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Welcome to this year's 41st issue of DistroWatch Weekly! The big openSUSE 10.3 release week is now behind us. All went without a hitch and many users are enjoying the newest software, improved package management, and extended support for the latest hardware in this new version. No major bugs have been reported so far, but let's wait for the first reviews before concluding that this is indeed openSUSE's best release ever. In other news, Mandriva Linux 2008 has been released to "early seeders", Ubuntu has begun accepting pre-orders for "Gutsy Gibbon", and Judd Vinet has resigned as the lead developer of Arch Linux. Finally, don't miss the featured story of this week - a Susan Linton's report on the major new release from Puppy Linux, version 3.00. Happy reading!

JD Frazer, Illiad of UserFriendly fame, has made a scientific discovery! A new element. I know you always wanted to know what 117 would turn out to be on the periodic table of elements.

For quick and effortless web development - Quanta Plus is steadily becoming a worthwhile competitor to the commercial web editors on the market. Quanta Plus's features include multi-document interface, WYSIWYG editing and templates. Among the advanced features your will find team development, plug-in support and a PHP debugger. The objective of the team behind Quanta Plus is simply to developer the best tool for web development.

Rob Weir of IBM has just posted a lengthy reply to concerns raised by Marbux and Gary Edwards (OpenDocument Foundation). There is so much to be said to not only complement but also correct Rob’s assessment, but here we shall only refer to the parts which are associated with Novell and the other relationships Microsoft has formed in order to combat ODF adoption and make ODF a second-class citizen.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #60 for the week September 30th - October 6th, 2007. In this issue we cover the freeze of the Gutsy archive, a Gutsy countdown script for websites, Philipp Kern joining the MOTU Team, the release of UbuntuBolivia by the Bolivian LoCo Team, Ubuntu Forums interviews, and, as always, much much more!

Linus Torvalds has launched a blistering attack on security programmers who object to adding the Smack application to the upcoming 2.6.24 Linux kernel. In an often heated exchange, Torvalds accused security programmers of being too concerned with theoretical problems and not enough with practical applications. Smack uses Linux Security Modules (LSM) which some researchers believe could be used to aid attacks on systems using the code. The researchers would prefer to see Security-Enhanced Linux as the option of choice.

The Amarok team is giving away an iAudio player. Kudos to them, but also to Cowon, a company that has boldly proclaimed support for GNU/Linux for some time now.

Novell fired its first legal salvo against the bankrupt SCO Group when it sought to lift the Lindon company's bankruptcy protections so it can recover millions of dollars in licensing fees it claims SCO wrongfully "hijacked." The Waltham, Mass., software developer is seeking to lift a bankruptcy stay on litigation against SCO so a federal court trial in Utah can proceed to determine the amount of licensing fees Novell is entitled to, and for a constructive trust to be put in place to protect those funds. SCO CEO Darl McBride said in bankruptcy court papers that Novell has claimed the licensing fees could amount to more than $37 million plus interest.

Well there you have it, Awn 0.2 has been released! With over six months since the last release, you'd think we were working on something as complicated as Gnome, but I think there are enough new features to show where the time has gone ;-). I'd like to highlight a few of the main features that have landed into trunk over the recent weeks, and others that I maybe haven't mentioned before.

Continuing their quirky habit of releasing a song for each new release, OpenBSD team has released the official 4.2 song. OpenBSD leader Theo de Raadt describes it as "mid-era Rush song". Download it now and check out the free software lyrics.

Fans of OpenSUSE 10.3 will be pleased to hear OpenSUSE 10.3 has been released. So, what can you expect? For a start, an improved interface with the latest versions of Gnome and KDE, including a KDE 4 preview. Or, for those still tied to Windows, an improved Linux-Windows dual boot option, better Microsoft Office format compatibility (what else did you expect?) and the latest version of OpenOffice.org (2.3).

Dr. Ann Cavoukian, as the Information and Privacy Commissioner in Ontario tells students to design for privacy

UNetbootin is a tool that allows you to install various Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuSE, Debian, ArchLinux) from a Windows or a Linux desktop over the internet (i.e., you do not need to burn the Ubuntu, Fedora, ... CDs). Unlike the Ubuntu installation with Wubi, real partitions are created during the installation. In the end, you have a dual-boot system (Linux/Windows or Linux/Linux).

People Behind KDE releases the fourth and final interview in its series of interviews with students who are working on KDE as part of the Google Summer of Code 2007 - meet Marijn Kruisselbrink, Alexandr Goncearenco, Emanuele Tamponi and Vladimir Kuznetsov!

LXer Feature: 07-Oct-2007

Some of the big articles this week include Mono becomes a trap, are computers sold with no OS profitable?, an editorial by Carla Schroder, Swedish police save 400 cars by using MySQL, Is Ubuntu losing its crown to PCLinuxOS?, The Next Leap for Linux and a tribute to Ken Starks. All this and more in the LXer Weekly Roundup.

Blue GNU caught up with Kelley Graham, of Toasterz, to find out about his company's business appliances, migration and education work.

A quick look at the new Zenwalk 4.8 released on October 6 2007. This Slackware based Linux OS was a pleasure to look at and test. Several images guide you through the install and a short flash video at the end to show you Zenwalk 4.8 in action.

What is Indiana? No one seems to know. Some people are excited. Some people are confused. Some people are scared and angry. Why? What is Indiana? The answer is, "Exactly!"

The good folks over at ASUS have sent over the P5E3 Deluxe, which is based upon Intel's new X38 Chipset and continues in the usual ASUS fashion of pushing new (and often unexpected) innovations onto the motherboard. Without spoiling the review of this motherboard that will be published shortly, the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe is one of the most innovative motherboards we have seen to date and it packs one very exciting and unusual feature. Embedded onto the P5E3 Deluxe is a Linux environment that features a Firefox-rebranded web browser and the Skype VoIP client! Within five seconds of turning on this $360 USD gaming/enthusiast motherboard, you can be using Linux and surfing the Internet. On this motherboard the feature is known as ASUS Express Gate, which is powered by something called SplashTop. SplashTop is an instant-on Linux desktop being created by DeviceVM. SplashTop isn't even launching for a few more days (October 10), but in this article we have more details on this embedded Linux environment as well as screenshots and our thoughts with what will hopefully come next for this Linux environment.

Last week I spent the day at eMDs talking with Dr. Winn and the excellent eMDs team. Sadly, I cannot talk about eMDs Open Source plans yet, but I can say that they will soon be making a big splash. I had some pretty cool pictures from my visit, including one with Robby the Robot, so post also servers to announce that I have migrated FredTrotter.com to wordpress, in order to be able to post pictures with my blog posts.