FreeSoftNews

“The forth alpha release of Gnash has just been made at version
0.8.1. Gnash is a GPL’d Flash movie player and browser plugin for
Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera. Gnash supports many SWF v7 features and ActionScript2 classes. Gnash also runs on many GNU/Linux distributions, embedded GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, non x86 processors, and 64 bit architectures. Ports to Darwin and Windows are in progress for a future release. The plugin works best with Firefox 1.0.4 or newer, and should work in any Mozilla based browser. There is also a standalone player for GNOME or KDE based desktops.

Read more at Gnash

FileZilla is one great open source FTP client that — up until now — was available only for Windows. Version 3 is a ground-up rewrite that makes the application available for the first time on Linux, too.

You can download the latest FileZilla release either from filezilla-project.org or through the project’s SourceForge.net page. In both places, you will find the older FileZilla 2.x series for Windows only, and the 3.0 series for Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and Windows.

Despite the similarity in names, FileZilla is not built on top of Mozilla code, nor does it use Mozilla-derived technologies like XUL. It does use wxWidgets for its cross-platform user interface elements, and is built on top of the standard GNU toolchain.

The current Linux download is a tarball containing the filezilla binary, a command-line SSH FTP (SFTP) utility called fzsftp, and various editable configuration files. Since the Linux download does not include an installer, make sure that you have wxWidgets installed before you get started.

Read more at Linux.com

Astaro makes and markets a network appliance built on Linux and a complement of open source tools to help prevent spam, viruses, and other potential Internet intrusions. When Astaro’s founders launched the company in 2000, venture capital funding for open source businesses was hard to find. CEO Jan Hichert says he and his colleagues tried but failed to secure funding and had to bootstrap. After the company was proved successful, VCs proved more willing to contribute to a company built on open source.

Read more at Linux.com

Fully-functional video drivers — ones capable of handling 3-D acceleration — remain one of the weak points of free software. The Free Software Foundation has declared them a high-priority project. Meanwhile, some distributions and even more users have resorted to using the proprietary drivers offered as free downloads by card manufacturers. One of the main projects attempting to provide complete, free drivers is focusing on developing the Avivo driver for the R500 and R600 cards from AMD/ATI, so-called after a specification first introduced in this line of cards. According to Jerome Glisse, who coordinates the development of the driver, progress is being made in the project, and “maybe by the end of this year, we might have some 3-D acceleration.”

Read more at Linux.com

Ying Huang continues to work on his kexec-based hibernation patches. Currently only supporting the i386 architecture, Ying notes, “the setup of hibernation/restore is fairly complex. I will continue working on simplifying.” Following up to the latest round of kexec-based hibernation patches posted to the Linux Kernel mailing list it was asked how performance would compare to other hibernation solutions. Ying suggested that with not-yet implemented optimizations it should offer comparable performance:

Read more at KernelTrap

“Welcome to the home page of the finstall project, accepted for Google’s Summer of Code 2007. This project aims to create a user-friendly graphical installer for FreeBSD & FreeBSD-derived systems. The project should yield something usable for 7.0-RELEASE, but the intention is to keep it as a “second” installer system during 7.x, alongside sysinstall. In any case, sysinstall will be kept for architectures not supported by finstall (e.g. all except i386 and amd64).” A first version has been released.

Read more at OSNews

Linux platform provider Xandros has taken one step further in a collaboration agreement with Microsoft that it signed in June over how the two firms will handle intellectual property on Linux interoperability projects. The two firms expanded the collaboration agreement on Aug. 15 to include Scalix e-mail servers, which connect Scalix subscribers via various mobile and computer-based e-mail applications that utilize Microsoft’s e-mail protocols. The enhanced agreement was needed because Xandros did not own Scalix in June.

Read more at LinuxInsider

“As Canonical Ltd. readies another major release for its Ubuntu Linux operating system (code-named Gutsy Gibbon), one executive hinted that a pre-installed server initiative would arrive soon if customer demand remains high.

“Gerry Carr, marketing manager for Canonical, which is the corporate maintainer of Ubuntu, said that while no deal was imminent, Canonical was exploring deals with Dell Inc. and other unnamed hardware manufacturers to bring Ubuntu pre-installed on x86 commodity servers in the near future…”
Read more at SearchEnterpriseLinux

It has been announced on the kde-core-devel mailing list that KDE 4.0 has been delayed by two months. KDE 4.0 was originally scheduled for release towards the end of October, but now it won’t make it out until at least December 20.

Read more at Phoronix

The Linux 2.6.22.6 kernel has been released. The Linux 2.6.22.6 kernel has a number of changes that includes disabling MSI on the RS690, RD580, and RX790 chipsets and fixing a number of bugs.

Read more at Phoronix

What is the problem, why is it needed?
Being a part of OSL[1] data centre forums.gentoo.org relies on their
backend database servers, which already have been upgraded to MySQL
v5. We need to follow now and have forums.gentoo.org lifted up to v5
too.

What will be done?
The database will be shutdown and backed up. After some final
consistency checks the migration procedures to the new database
backend will be executed. If nothing unforseen will happen finally the
conversion to full UTF-8 support is the last step.
In order to have the needed steps done in the most quickest way the
forums administrators decided to shutdown the forums during this time.

• Read more: forums.gentoo.org leaves the web

Dear FreeBSD Community,

I am pleased to announce the publication of the FreeBSD Foundation’s Semi-Annual August Newsletter. Go to http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2007Aug-newsletter.shtml
to find out what we’ve been doing to help the FreeBSD project and community.

Thank You,

Deb Goodkin
The FreeBSD Foundation

For up-to-date news visit the OpenOffice.org Newsletter Blog:
http://ooonewsletter.blogspot.com

To read all of this month’s stories in full:
http://ooonewsletter.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_ooonewsletter_archive.html

ATOM feed:
http://ooonewsletter.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Contents

1. Announcements
================
* Register now for the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference (OOoCon)

2. Success Stories
==================
* Portuguese Ministry of Education distributes open source CD
(OpenOffice.org included)

* Dell’s Ubuntu systems will be shipped in Germany, France and the UK
* Lenovo bundling Linux (and thus OpenOffice.org)
* HP releases its first mass-market Linux PC (OpenOffice.org included)
* Google Pack Offers StarOffice Suite For Free

• Read more: OpenOffice.org Newsletter - Volume 05 - Issue 02 - 08/2007

================================
GNOME 2.19.91 Development Release
================================

This is our eighth development release on our road towards GNOME
2.20.0, which will be released in September 2007. All new features should
all be there, so your mission is simple : Go download it. Go compile
it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, translate it, fix it.

Lots of modules have great plans for 2.19, and if you’re willing to
help there are many areas where that help is welcome! Don’t
hesitate to ask how or where you can help. If you don’t even know
where to start, just send a mail to our fantastic gnome-love mailing
list.

• Read more: GNOME 2.19.91 (GNOME 2.20.0 Beta 2) Released!

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.4. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.X branch with over 120 various bug fixes in addition to resolving several low priority security bugs. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.2.4

• Read more: PHP 5.2.4 Released

“I have been playing around with phphGroupware (version 0.9.16.011) for a little while, trying to get a feel for it. On the surface, it is fairly simple to use. And yet, it is also a fairly complex and flexible system. The question is, just how useful is it?

• Read more: Checking Out phpGroupware–The Virtual Office in a Box

Gartner Webdev has published an interview with KDE’s very own marketing renegade Wade Olson. Wade talks about KDE 4, what makes it special and what KDE’s role in the software market is. He sheds some light on the user’s point of view and discusses his vision about the way the computer and software industry is moving. Read the interview for yourself.

KDE.news

I gather SCO has noticed that the SCO v. IBM litigation won’t be nearly so annoying to IBM unless it does something fast about Judge Dale Kimball’s August 10th ruling, which pared that case, like all of SCO’s cases, down to almost nothing but the counterclaims against SCO.

• Read more: SCO Asks Judge Kimball for an Entry of Final Judgment So It Can Appeal Some Issues Immediately

I sometimes happen to be in a dialogue like this:

X: According to GPL, you can sell copies of your software at any price you want, right?

Me: Right.

X: But your customers can in turn sell copies of your software at any price they want, right?

Me: Right.

X: So, the only way a GPL developer can make money is by charge for development of their software?

Me: Not only for development: also for maintenance, improvements, customisation, installation, training, gadgets, support…

The market is quite big, actually.

In fact, one can even make business by selling the software in a box, if one makes a box that people would like to have (for example, including things like useful documentation, a few gadgets, a support contract and a pony).

Read more at Enrico Zini blog

We plan to include KDE4 in Fedora as soon as possible. Due to slow progress both in Fedora packaging and upstream stability, as well as potential delays in KDE4 release schedules, it is not reasonably possible to get this done in time for Fedora 8 release.

Read more at Fedora