the same way Mozilla does. I keep Mozilla around as a backup browser, but dillo is so freakishly fast that it's hard to want to use anything else.
There are a few other browsers, but Konqueror, Mozilla, and dillo are (IMHO) the big GUI players on Linux. Amaya is a specialty browser, Opera (thanks to its MDI interface) doesn't seem to have caught on much in the Linux world, and Navigator 4.x is definitely on its way out the door.

File manager:
You may choose to simply use a command-line shell and the standard file utilities (cp, rm, ls) to do your file management -- I do, and I've tried hard to give other things a chance. But if you prefer to use a specalized GUI tool:
Konqueror can be used, even if you aren't using KDE (you do, of course, need the KDE libraries installed). Faster than gecko (the engine in mozilla and galeon) and almost as standards compliant, Konqueror has a lot of fans.
GMC is no longer being developed, but it's a reasonable lightweight interface.
Nautilus, the current official GNOME file manager is big, slow, RAM-hungry, and pretty. Not sure how well Nautilus works outside of GNOME (given that Konqueror can work outside of KDE, I would expect this capability of Nautilus).
ROX filer is a very fast little gtk file manager.
There are a lot of file managers out there, so I won't list them all, especially as I'm happy with just bash and the POSIX tools.

Terminal emulator:
GNOME and KDE both come with terminal emulators -- gnome-terminal and Konsole. I'm not very impressed with either -- they're both very slow and aren't available apart from their associated desktop environment. Konsole supports tabbed terminals, which some people may like. Both of them are fairly easy to configure, and are suitable for newbies to work with.
Multi Gnome Terminal extends gnome-terminal significantly with Konsole-style tabs and a set of other features. If you like gnome-terminal, you should probably consider using this instead.
Eterm is a RAM-heavy terminal emulator that was designed to look nice. For all the tinting and blending it can do, reasonably fast.
Aterm seems to be basically a less featureful, less memory-hungry Eterm-like terminal.
xterm is the reasonably fast not-so-pretty fairly RAM-hungry terminal that's used all over the world.
rxvt is easily my favorite terminal emulator. rxvt uses less RAM than anything else out there, and is incredibly fast. You can compile in only the features you want to use (which can, of course, also be disabled at runtime). Background images are supported, but emphasis is not much on eye candy. Very configurable. The biggest drawback is that configuration is through traditional UNIX methods, which may scare away some -- X resources, command line options, compile-time options.

Whatever you do, choose a set of software that you like, and remember -- your desktop environment is based on Linux, which means it should composed of exactly the parts that you like most. Have fun!

A shame that the very fast and neat Dillo wasn't mentioned.

> in the case of Brazil, passing legislation forcing people to use open source

Only some states and municipalities are requiring free software in Brazil. The mostly important sphere of government, the federal (Union) one, still is deeply commited to Microsoft, to the point of preferring it to Brazil’s own Conectiva GNU/Linux. You can read more about it at CIPSGA’s old stories.

If you're a Linux user, try dillo. Lightweight and fast. Like opera but more so.