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Welcome to this year's 49th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! How many distributions have you installed? And what criteria do you use to evaluate them? Baris Paraskeva, a DistroWatch contributor, has summarised his experiences with many recent desktop distro releases in a grand overview - complete with ratings for ease of installation and use, package management and speed. In the news section, Ubuntu embarks on a new development journey, Mandriva announces two new products - Flash and Linutop, openSUSE launches a weekly newsletter, Mage Power interviews a leading developer of Source Mage GNU/Linux, and Foresight Linux unveils its plans for the upcoming version 2.0. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the November 2007 DistroWatch.com donation goes to MEPIS Linux. Happy reading!

Helios and company have begun a multi-part series on the ideal desktop for the New Linux User. Knowing helios is a kde-kind-of-guy, be warned that he works in that realm alone. He is asking the Linux folk to add their advice, experience and criticism...from there, Komputers4Kids can build on YOUR experience and knowledge.

This year a lot of stuff has happened in the Linux world. Here is a summary of a few of the most important events and news this year.

There are several things either happening, unraveling or in various stages of preparing to happen and I think we need to talk about them. In Texas, we have our own particular way of expressing our intent to take action at some unspecified time. Where I come from, "We're fixin' to get ready to have company" makes perfect sense. We have some issues to resolve before they get here.

The airline is looking to explore Web 2.0 technology and open source solutions to expand its online capabilities and business applications, according to its CIO.

LXer Feature: 02-Dec-2007

This week we have the beginnings of a book for Andy Upgrove, a couple articles about Firefox, Richard Stallman's guide to writing, South Africa, Netherlands and Korea move towards ODF support, Ten things you can do to help open source and Microsoft spreads the FUD with a Windows to Linux Security comparison.

This is the second chapter in a real-time eBook writing project I launched and explained last week. The following chapter on how Microsoft acquired its dominant position in a few products, and failed to succeed in others, is one of a number of stage-setting chapters to follow. Comments, corrections and suggestions gratefully accepted.

Want a sneaky peek at Ubuntu 8.04? Then you are in luck as the Hardy Heron Tribe 1 Alpha pre-release has just been made available for download.

The Linux OS for Windows users by previous Windows Users.

In the spring of 1983 I went to work for Digital Equipment Corporation. At that time Digital was mostly providing support for different flavors of Unix on their PDP-11 and VAX lines of computers for the telephone company and universities that were using them. However, a decision had been made to make and release a binary-only version of the Unix operating system so commercial customers could get it without having to pay the very high source-code license fee that AT&T required of them.

In this HowTo I will explain how to install and use KVM for running your services in virtual machines. KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a Linux kernel virtualization technique that provides full virtualization by using Intel VT (Vanderpool) or AMD-V (Pacifica).

The recent delay of KDE 4 has caused a panic at the North Pole, due to concern over finding replacement toys for all the geeks. Luckily, S. Clause has a plan to turn his elves into programmers.

PatientOS version 0.21 adds major scheduling functionality. Appointment types can be defined in batches , double or any number of overbooking predefined on the schedule with all appointments defined with a custom color. Appointments can be rescheduled. Multiple resources viewed by day or week. Custom work schedules, blocking out of schedules.

For me, it started like it did for others as well - I first saw an ad from the German company Raidsonic about their IB-NAS4220-B in some computer magazine. Then I tried it in my favourite search engine, and ended up in a German-speaking forum, where people discussed their experiences with it. Now one of the most active forum members, Thomas Knoefel of the software division of IBM Germany, started a community Wiki around the device - both in English and in German.

The KDE Release Team has decided to release KDE 4.0 this coming January. The release was originally planned for mid-December. The KDE developers want to solve a couple of essential issues before releasing. Having solved some of those issues, among which were glitches in the visual appearance, and in Konqueror, the KDE community hopes to have a KDE 4.0 that will live up to the high expectations for it.

In the preceding sections about multi-processor handling we have seen that significant performance problems must be expected if the number of CPUs or cores is scaled up. But this scaling-up is exactly what has to be expected in the future. Processors will get more and more cores, and programs must be ever more parallel to take advantage of the increased potential of the CPU, since single-core performance will not rise as quickly as it used to.

ES is an interesting looking open source research OS created by Nintendo. It runs natively on x86 and qemu. The kernel is written in C++ it uses an ECMAScript interpreter for all of the userland and it uses Cairo for graphics and even has a port of Squeak.

Mozilla has issued a fix for a bug found in an update issued earlier this week. Officials at Mozilla said they have released an update to fix a flaw in the recently released 2.0.0.10 version of their Firefox browser. It is the first time ever Mozilla has released two versions of the open-source browser in the same week. When Mozilla released Firefox 2.0.0.10 Monday, it included a bug in its rendering canvas HTML elements. Canvas elements allow for dynamic, scriptable rendering of bitmap images in HTML.

I am increasingly convinced all of the arguments between Linux distributions are going to become moot very soon. If they aren't there already. Not that I have anything against diversity, mind you. I have (and will) actively support the right to create and use any Linux distribution you want. My concern is, I think the distributions are becoming so similar in their construction, and the differences between them so subtle, the whole notion of distribution superiority is completely moot.

Lawyers for plaintiffs in a case brought against Microsoft over Vista's marketing have claimed that even the software giant's marketing director was confused by the pre-launch campaign in the United States. The case involves the way Microsoft marketed PCs as "Windows Vista capable" prior to the consumer launch of the operating system in January.

[Looks like even Microsoft doesn't know which computers can actually handle a Vista upgrade - Scott]