FreeSoftNews

Users of Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.12 have been offered a major update to Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.4 via the automatic update notification. As reported earlier, Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.12 is the last release from the Firefox 1.5 Branch.

As per the the ReleaseRoadmap policy, the previous release of Firefox (1.5 in this case) is supported for six months beyond the release of a major revision (2.0 in this case).

Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.4 can also be downloaded directly from the Firefox Product Page

Read more at mozillaZine

“One of the things that is very confusing to new Linux enthusiasts is the ‘distro,’ or distribution. And one of the most confusing things about distributions, for the beginner, is that there is no official definition of what a distribution is, exactly: distributions existed in many forms long before anyone cared.

“To venture my own definition, a distribution is a bundling of the Linux kernel with other software and services. That’s it. In general, the kernel is the same, so what you are selecting is the style of installation, the tools you want, and the level of support that you need to have…”
Read more at IBM.com

“India’s Kerala state government is counting on open-source software to boost its IT literacy rate.

“According to a statement, the Kerala government has identified free and open-source software as a major strategic component in its efforts to build an inclusive information society…”
Read more at news.com

“When it comes to competition between operating systems, a platform is ultimately only as useful as its applications. For businesses that use Linux servers for their back-end operations–a category now growing by double-digits quarterly according to IDC–availability of applications is often the most significant bottleneck.

“As a result, some organizations find themselves in the uncomfortable position of needing to support two back-end platforms: Linux for the majority of network applications, like Web servers, file servers, e-mail and messaging servers and CRM servers, and Windows for anything else necessary but unavailable for Linux.

• Read more: QuickBooks and Linux: A Server Story

This evening KDE developers from around the world arrived in Scotland’s largest city Glasgow for their annual KDE World Summit. The week long meeting will see over 250 delegates from KDE and our partners discuss and hack on the world’s original Free Software desktop. Tonight the local team have been busy settings up the network, videos and other infrastructure for the attendees who are busy in the student bar below the building. The first photos have been arriving on the internet.

Read more at KDE.news

Motorola announced that it intends to form an industry-wide consortium that will assume stewardship for the OpenSAF project the company announced in February. The company also announced the first release of the open source code related to the project. The consortium also will manage any future development of the OpenSAF code base. Leading companies including Ericsson, HP and Nokia Siemens Networks have expressed support for this initiative.

• Read more: Motorola Releases Open Source Middleware

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA—Friday, June 29, 2007—The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today released version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), the world’s most popular free software license.

“Since we founded the free software movement, over 23 years ago, the free software community has developed thousands of useful programs that respect the user’s freedom. The programs are in the GNU/Linux operating system, as well as personal computers, telephones, Internet servers, and more. Most of these programs use the GNU GPL to guarantee every user the freedom to run, study, adapt, improve, and redistribute the program,” said Richard Stallman, founder and president of the FSF.

• Read more: FSF releases the GNU General Public License, version 3

Mandriva today announces its sponsorship of the 2007 aKademy KDE conference, which is taking place in Glasgow from June 30th to July 7th.

Mandriva today announces its sponsorship of the 2007 aKademy KDE conference, which is taking place in Glasgow from June 30th to July 7th. As well as sponsoring the conference, Mandriva is arranging to provide special edition Mandriva Flash USB keys to developers attending the conference as a token of appreciation for their work.

“We are very happy to welcome Mandriva as a silver sponsor for Akademy 2007,” said Jonathan Riddell of the aKademy Team. “As a long term supporter and distributor of KDE the summit organising team is looking forward to giving our developers, contributors and industry partners at the conference a special present from Mandriva.”

Read more at Linux PR

This is release 0.9.40 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix.

What’s new in this release:
- Many MSHTML improvements.
- A few more sound fixes.
- Many Direct3D fixes.
- Lots of bug fixes.

• Read more: Wine release 0.9.40

Voting is now open for the Fedora Board elections.

As a reminder, we are electing 3 of the 9 seats during this election.

The candidates are (in alphabetical order):

Christopher Aillon
Dennis Gilmore
Bob Jensen
Brian Pepple
Jef Spaleta
Rahul Sundaram

More information about the candidates is available at:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board/Elections/Nominations

Voting will end at Jul 8 23:59:59 UTC

Please go to https://admin.fedoraproject.org/voting/

Anyone who has signed the Fedora CLA (ie: is in cla_done in the Fedora Account System) is eligible to vote.

Thanks to Toshio Kuratomi for his work on the voting software.

–Max

–
Max Spevack
+ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MaxSpevack

1. Announcements
================
* OpenOffice.org Release 2.2.1
* Registration opens for the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference

2. Success Stories
==================
* Positive usibility certification for Munich’s Linux client
* German City of Freiburg joins the ODF Alliance

3. Featured News
================
* Another 12857% Speed Improvement
* Positive OpenOffice.org Review by eWeek
* Aqua developer snapshot available
* What’s new in the Mac port?
* WordPerfect filters improving
* OpenOffice.org extension: Writer’s Tools

• Read more: OpenOffice.org Newsletter - Volume 04 - Issue 12 - 06/2007

OrangeHRM announced it has reached more than 50,000 cumulative downloads since February 2006, when the first version of the Open Source Human Resource Management System was released to SourceForge.net - world’s largest open source collaborative development website. In addition, OrangeHRM has been holding the position among the first 15 most active open source applications on SourceForge.net for the past month.

The growing download numbers signify that OrangeHRM is gradually adding value and becoming more useful for the companies on all 6 continents, and is establishing worldwide user community, who contribute to the project. This is resulting in a product that matures rapidly based on response to market needs.

“Developing and managing the community is crucial”, says Sujee Saparamadu, CEO of OrangeHRM Inc. “This continuously evolving collective knowledge base holds a positive consequence: speed of innovation. When delivering free open source software the number of users can grow fast. And because of the speed with which users, developers, and companies can post bugs, define expanding list of features, prepare documentation, translations and implement patches, the product lifecycle is shortened considerably”

Read more at Linuxlookup

“We love GNOME. Sometime around 2.6 it started becoming really, really damned good, and a lot faster and more responsive. All kinds of nice things like Network Manager, the Nautilus CD burner and the SFTP support popped up. It helps that most major Linux apps like like Firefox, Evolution, GAIM, and OpenOffice use the same toolkit and themes too. Obviously we’re not alone either: Ubuntu, RHEL and SuSE all use GNOME by default.

“Here’s a bunch of ideas to improve it…”
Complete Story

Microsoft’s partnership with Novell got a lot of people in the open-source community fired up. Since then, Microsoft’s Linux deals with Linspire and Xandros have just thrown gasoline on the fire. Now, it appears that Red Hat, the leading Linux company and the most vocal opponent to Microsoft wheeling and dealing, tried to make its own deal with Microsoft before the Novell one was released.

So, what’s going on here? As Kevin Carmony, Linspire’s CEO and president, rhetorically asks in his latest public column, “Is Linux Splitting into Two Factions?”

Carmony says: “Saying that Linux is going to be torn in two makes for good press and lively debates, but this is certainly nothing new for Linux. There are far more material splits today in the Linux world, such as Debian vs. RPM, KDE vs. GNOME, Distro A vs. Distro B, and so on. These divisions are quite material, and dilute significant energy and efforts across competing standards. However, we accept this as the price we pay for freedom of choice.”

Read more at Linux-Watch.com

Like other OpenOffice.org applications, Calc has several dozen options in how it is formatted and operates. These options are available from Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org Calc. Thanks to OpenOffice.org’s habit of sharing code between applications, some of the tabs for these options resemble those found in other OpenOffice.org applications. Others are unique to Calc and the business of spreadsheets. Either way, the more you know about Calc’s options, the more you can take control of your work.

Read more at LinuxJournal

The newest versions of Lightning and Sunbird, released simultaneously by Mozilla yesterday, include 38 new calendars as well as support for Google Calendar, a viable print function, enhanced support for Outlook displays and numerous other upgrades.

Read more at Linux.com

SSL-based VPNs were designed to eliminate the need for complex configurations on the user’s PC. Unfortunately, that was before the dangers of public WiFi networks and tougher regulatory requirements came into being. Thanks to WiFi, many attacks that were difficult are now quite simple. In particular, a man-in-the-middle attack can intercept SSL-encrypted traffic, rendering SSL-based VPNs useless - even if it’s protected by a typical one-time password system. The man-in-the-middle can easily feed the one-time password into the SSL-based VPN within the alloted time.

Read more at HowtoForge

Maxemum TV-Guide is a KDE TV-guide. It is developed in C++, based on QT/KDE and uses XMLTV as it’s back end to grab listings. At present there are backends grabbing TV listings for Australia, Belgium and Luxemburg, Brazil, Britain and Ireland, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary and Romania, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, North America, Norway, Portugal, Reunion Island (France), South Africa, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

Read more at Ubuntu Geek

New in Tribe 2 for Gutsy Gibbon is GNOME 2.19.4, an easy enablement path for the free Flash player (Gnash), XDG-user-directories, Firefox 3 being pushed into the Ubuntu Universe repository, Compiz Fusion has been enabled by default on supported systems, and Restricted Manager improvements where there are open-source drivers available but rely upon closed-source firmware. We decided to try out Ubuntu 7.10 Tribe 2 and have a few screenshots to share.

Read more at Phoronix

The 22nd edition of the Nouveau Companion is now online after a three-day delay. Some of the work covered in this issue is rules-ng now containing ATI Radeon register data, renouveau improvements, and X-Video work has started. The improvements to renouveau include replacing the nv_object[] data structure over to an XML database and splitting renouveau into a dumper and parser program. Fixes have also been merged into Nouveau main for the NV49 and NV4b GPUs. No new progress has been made in open-source 3D support for the GeForce 8 (G80) series. Read more on the Nouveau Wiki.