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The One Laptop per Child's XO, better known as the $100 laptop, gets most of the headlines but NComputing is showing in Macedonia, with its Ubuntu Linux based servers and virtual PC terminals, that there's more than one way to get inexpensive Linux desktops into students' hands.

LXer Feature: 19-Sept-2007

I interview one of the lead developers of the Xfce desktop environment, in The LXer Interview of Benedikt Meurer.

So yes, I will today turn to the West and nod my head to the author of the Linux Kernel. I am not writing this to speak of his obvious genius. Neither am I banging on a keyboard to offer praise and accolades to our kernel developers, distro authors and graphic artists. What Linus Torvalds gave to us is worth more than we know. That is being done

My apologies for the rough title. However, if you have read about James Burgett and how the EPA is trying to prevent him from recycling older computers to give to the needy, then it is my hope you will understand. Kudos to ZaReason for raising awareness of this.

Listening to Internet Radios seems easy nowadays with the rampant powerful graphical environments of KDE and GNOME. Given that the computer you have is well equipped with processing power, it will do well with all those graphics overkill. But should users who own older machines get rid of the pleasure of listening to the Internet radios? Never!

During the last weekend, the KDE on Windows developers conducted their second real life meeting in the Trolltech offices in Berlin Adlershof, incorporating new developers and improving infrastructure. On Friday evening, the participants were welcomed by the Berlin Trolls and introduced to the office. After a nice meal at a local restaurant, the the group evaluated the main working areas of the participants and created a meeting roadmap.

IBM has released a suite of free software tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The company announced on Sept. 18 the tool set, known as Lotus Symphony, at the IBM Collaboration Summit at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. Lotus Symphony supports multiple file formats including Microsoft Office and ODF (Open Document Format), and can also output content in PDF format. "IBM is committed to opening office desktop productivity applications just as we helped open enterprise computing with Linux," Steve Mills, senior vice president of IBM Software Group, said in a statement.

"Here's a new version of my credentials patch. It's still very basic, with only Ext3, (V)FAT, NFS, AFS, SELinux and keyrings compiled in on an x86_64 arch kernel,"stated David Howells. He described the patch as,"introduce a copy on write credentials record (struct cred). The fsuid, fsgid, supplementary groups list move into it (DAC security). The session, process and thread keyrings are reflected in it, but don't primarily reside there as they aren't per-thread and occasionally need to be instantiated or replaced by other threads or processes."

Welcome to this year's 38th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! DistroWatch has a new Number One distribution and it's called PCLinuxOS. But how is it possible that this small, little-known project, built mostly by one enthusiastic developer, has reached the heights that eludes many of the more famous and better established distributions? Keep reading to find out. In the news section: Ubuntu technical team votes for CompizFusion by default, openSUSE continues to show faith in KDE 4.0, Debian looks at new features in X.Org 7.3 and 7.4, Ulteo launches new beta releases, and Linux Mint develops a new update tool - mintUpdate. Finally, don't miss our featured article that introduces MACH BOOT, a Linux live CD that boots into a graphical desktop in as little as 10 seconds! Happy reading!

Mandriva Linux today announced the signature of a broad technical co-operation and training agreement with Angola.

A musical notation system for KOffice, a cross-platform kiosk browser, a help system editor for GNOME -- these are just a few of the projects completed in this year's Google Summer of Code (SOC) event, during which Google paid students to work on free and open source software projects. The innovations in this third year appear to have enriched the experience for participants, but not affected the project completion rate.

Today (22 September) isOneWebDay, a project I'm proud to have been a part of sinceSusan Crawford thought it up many months before the first one last year. OneWebDay is meant as a day on which we celebrate the Web and what it does for each of us. So I want to celebrate what the Web does, and continues to do, for me as a journalist.The arc of my writing career is something of a parabola: a broad U-shaped valley between the time when I worked as a newspaper and magazine writer and editor and the time when I started writing on— and about— the Web, and everything that makes it good, including (and especially) Linux.

Enterprise distributions are an important part of the economic success story of Linux. The creation of highly stable, highly supported distributions has brought significant revenue streams to some distributors and enabled the deployment of Linux into many "mission critical" situations. Enterprise distributions encourage the commercial world to take Linux seriously. At LinuxConf Europe, however, your editor has stumbled into a few conversations which characterized enterprise distributions as one of the bigger problems the development community has now. Then a talk by Dirk Hohndel made that point again in a different context.

A frustrated sounding Andrew Morton released the 2.6.23-rc6-mm1 kernel as"a 29MB diff against 2.6.23-rc6." Many patches are merged first into Andrew's -mm tree for testing before being pushed to Linus' mainline tree during the merge window. Andrew suggested that the -mm process wasn't working as well as it could:"It took me over two solid days to get this lot compiling and booting on a few boxes. This required around ninety fixup patches and patch droppings. There are several bugs in here which I know of (details below) and presumably many more which I don't know of. I have to say that this just isn't working any more."

IBM for Multicore Acceleration for Linux is an advanced, high-performance cross-compiler tuned for IBM XL C and C++ compiler for the Cell Broadband Engine Processor. This updated version provides support for SDK for Multicore Acceleration 3.0; automatic generation of overlays for SPU; improved listing support for SPU; and auto-SIMDization improvements.

Trolltech today announced http://www.linuxlookup.com/2007/sep/18/trolltech_and_openmok...">Qtopia Phone Edition, the leading application platform and user interface for Linux based mobile phones, has been ported to the Neo1973 mobile phone from Taiwanese manufacturer FIC and open-source software provider OpenMoko. Now, in addition to Trolltech’s Qtopia Greenphone, developers have an additional reference platform and form factor for development and testing of new mobile Qtopia applications.

Predicting SCO's demise is a popular hobby in open-source circles. Now, however, with SCO recent filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the experts believe that SCO's end is near.

In July, Mozilla executives admitted that they weren't quite sure what to do with Thunderbird, the open-source e-mail client, since Firefox, the popular open-source Web browser, demanded most of the company's attention. On Sept. 17, Mozilla announced that it had decided to spin Thunderbird off into a company of its own: MailCo.

Although the idea of using an application to manage your personal finances makes a lot of sense, not all of us have the time and patience to learn all the intricacies of tools like GnuCash or Money Manager Ex. If that sounds like you, try Buddi, probably the easiest to use personal finance manager out there. Written in Java, Buddi runs on most platforms that can run the Java Runtime Environment. If you are running Debian or Ubuntu, you can download and install it from a .deb package; otherwise you can opt for a plain .jar file that will run on pretty much any Linux distro.

A new website has been launched to offer information on free, libre and open source software with particular reference to the use of ICT in the NGO sector.