FreeSoftNews

I recently was contacted by a major Unix reseller. The company had a very simple question: with the writing on the wall for Unix growing bigger and bigger with every quarter, which Linux should they adopt?

It’s a good question, and the answer depends not just on the pluses and minuses of each Linux distribution, its distributors, and its channel programs, but what you bring to the table. For example, in the case of the reseller I spoke with, they already had a great deal of in-house Unix and Linux expertise. For them, going with a distribution that had little formal support would work just fine. For a company whose staff had done little more than sell boxes, such a move could be fatal.

linux-watch.com

Smolt is a new hardware profiler that is designed for use by Fedora. Currently it’s compatible for those running Fedora Core 6 or Rawhide. The intent of this project is to get a better understanding for the most commonly used hardware by Fedora users, and the collected statistics are freely available. So if you’re a Fedora 6 user, do your part and fire up yum to grab Smolt and then send in the hardware information! More information on Smolt is available …

Read more at Phoronix

Matthew Dillon has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 1.8: “1.8 is our fifth major DragonFly release. DragonFly’s policy is to only commit bug fixes to release branches. The biggest kernel change in this release is the addition of virtual kernel support and a virtual kernel build target….

Read more at DistroWatch

I guess you have enough family dinner conversations about open source, someone in the family is bound to write a paper on the topic at some point. And so my brother has. Clark is finishing up his law degree at Stanford, heading to Wilson Sonsini to join its Technology Transfer group this summer, and has written a few papers on open source (I’ll be posting his GPLv3 paper as soon as he gets it to me). This particular one is entitled “Monetizing Free and Open Source Software: The Red Hat Solution.”

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Novell has developed a new training course to help systems administrators migrate from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell. The course is available both as a free download and as an instructor-led class, available at locations globally.

read more at Linuxlookup

Open source database vendor MySQL AB is preparing itself for an initial public offering, and could even be ready to go public before the end of the year, according to its CEO Marten Mickos.

read more at Linuxlookup

This tutorial describes how to set up and run an UnrealIRCD server on OpenSuSE 10.2 and Fedora Core 6. It also shows how to install Anope IRC services. Anope is a set of Services for IRC networks that allows users to manage their nicks and channels in a secure and efficient way, and administrators to manage their network with powerful tools.

Read more at HowtoForge

The long awaited Xfce 4.4 has been released and the Gentoo Forum Netherlands celebrates its second anniversary in this week’s Gentoo Weekly Newsletter. Also in this week’s GWN is the usual security, bugs, and package updates and summaries from the community.

We now believe the site to be fully ready for all openSUSE community
members to contribute to, so without further ado we proudly announce
http://openSUSE-Community.org

Many are still in the dark about the existence and purpose of the new
openSUSE Community website, so here’s a little light. Many productive
things came out of the first community meeting on IRC
(http://en.opensuse.org/Meetings/Community_Meeting_2006-12-16/minutes).
In the brainstorming section, one of these things was the decision to
have a completely new resource for openSUSE users created content, a
place where we can document the stuff that we perhaps can’t put directly
onto openSUSE.org, such as Packman and guru, tutorials, restricted
format issues, etc.

• Read more: openSUSE-community.org

We’ve just released the fourth technology preview release of Samba 4.

=============
About Samba 4
=============

Samba 4 is the ambitious next version of the Samba suite that is being
developed in parallel to the stable 3.0 series. The main emphasis in
this branch is support for the Active Directory logon protocols used
by Windows 2000 and above.

While we welcome your interest in Samba 4, we don’t want you to run your network with it quite yet. Please note the WARNINGS below, and the STATUS file,
which aims to document what should and should not work.

With 4 years of development under our belt since Tridge first proposed
a new Virtual File System (VFS) layer for Samba3 (a project which
eventually lead to our Active Directory efforts), we felt that we
should create something we could ’show off’ to our users. This is a
Technology Preview (TP), aimed at allowing you, our users, managers and
developers to see how we have progressed, and to invite your feedback and
support.

========
Warnings
========
Samba4 TP is currently a pre-alpha technology. That is more a
reference to Samba4’s lack of the features we expect you will need
than a statement of code quality, but clearly it hasn’t seen a broad
deployment yet. If you were to upgrade Samba3 (or indeed Windows) to
Samba4, you would find many things work, but that other key features
you may have relied on simply are not there yet.

For example, while Samba 3.0 is an excellent member of a Active
Directory domain, Samba4 is happier as a domain controller: (This is
where we have done most of the research and development).

While Samba4 is subjected to an awesome battery of tests on an
automated basis, and we have found Samba4 to be very stable in it’s
behaviour, we have to recommend against upgrading production servers
from Samba 3 to Samba 4 at this stage. If you are upgrading an
experimental server, or looking to develop and test Samba, you should
backup all configuration and data.

• Read more: Samba 4.0.0 TP 4

Name: Google Earth
Version: 4.0.2723.0
Type: Education
Depend: Qt 3.x
License: Proprietary License
Homepage: http://earth.google.com
More Info:
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=40822

Description:
Google Earth is a free-of-charge, downloadable
virtual globe program. It maps the entire earth by
pasting images obtained from satellite imagery,
aerial photography and GIS over a 3D globe.

Changelog:
New features:
-Drawing Tools: The path and polygon drawing
tools are now available in the free product.
-free Premium modules
–Premium Printing Module
–GIS Data Importing Module
–Movie Making Module
-Faster performance for 3D models
–Improved caching of models
–Support for compressed textures
-New icons and icon management for easier
navigation
–New icons for pushpins and user palette
–Coincident placemarks/icons now expand into a
‘star-formation’ for disambiguation when you
click on them.
-Improved Printing: Now you can also print search
results, and folders of placemarks, in addition to
driving directions and the 3D view.
-MSI Installer: For easier installation and
maintenance of Google Earth over networks, we now
have an MSI installer available for the client.

Welcome to this year’s 2nd issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community. Anthony Towns was [1]interviewed by Liz Tay on
whether [2]Dunc Tank was a failure or success. Joey Schulze
[3]reported that the [4]alpha port has caught up and is fitter than
before since it now has two working build daemon.

1. http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;189708751;pp;1
2. http://www.dunc-tank.org/
3. http://www.infodrom.org/~joey/log/?200701291912
4. http://www.debian.org/ports/alpha/

Dealing with personal Configuration and Data. Aigars Mahinovs
[5]proposed a standard for applications to organise data and
configuration files stored in the user’s home directory as an
extension to the [6]Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. It should first
implemented in Debian and then passed upstream. Mark Hymers
[7]pointed out that the [8]XDG Base Directory Specification from
Waldo Bastian addresses configuration files already.

• Read more: Debian Weekly News - January 30th, 2007

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could access your Writer documents from any computer connected to the Internet and work with them as if they were on your local machine — especially if this could be done transparently with just a couple of mouse clicks?…

Linux.com

Microsoft Corp., the pioneer behind the Ultra Mobile PC movement (Origami), is more or less killing the original concept and coming up with a more upbeat version. The primary reason, according to Microsoft and its partners, was the price and availability issues, which is a catch-22 problem. Very few consumers actually bought the units at such high price tags, and until the price tag reached more reasonable levels, third party manufacturers couldn’t produce enough units to cut prices.

Full Story

Another Macworld has come and gone, and once again, I wasn’t able to be in attendance this year. In other words, I was one of the thousands of people who were staying glued to the live coverage that was being provided by a number of unofficial Apple resources, and I was jealous of those who were able to watch the action take place live in San Francisco, while I was sitting in my home office some 2,500 miles away Apple pandemonium.

Full Story

It looks like AMD/ATI is working on improving the fireglcontrolpanel, which right now lacks a ton of functionality. However, reports are saying that AMD is working on a new Qt Catalyst Control Panel for Linux, which is rumored to be completed by the end of the calendar year. More information is available in the Phoronix Forums.

Phoronix

Fedora 7 Test 1 was originally scheduled for release today, but it has now been delayed. An official announcement will be made later today, but the earliest now that F7T1 will make it out the doors is this Thursday. More information to come soon.

Phoronix News

Hide PHP Version in Apache from remote users requests In order to prevent PHP from exposing the fact that it is installed on the server, by adding its signature to the web server header we need to locate in php.ini the variable expose_php and turn it off. By default expose_php is set to On. In your php.ini [...]

Read more at DebianAdmin

Foresight Linux is a desktop-focused Linux system that just works. Our mission is to provide a truely useful desktop system that is friendly for the novice user, as well as flexible for the power user. Foresight comes with the GNOME desktop, Banshee for your music, F-Spot for your photos, and Open Office for your office needs. Great attention has been paid to making things simple and integrated. For example, NetworkManager makes it simple to connect to wireless access points. Foresight System Manager handles keeping your system updated. You can even auto update if you wish, or get notifications when there are updates available and apply them yourself through an easy-to-use web interface.

New release of Tracker (fomerly known as Meta Tracker)
Tracker is a tool designed to extract information and metadata about your personal data so that it can be searched easily and quickly.

Several BUGS FIXES, faster and unobtrusive in daily use due to the better scheduler.
This is a really big jump from the previous release.
Check out all the improvements from the website: http://www.tracker-project.org/