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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 70 for the week December 9th - December 15th, 2007. In this issue we cover the countdown to Hardy Alpha 2, new MOTU & community members, Ubuntu Forums interview, Bazaar 1.0 release, and as always, much, much more.

The difficulty and frustration of building GNOME from source is a major impediment for many new contributors. Installing the dependencies, getting the tools working, and compiling major components of the desktop environment is a burden that detracts from time that could be spent making patches. In order to resolve this problem, the developers from rPath have created the GNOME Developer Kit, a complete environment for testing and developing GNOME.

Sometimes, you just need to break through a troublesome gateway. Or perhaps you need to test a connection from a remote location. If you’re like most geeks, though, there’s already ample reason to do any of this — because you can.

Welcome to this year's final issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Yes, it's that time of the year when DistroWatch takes a brief look at the events that shaped the distribution world during the past 12 months. Who were the winners and losers in 2007? Which distributions impressed most? Were there any major surprises? Read more in our feature story. In the news section, Mandriva enters a new development process with Cooker Alpha 1, Max Spevack resigns as Fedora Project Leader, MEPIS updates its artwork for the upcoming release of SimplyMEPIS, Daniel Robbins announces updated "stage" tarballs, and Ulteo delivers the first of its online services. Finally, many thanks to all our loyal readers and best wishes for the festive season! See you all in 2008!

I had enough with eating crap with Vista. My last line of patience warned off when I happened to wait about 5 seconds when changing from one MS Doc file to another and also happened that I was running with time to finish a project report. No, I’m not running on 256 ram, it’s 1 GB and this kind of a time wastage is totally unacceptable. You may ask why I put up with Vista in the first place. That’s thanks to HP’s decision to embrace Vista so my laptop was pre-built with Vista and no chance to downgrade because there are no drivers. So where to go now ? Easy….Gutsy.

Trolltech, the company behind the Qt widget toolkit used in KDE, released today several new Phonon backends that facilitate cross-platform multimedia support. Phonon is media engine abstraction layer that was originally developed for KDE 4. Phonon simplifies multimedia application development and makes it possible to swap seamlessly between various underlying media libraries without having to reimplement application code.

While Linux is pretty efficient with a computer's resources out of the box, there are still ways you can make it run leaner and meaner on your desktop. Using a little bit of know-how, a willingness to run a few terminal commands and a mind for efficiency, you can get every last bit of power from your Linux box, or get more life from an older system. Read on for a roundup of ways to slim down and speed up Linux that any level of user can implement.

For my recent review of the latest KDE 4 release candidate, I used an OpenSUSE Live CD image. I've gotten a few e-mails this morning from readers who are looking for an equivalent Live CD based on Kubuntu, so I figured I'd take this opportunity to point out that the Kubuntu KDE 4 RC 2 Live CD was released yesterday. A KDE 4 PPA repository is also available for Kubuntu 7.10 users.

Linux services are basically programs that start at boot time to provide certain features and services (Apache, the web server for example). After installation, every Linux distribution provides a list of enabled services. However, you might not need some of these services or you might need others that are not enabled by default. Having only the services you need running will make your system faster, more stable and secure. So the first thing you need to do after installing a Linux distribution is to manually edit the list of enabled services. Unfortunately, some services don’t provide a description, others provide a description that’s not understandable so you might end-up disabling a vital system service just because you didn’t know what it did and you thought you didn’t need it. In this post, I’ll try to explain as good as I can, most services you’ll see on a Linux distribution.

In May, Mozilla Labs vice president Chris Beard developed Personas, an experimental Firefox add-on for lightweight theming. The add-on makes it possible to apply custom artwork to the Firefox chrome, including the toolbars, tabs, and status bar. The addon is compatible with Firefox on all three major platforms. The Personas addon started out as Beard's personal project, but has now found a new home at Mozilla Labs and has undergone a major rewrite that is compatible with the latest Firefox 3 beta.

Red Hat has launched a regionwide campaign in hopes of raising awareness of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5's virtualization capabilities. The campaign, Integrated Virtualization Inside, kicked off in Beijing Thursday, and will introduce RHEL 5's virtualization capabilities to customers through methods such as training courses.

Komputers4Kids has had a good year. To this date, we have either built or been donated 110 computers for financially or socially under-privileged kids. We here at Lobby4Linux have installed each one of them and then taught them how to use their new Linux System. It's been a good year other ways as well.

With the rise of cloud computing, users are becoming less and less dependent on their operating systems as their applications move to the web, but Jim Zemlin points out that the rise of cloud computing also helps Linux on the server side.

I'm beginning to wonder myself. My uncle bought a $1200.00 laptop that didn't work right brand new and wanted to return it for a refund in under 30 days. In the US its illegal not to refund someone's money for a defective product or a product that is not as described and everyone has the right to return something that is new.

While recently talking with a fellow network admin, I learned about Nipper. While there are many tools available to perform security audits of network devices, Nipper is unique. Let me show you why.

A streaming version of the British Broadcasting Corporation's iPlayer online TV on-demand service has been launched for the Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. This is the first time a U.K. broadcaster has provided an on-demand streaming service for all three platforms.

LXer Feature: 16-Dec-2007

In this weeks roundup Andy Updegrove continues his series on ODF vs. OOXML, Open Source Fonts, a new version of Picasa for Linux, our own Hans Kwint asks "Do Linux filesystems need defragmentation?", KDE takes a stand on OOXML and Carla Schroder gives her advice to those brave enough to run Debian Volatile. Also, Microsoft decides to stay quiet on what Unix code it may own, someone figures out how to get a OLPC laptop to run XP, why the NYSE using Linux is important and Richard Stallman finally goes off the deep end.

Setting up a network can be fairly quick and easy if you're setting it up with straight Class A, Class B, or Class C network addresses. But, there may be occasions when you would only have a few hosts assigned to a given network segment. In that case, you wouldn't want to use a straight "classful " network addressing scheme, because you would waste too many IP addresses for that network. (You may need to use these IP addresses later if you decide to add other segments to your network.) This is where subnetting comes in handy.

Last month AMD introduced the ATI Radeon HD 3800 series as "enthusiast gaming performance for the masses" through the Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870, which are both sub-$250 graphics cards. While rudimentary, the Catalyst 7.11 Linux driver (also released last month), supports these two RV670 GPUs with better support coming through the Catalyst 7.12 Linux driver this month. To see how well these two PCI Express 2.0 graphics cards are able to perform under Linux, ASUS had sent out their EAH3850 TOP and EAH3870 TOP. We have tested both of these graphics cards using Ubuntu 7.10 and have compared the results to other products using the fglrx driver, including the ATI Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB. These are the world's first Linux benchmarks of these new mainstream ATI graphics processors.

To embrace Linux, or not embrace Linux, that is the question.