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Welcome to this year's 42nd issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Following the openSUSE 10.3 release two weeks ago and the new Mandriva Linux 2008 announced last Tuesday, the rapid succession of major Linux distribution versions continues this week with Ubuntu 7.10. Will the developers of these projects succeed in enticing more computer users to switch to Linux? Chris Smart tries to answer the question in the upcoming issues of DistroWatch Weekly by reviewing these new products - today he installs openSUSE 10.3 on his trusty MacBook to see how it fares. In the news section: Mandriva simplifies its product range, Ubuntu prepares for another download rush, and Fedora embraces artwork developed by the user community. Finally, don't miss two interesting interviews with Lucas Villa Real from GoboLinux and Gerard Beekmans from the Linux From Scratch project. Happy reading!

LXer Feature: 15-Oct-2007

So far in this randomly-appearing series I haven't talked all that much about Linux, but mostly camera gear. Today I'm going to talk about photography fundamentals. Because a skilled person can use an image editor to doctor any photo to look like anything, but for me that is not the point. I'm not interested in devoting my life to repairing inferior photos; I want to take the best-quality pictures possible and not have to spend endless hours mucking about to make them look like anything. So step one is Find Good Camera Equipment, and step two is Learn To Use It.

Jaka Kranjc discusses his Linux beginnings, plus his current work on Source Mage GNU/Linux.

Packt is pleased to announce a new book on OpenLDAP for Application Developers and System Administrators running OpenLDAP. This book teaches the reader to build a directory using OpenLDAP and then employ this directory in the context of the network, taking a practical approach that emphasizes how to get things done.

Avi Kivitiy postednumerous KVM updates which Linus Torvaldsmerged into his mainline kernel source tree to be included in the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel. Avi summarized:"Highlights include in-kernel pic/lapic/ioapic emulation, improved guest support, preemptibility, an improved x86 emulator, and a fair amount of cleanup."The changes outside drivers/kvm/ and include/linux/kvm*.h fix the CR8 mask definition (which is not otherwise used in the kernel) and expose some ioapic register definitions even if ioapic support is not compiled in. The diff is appended below."read more

"I've never looked at the Reiser code though the comments I get from friends who use it are on the order of'extremely reliable but not the fastest filesystem in the world'," Matt Dillon explained when asked to compare his new clustering HAMMER filesystem with ReiserFS, both of which utilize BTrees to organize objects and records. He continued,"I don't expect HAMMER to be slow. A B-Tree typically uses a fairly small radix in the 8-64 range (HAMMER uses 8 for now). A standard indirect block methodology typically uses a much larger radix, such as 512, but is only able to organize information in a very restricted, linear way." He continued to describe numerous plans he has for optimizing performance,"my expectation is that this will lead to a fairly fast filesystem. We will know in about a month :-)

With the arrival of Windows Vista , lots of people are looking for alternatives. And Linux has emerged as the best contender. As I have used Windows XP and Linux for last 5 years, and Vista since its release. I thought why not write an article for the people who may want to know/use/switch to Linux from Windows.

For this article we've decided to not only deliver power benchmarks from Ubuntu 7.10 and Ubuntu 7.04 to compare the tickless kernel effect, but we have went back and retested all of the Ubuntu releases going back to Ubuntu 5.04, or also known as Hoary Hedgehog. With the past six Ubuntu releases we had tested the power consumption of a Lenovo laptop when running from its AC charger and off the battery, when the system was idling and then again under load. We had also monitored the temperature of the Intel Centrino mobile processor. You may be surprised by the results of Ubuntu's power usage.

KDE 4 is the next major release of the K Desktop Environment software. It contains a new multimedia API, called Phonon, a device integration framework called Solid and a new style guide and default icon set called Oxygen. Let me say this first: KDE 4 is still not ready but it is nice to see the major improvements in usability, performance and stability. KDE 4 (preview) is already included in the latest Mandriva release. This article describes the installation on a Mandriva 2008 desktop

Read more at Linux-tip.net

Most Linux users out there, think that their whole system is named just “Linux” (or perhaps the distribution name). For a large number of reasons, which I do not intend to analyze in this post, this is not, and should not be the case. The actual name is GNU/Linux since only the Linux Kernel is “Linux” and the rest of the system (including some vital parts such as glibc or GCC) are parts of the GNU Operating System. Linux was chosen as the kernel for the GNU system at a time when the GNU project had a nearly working operating system, which however lacked a working kernel (although an initial implementation of the Hurd existed).

KDE 4 is coming. It’s starting to look and behave in a mature enough manner to use it on a normal desktop. This article is a little introduction as to what you should expect from the brand new KDE that is due out later this year.

Here at Tectonic we spend way too much time online and a great deal of that time is spent doing research. QuickNote is one of the few Firefox extensions that make it possible for us to escape the Internet occasionally have lives in 'meat space'.

The parallels are there. At least enough of them to bring forward a comparison and force us to ask the tough questions. Questions not only between us, but questions that should be posed to the world....a world by the way that really doesn't see what we do. We've created a creature that now rules the Master. How do we stop it? And even if we decide we should...how do you fight a monster of this stature and strength?

LedgerSMB is a free (licensed under the GPL), web based double entry accounting system written in Perl which uses PostgreSQL for data storage. It is intended for small and medium businesses (SMB), and it can be used easily through a regular web browser like Firefox. This tutorial explains how to install LedgerSMB on a Debian Etch system.

LXer Feature: 14-Oct-2007

I have a lot of big stories for you this week. Linus gets mad, Amsterdam's open source test is successful, Red Hat and Novell get sued with a little help from Microsoft, 12 tips for KDE users, an article on how to protect your Linux system during startup, a review of KOffice and our own Sander Marechal interviews John Hull of Dell. All this and more in the LXer Weekly Roundup.

LXer Feature: 14-Oct-2007

In its second year, T-Dose, the Dutch Open Source event aimed at developers takes place in Eindhoven. Your two LXer editors went there to find out what's happening and what's new in open-source land. Todays topics include QTopia for PDA's and smartphones, open source software in the iLiad digital paper device, KDE4 application programming, the Lodel publishing tool, efficient data structures and how to overtake proprietary software without writing code.

"This report covers FreeBSD related projects between July and October 2007," began the latest FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report, posted by Brad Davis. He included a summary of the recent Google Summer of Code projects noting, "lots of participants are working getting their code merged back into FreeBSD." Regarding the upcoming FreeBSD 7.0 release he noted, "the bugs in the FreeBSD HEAD branch are being shaked out and it is being prepared for the FreeBSD 7 branching. If your are curious about what's new in FreeBSD 7.0 we suggest reading Ivan Voras' excellent summary."

The Dutch Consumers Association has called for a boycott of Windows Vista, after the software giant refused to offer free copies of Windows XP to users who are having problems with Vista. A spokesman for the Consumentenbond says that the product has many teething problems, and "is just not ready". The association claims it received over 5000 complaints about Vista. Many printers and other hardware failed to work, the association says, computers crash frequently and peripherals are very slow.

The Software Freedom Law Center will soon reveal the culmination of a year and half of steady revision and editing: a legal primer for free software projects, designed to make complex issues understandable to the layman. The primer, which will be disgorged on the Law Center’s web site on Monday, walks through issues such as the GNU public license (GPL) and how to use it correctly, copyright assignment and enforcement, and so on.

Andrew Morton posted his first -mm patchset against the recently released 2.6.23 kernel, preparing for a big merge of patches bound for inclusion in the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel. He noted: "I've been largely avoiding applying anything since rc8-mm2 in an attempt to stabilise things for the 2.6.23 merge. "But that didn't stop all the subsystem maintainers from going nuts, with the usual accuracy. We're up to a 37MB diff now, but it seems to be working a bit better."