This is a reminder for those who plan to attend this year’s pkgsrcCon
and haven’t registered yet. There is only a month left until the
registration deadline, June 1st!
The fifth annual pkgsrcCon will convene in Berlin, Germany on
Jun 13 - 15, 2007.
In this installment of our co-published Fedora Interviews, Jeremy Katz, David Cantrell, and Chris Lumens talk about the improvements to Anaconda in Fedora 9.
What motivated you work on Anaconda for Fedora 9?
Jeremy Katz: Well, it’s part of most of our jobs 
We’re full-time employees with Red Hat and have the installer as one of areas that we tend to work on.
David Cantrell: Anaconda is the first program that people will use when they use Fedora for the first time. We are the first impression of the OS, and we are always trying to improve that experience and make Anaconda do what people are wanting.
Dan, Warren and I returned Monday afternoon from the Linuxfest Northwest 2008 event. What follows is my review of the show.
Introduction
For those unfamiliar with the Linuxfest Northwest, it is an annual, two-day event held at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, Washington on the last weekend in April. It has become a hub of Linux activity in the Northwest with several of the Washington area Linux Users Groups supporting it. Visitors seem to come from all over the country especially those places that don’t have a Linux conference anywhere near them. I also attended the LFNW last year so a bit of this review compares this year with last.
Let’s get this out of the way… it was obvious that there were less visitors to the show this year than last year. I haven’t seen any numbers published yet though. While that might sound bad it did make for a better show as it allowed for more time with the presenters and the exhibit booth folks.
VIA has sent out a press release proclaiming the availability of its new “open source driver development portal.” What’s available now falls a bit short of that, though; it’s essentially a distribution site for binary drivers. “The VIA Linux Portal will initially offer graphics drivers for the VIA CN896 digital media IGP chipset for the new Ubuntu 8.04 LTS distribution.
A year and a half ago, the excellent Linux music player Amarok added extensive support for Magnatune. The programmer, Nikolaj Hald Nielsen, did this on his own initiative, simply because he thought it’d be a neat thing for his favorite music player to have, and because he liked Magnatune’s business philosophy.
I really like Amarok, so I volunteered that I’d be happy to donate 10% of gross sales at Magnatune caused by Amarok. I was also so pleased with the quality of Nikolaj’s work, that I hired him, and he now spends 50% of his time on Magnatune, and I pay for him to spend the other 50% of his time on Amarok.
As SUSE Linux 10.0 has reached its end of life in November last year, the Packman team will be removing all SUSE Linux 10.0 packages from its repository end of this week. If you want to keep them aside, make sure to download a copy before.
And as for good news, the Packman team has started to build its packages for openSUSE 11.0 (against Beta 1) since a few days. You can enable it by going to YaST -> Software Management. From there select Repositories -> Manage Repositories in the menu. Then select Add -> Community Repositories, and from here select the “Packman Repository”.
The codecs one-click-install for 11.0 should be updated and available next week.
2008.0_beta2 is here. Thanks to you, our community, for testing beta1 and filing many bugs. You can help make 2008.0 amazing! Test out this beta and report any functionality issues you encounter. Since this is still a beta, we’re looking only for bugs in functionality, not bugs in appearance such as desktop backgrounds or other artwork.
This should be the last beta and will be followed by the final 2008.0 release after further bug fixing.
Get 2008.0_beta2 from the usual places.
The KDE Community is happy to announce the first preview for the upcoming KDE 4.1, due in late July. KDE 4.1 is based on Qt 4.4’s goodness, bringing performance improvements, WebKit, widgets-on-canvas and other goodies. Also new is Dragon Player, a KDE 4 port of the codeine video player which is famous for its simplicity and ease of use. KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 ships with Akonadi, the new data storage framework for our beloved PIM applications. KDE-PIM will also see its first KDE 4 release with 4.1, but is not yet based on Akonadi. More planned and already implemented features can be found in the KDE 4.1 Feature Plan. The Plasma desktop shell has just undergone major surgery, so expect some additional breakage there.
REMINDER:
———
Fedora 7 will reach its End of Life for official updates on Friday, June
13 — one month after release of Fedora 9.
Fedora 8 will remain supported until one month after the release of
Fedora 10, or approximately the end of November 2008.
For more information on the Fedora lifecycle, refer to:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LifeCycle
Following our interview covering KDE in Japan last week, we now turn to South Korea. Cho Sung Jae tell us about the Korean KDE Users Group, including some of the problems of using KDE with Korean and just how fast their broadband is.
How did the Korean KDE Users Group start?
The Korean KDE Users Group was started in 1999 by Kabby (Kim Kyoung Heon). But it was not active. In 2006, Kabby recommended for me as Translation coordinator, then our team had activity to bring information about KDE in public.
Read more at KDE.news
Codenamed Kestrel, Opera’s latest browser is no medieval minstrel, but a modern day diva taking on its competitors from Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla.
Aiming for the high notes, the new Opera has found itself revved up with the latest performance enhancing tricks to soup up speed and security, while refining its stellar features that set Opera apart from the competition.
Now, while use of Opera 9.5 beta 2 is only recommended for those who enjoy bashing around with betas, it’s now happily installed on my computer and it veritably flies across the web – in much the same manner as Firefox 3 and the latest Safari have also enjoy speed boosts.
Both Microsoft and Novell can be accused of harming perceptions of “Open Source”. Novell seeks justification by clarifying that it really is a mixed-source company, whereas Microsoft shoves the word “open” everywhere it deems possible. Why would they do this? Because the market increasingly demands “open source”. Microsoft and Novell hope to sell their overpriced crown jewels while falling under the same “open” umbrella, whose significance they lessen.
Read more at Boycott Novell
Recently a couple people asked me about trying Linux without actually installing it. Obviously the first thing that came to mind is to try versions via LiveCD. For those not familiar, LiveCD means:spacer_gif 130 Useful Linux Based LiveCD Versions.
“A CD-ROM that contains a working copy of an operating system or other application that is run without installing it. Used for demonstration and evaluation as well as system recovery, the software runs intact from the CD.” Source: http://dictionary.zdnet.com/definition/LiveCD.htmlspacer_gif 130 Useful Linux Based LiveCD Versions.
While I was fast to mention and provide the LiveCD for Ubuntu Linux, I was asked if there are other versions of Linux or Linux based applications that offer down loadable LiveCD’s and what the primary function (of the CD) focused upon. Well, I’m by no means the know-all expert of Linux and its LiveCD distributions, I was however, able to find almost 300 and have done my best to put them in alphabetical order with a brief blurb.spacer_gif 130 Useful Linux Based LiveCD Versions.
Read more at Ubuntu Linux Help
The GNOME Community Roadmap is a big-picture view of functionality we expect GNOME to include in short-term and long-term future. The roadmap is based on feedback from current GNOME developers and other community members.
The roadmap is organized into target groups: Users, Developers, Admins and Everyone in each target release. In the case of user-targeted plans, sometimes a change will not be user-visible but will nevertheless alter the user experience in some way.
This roadmap shows the ideas and hopes of GNOME contributors for the near future. However, GNOME is primarily a volunteer community that does time-based releases, as opposed to feature-based releases. Therefore, these changes will only happen for their target releases if the contributors have the necessary time and resources. If it needs more time, then the feature will be moved to the next 6 month release cycle. We hope this roadmap allows interested people to take part. The GNOME project relies heavily on your involvement.
Read more at Gnome
Brian Brazil and the team behind the ultra-free gNewSense Linux distribution have released a beta of the forthcoming 2.0 (or Deltah) series. gNewSense is based on Ubuntu but strips the distribution of non-free components to provide users with a truly free operating system. gNewSense is backed by the Free Software Foundation. Among the changes in this release are that gNewSense is now based on Ubuntu Hardy released last week; the distribution has new artwork; the browser has been changed from Firefox to Epiphany, the Gnome browser; non-free GLX has been removed from X/mesa; and there is now support for Debian source packages.
Read more at Tectonic
About a year ago, we took a look at the growing trend toward open-source security and highlighted 10 of the best apps available. Since then, the area has continued to mature, and now we’re back highlighting 75 of the most frequently downloaded open-source security applications.
Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware
This Windows-only app uses the incredibly popular ClamAV engine to detect viruses and spyware. It includes a scanning scheduler, automatic downloads, and a Microsoft Outlook plug-in. However, it does not provide real-time scanning; you’ll need to scan your files manually in order to be protected. Operating System: Windows.
After the partnership between Gaël Duval and Mandriva was over, he was said to build an OS even more user friendly than Mandriva. The first Alpha release, which was presented really soon after the start of the project, did not surprise anyone as it was plain KDE with a new theme. Now, after two years, there is a successive release of the Ulteo distribution. The purpose of the Beta1 Ulteo Application System is to feature what it can develop into in the nearest future, especially considering the Ulteo Online Desktop.
To start with…
The idea of Ulteo is to be revolutionary easy to handle - the user does not have to bother about anything since the system manages all by itself. The intention was to prepare such a distribution that absolutely nobody would have problems with switching to it regardless of which OS one has been using before. KDE is the default graphical environment for Ulteo as it is based on Kubuntu, however, a GNOME-based release is also planned.
Read more at polishlinux.org
Software developer Hans Reiser was found guilty today of first degree murder in the death of his wife in late 2006, a conviction that carries up to 25 years in prison and a possible death sentence for the Reiser4 file system.
The verdict, delivered Monday afternoon by an Alameda County, Calif. jury, concludes a five-month-long trial. Reiser was separated from wife Nina Reiser (and engaged in a custody battle for their two children) at the time of her disappearance, which occurred in the fall of 2006. Her body has never been found.
Read more at ZDNet