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Welcome to this year's 16th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! It's that time of the year when the fans of Ubuntu rejoice over another new release, while those jealous of the project's growing success on the desktop would rather stay away from the Internet. But Ubuntu is not the only option; although delayed by two weeks, Fedora 9 will arrive in a blink of an eye, while openSUSE 11.0, one of the most technologically advanced distribution releases the Linux world has ever seen, is also making huge strides towards the planned release date in June. In other news, Red Hat and OpenSolaris take different views of the alternative desktop, Mark Shuttleworth opens a discussion over the future of Gobuntu and gNewSense, Mandriva introduces a new urpmi feature for adding third-party repositories, and sidux announces the release of sidux-seminarix, a Debian-based distribution for schools. Finally, don't miss our feature story: a first look at Draco GNU/Linux, an unusual distribution that combines Slackware's base system and NetBSD's packages into a powerful desktop Linux solution. Happy reading!

LXer Feature: 21-Apr-2008

In recent announcements both Red Hat and Novell made it pretty clear that their foray onto the desktop would be delayed quite a bit longer. What they do not know is that they just left the door wide open for Ubuntu to conquer the desktop and the server space.

Because I use the KDE Desktop to its fullest potential, I want to help others realize how much you can expand the utilities of this environment. It goes farther than just grouping your system trays. Oh yes, in fact, my wife calls my desktop "Linux Command Central." Here is how a new user can maximize the most efficient and effective environment in Linux. And it's not me that says so. I get that straight from the penguin's mouth.

Open-source management company OpenLogic, backed by sponsors such as IDC and Unisys, has launched its long-promised Open Source Census, aimed at delivering the first detailed survey of how open-source software is used in the enterprise.

Your editor is typing this from the Linux Foundation's collaboration summit, currently in progress in Austin, Texas. The day's agenda includes giving a talk on the state of the kernel during the evening reception; beer-fueled hecklers would appear to be in your editor's near future. The first day, though, included a rather more sober panel on the state of the Linux desktop which revealed some interesting thoughts on where things are going.

Sometimes, there isn't much you can do to kick-start your career. Not everyone can be lucky enough to get involved in a high-profile project at work, or to develop a talent in a technology that's suddenly in-demand. But it surprises me when IT professionals who aim to move up the career ladders don't take advantage of one resource that's a win-win solution all around: get involved in an open source project.

In what is being perceived as a move to counter the threat of Linux — a free operating system — in the ultra-low-cost personal computer (ULCPC) segment, Microsoft has extended the sale of Windows XP Home by two years to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) beyond the current deadline of June 30. Linux is the operating system (OS) running the current poster child for low-cost laptops like Asustek Computer’s Eee PC, released in January and costs just Rs 18,000. To counter this, Microsoft maintains that it wants to see Windows on ULCPCs, and wants “to provide the best possible Windows experience for the devices”.

Asustek Computer Inc. on Friday confirmed that it will launch the Eee PC 900 in the U.S. on May 12, and will set $549 as the list price for the new ultralight notebook. The Eee PC 900, which the Taipei-based computer maker unveiled last Tuesday, can be configured with either Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP Home or the open-source Linux. The price for both configurations, said an Asustek spokesman, is identical: $549. But there are differences. Users who purchase an Eee PC 900 with Linux, however, receive a laptop that boasts 20GB of flash memory-based storage space. Customers who opt for Windows XP, meanwhile, end up with a machine equipped with only 12GB of solid-state storage.

Well, it looks like Richard Stallman, the father of FOSS, is going to have to cut his hair and get a suit because the warmed-over hippie movement he’s been leading is no longer the radical anti-software establishment counter-culture his rag-tag army fancies it is. Nope, it IS the software establishment.

[Yes, I know. It's Maureen O'Gara on SYS-CON. I can't believe my eyes either... - Sander]

We have already discussed how to install mail server with postfix+Devcot+SASL +Squirrel Mail in this article we will see how to add spam filter for postfix mail server.Apache SpamAssassin is an extensible email filter that is used to identify spam. Once identified, the mail can then be optionally tagged as spam for later filtering.

LXer Feature: 20-Apr-2008

In this week's Roundup we have lots of Linux and Open Source news including how Sun has started working on a free video codec, Ken Starks comes "back from the mountain", The missing five-minute Linux manual for morons, A new spin on Xfce and the one place Novell can beat Microsoft along and other MS related articles. Plus, we have Blue Jeans Cable's response to Monster Cable, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Linux Users and in our FUD section we have Seagate killing Linux support, Linux wanting to destroy things and how Open Source is costing the IT vendors $60 billion. Enjoy!

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows.

Hardy Heron, the latest version of Ubuntu, arguably the world’s most well known version of Linux, is set to be released in a mere four days. Keen as I am on – shock horror – Windows Vista, and less of a shock, Mac OS X, I await the release of Ubuntu’s newest bird with great anticipation.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Mandriva One 2008 Spring (Mandriva 2008.1) desktop (with the KDE desktop environment) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

While the ability to create a LiveUSB stick from the LiveCD media has been a feature of Fedora for a while, a new feature in Fedora 9 is the ability to have persitant data. I originally thought that the persistant data feature was only for user data but as it turns out it applies to the complete system... so not only can you store your documents... you can also install updates, new applications, create accounts, and save settings. There is nothing special you have to do... it works just like a hard drive would.

A couple of months ago I got a couple of wonderful birthday presents. My lovely geeky girlfriend got me two Western Digital 500 GB SATA 3.0 drives, which were promptly supplemented with a 3ware 9550XS 4-port hardware RAID card. Immediately I came up with the idea for this article. I had just read up on mdadm software RAID so I though it would be perfect to bench mark the hardware RAID against the software RAID using all kinds of file systems, block sizes, chunk sizes, LVM settings, etcetera. Or so I though… As it turns out, my (then) limited understanding of RAID and some trouble with my 3ware RAID cards meant that I had to scale back my benchmark quite a bit. And to top it off I discovered some nasty problems with 3ware 9550 RAID cards under Linux that quickly made me give up on hardware RAID. I still ended up testing various filesystems using different blocksizes and workloads on an mdadm RAID 1 setup, so the results should still prove interesting.

We need a new conversation about infrastructure. That's what Linux, the Net, and half a million FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications require. Because they're all part of a new infrastructural system that cannot be explained in terms of the old one — especially since infrastructure itself is not well understood. Or rather that it is too well understood in a general way, though not in the specific.

The final release of Fedora 9 has been delayed by two weeks, so I thought I’d take this chance to look at what you can expect from Fedora 9 and why you should be excited!

There are many new and innovative features brewing within the X.Org development community right now -- among the many are Gallium3D, the TTM memory manager, and MPX (Multi-Pointer X) -- but one of the features that has risen towards the top of the list and delivers visible benefits to the end-user is kernel-based mode-setting. As implied by its name, kernel mode-setting involves moving the mode-setting code for video adapters from the user-space X server drivers into the Linux kernel. This may seem like an uninteresting topic for end-users, but having the mode-setting done in the kernel allows for a cleaner and richer boot process, improved suspend and resume support, and more reliable VT switching (along with other advantages). Kernel mode-setting isn't yet in the mainline Linux kernel nor is the API for it frozen, but Fedora 9 shipping next month will be the first major distribution carrying this initial support. In this article we're looking more closely at kernel mode-setting with the Intel X.Org driver as well as showing videos of kernel-based mode-setting in action.

I'm always using a mix of machines and OSes for my work, but until this week, my main "home" machine -- The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) -- has been mostly used at home for a bit of Web browsing, testing Linux distributions, and my daughter's favorite educational games (gCompris, Childsplay, TuxPaint, Potato Guy). But this week I've needed to use the laptop a lot more while I'm in the office.