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The OpenStreentMap Project has announced that it now has translations in German and partially in French on its main OpenStreetMap site. The project, run by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, is an open source project that is building free online maps, not based on any copyright or licensed map data. The project was started in August of 2004 and has become increasingly popular.

Welcome to OpenOffice.org, the world-class office suite that’s also free and open source. This is your new-user orientation. Read on to discover support, tutorials, community insights, templates, clip art, extensions, and blogs.

It has only been one week since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 Alpha 2, but we happen to be ahead of schedule on the third (and possibly the final) alpha release for 2.0 Sandtorg. In the past eight days there has actually been a very large number of changes to the Phoronix Test Suite, both to pts-core and the included test profiles and suites.

The Gimp FX Foundry SourceForce project made it its assignment to provide scripts for porting into the current GIMP or allow creating them from scratch. The scripts allow GIMP graphics to be endowed with special effects, such as blurring or distorting them in certain ways. The Foundry now provides 117 new scripts for GIMP 2.6 that are not part of the graphic software's standard installation.

The Eclipse Foundation, a not-for-profit, member supported corporation that hosts the Eclipse projects, recently announced the Eclipse Community Survey 2009 in The Open Source Developer Report. According to the report, Linux has become the most common deployment platform for the developer community. There is a shift from the Microsoft Windows to Linux and Mac OSX for their desktop development operating system.

An article in the Wall Street Journal says that European Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes is considering imposing tighter regulations on Microsoft. It says the company could be compelled to package browsers that compete with Internet Explorer, with its Windows operating system. Jonathan Todd, a Commission spokesman, had stated similar considerations publicly in February. A response from Microsoft was still being considered at that time, but it evidently made no impression on Commissioner Kroes.

Linux has, in some ways, always been a bit politicized in the sense that there are true believers among Linux users and developers that all software should be truly free. When I say free, I mean free as in free to use and share with others without any restrictions on that usage or sharing. gNewSense Linux is a distribution that is strongly devoted to those ideals.

Netbooks made with the processors required to run Google's Android software will be on show at Computex Taipei 2009 this week from at least five or six companies, an executive from Arm Holdings said Monday. The company does not expect to take a significant share of the central processing share of the netbook market this year, but growing interest in its processing cores should lead to greater gains next year.

Qualcomm said Sunday night that it has persuaded a number of Taiwan ODMs to at least show off netbooks, which it calls "smartbooks," that use its Snapdragon microprocessor. ASUS, Compal, Foxconn, High Tech Computer (HTC), Inventec, Toshiba and Wistron are among the ODMs showing off wares at the Computex Taipei show, the company said.

As we reported last week, the release of OpenSolaris 2009.06 would come on Monday, and sure enough, it has been released by Sun Microsystems. The OpenSolaris 2009.06 release presents network virtualization support with Crossbow, SPARC support, Intel Xeon 5500 series hardware support, MySQL and PHP DTrace probes, improved usability with its package management system, and much more.

Sun is giving opensolaris a major overhaul in the new 2009.06 release, the new release includes enhanced networking, virtualization and storage capabilities for the open source operating system. "This is really a transparent development step toward the next generation of the Solaris platform," Dan Roberts, director of product management datacenter software marketing at Sun, told InternetNews.com. "Initially, OpenSolaris had a developer-and desktop-centric flavor, but in this release we've moved from just desktop and developer to a datacenter-capable mission-critical operating system."

The kernel developers have added new features to thousands of the Linux kernel's existing drivers and integrated numerous additional drivers. This further increases the variety of hardware supported by Linux. A few days ago, Linus Torvalds released the seventh Linux 2.6.30 release candidate. According to Torvalds, most of the merged changes are minor, and the next big kernel version is nearing completion – although Torvalds does still anticipate an eighth release candidate. The Kernel Log takes this opportunity to discuss what's new in the driver arena of Linux 2.6.30; the final version of the forthcoming kernel will probably be released in one to three weeks.

Welcome to this year's 22nd issue of DistroWatch Weekly! OpenSolaris 2009.06, the third official release of the increasingly influential UNIX alternative for the desktop, is here! With a large number of new features and updated applications, it is bound to excite everybody interested in free operating systems. But will it also entice the average desktop user? That remains to be seen. In other news, Fedora slips the release of version 11 "Leonidas" by another week, FreeBSD gets set to enter code freeze in preparation for version 8.0, NetBSD receives a new binary package manager to offer a more APT/YUM-like package management experience, Debian gets improved support for Eee PC netbooks, and the openSUSE community announces Goblin - a new Moblin and openSUSE-based distro for netbooks. Also in this issue, the feature article takes a look at a minimalist, yet highly usable and well-designed Debris Linux, while the tips and tricks section returns with an article on running "Factory", the openSUSE development branch. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the May 2009 DistroWatch.com donations is SliTaz GNU/Linux. Happy reading!

This seems to be the popular stigma or stereotype that is floating around the internet. If you use Linux then you are automatically a geek, an unwashed, pizza eating, cola and coffee swilling, obnoxious and scruffy rebel who just wants to stick it to the man. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sure there are people of that type who do use Linux. These same type of people also use and feel exactly the same way about other operating systems.

The folks at Tungsten Graphics, which are owned by VMware, have been busy with new software releases so far this summer. Mesa 7.5 is coming along well and the Gallium3D driver architecture is now merged into the Mesa mainline code-base for release with Mesa 7.6. When it comes to Gallium3D an OpenVG state tracker has been released along with two OpenGL ES state trackers to accelerate the OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 APIs. There are also OpenCL and OpenGL 3.1 state trackers under development.

For those of you who think Google Wave is all that and a bag of chips, I put on the brakes and give you a few questions to ponder.

This guide shows how you can install and use BleachBit on an Ubuntu 9.04 desktop to delete unnecessary files. BleachBit deletes unnecessary files (such as cache, cookies, Internet history, localizations, logs, temporary files, and broken shortcuts) to free valuable disk space, maintain privacy, and remove junk. It wipes clean Adobe Reader, APT, Bash, Beagle, Chromium, Epiphany, Firefox, Flash, GIMP, Google Earth, Java, KDE, OpenOffice.org, Opera, RealPlayer, Second Life viewer, Skype, VIM, XChat, Yum, and more.

LXer Feature: 01-Jun-2009

We have a lot of big stories is this week's roundup like the news that the U.S. Army has decided to upgrade from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2007 and Vista in order to “bolster Internet security”, which begs the question, why isn't the entire military already using SELinux? For those who want to learn some Linux/Unix history and happen to have spare 40ft wall, then this poster might be for you, and SourceForge takes down the rtmpdump project after receiving a cease-and-desist notice from Adobe.

Novell, having reported its second quarter financial results yesterday after Wall Street closed, said it had inked a deal with Dallas-based Affiliated Computer Services to have that outsourcer take over its ERP systems and related data center in Provo, Utah. While the operating system supplier is headquartered back in Waltham, Massachusetts, a big chunk of its operations are still back in Provo. And in an effort to cut costs and to get ACS on board using Novell's products in its outsourcing engagements, Novell has cut a two-way deal with the outsourcing firm.

There was a time when SCO was a great company. No. Seriously. SCO Unix was a great Unix for x86 systems, and, for a brief shining moment it looked like SCO would bring together the best things of both Unix and Linux. Then, SCO's ownership got it into their heads that trying to take IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and anyone who else who used Linux was a great plan. Ha! As Pamela Jones, editor of Groklaw, points out, SCO appears to be heading towards Chapter 7 Bankruptcy. For those of you who don't know, Chapter 7 can be thought of as the Go to Jail card in the game Monopoly. "Go directly to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200." Or, go out of business; do not come back; please leave the plumbing in the restrooms on your way out the door.