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Hard drives are slow and fail often, and though abolished for working memory ages ago, fixed-size partitions are still the predominant mode of storage space allocation. As if worrying about speed and data loss weren't enough, you also have to worry about whether your partition size calculations were just right when you were installing a server or whether you'll wind up in the unenviable position of having a partition run out of space, even though another partition is maybe mostly unused. And if you might have to move a partition across physical volume boundaries on a running system, well, woe is you.

With its 4.1 release, KDE is taking few chances. While the 4.0 release's announcement emphasized excitement and significance, the tone of the announcement for 4.1 is more subdued. This time, the announcement talks about maturing technologies and underlying improvements, and the only claim is that the 4.1 desktop "can replace the KDE 3 shell for most casual users."

This is the first in a two-part series from Summit presenter and Red Hat/Fedora engineer Bill Nottingham. It is based on the talk he gave at this yearâ??s Red Hat Summit. Part two will be published later this week.

RSOL PC (that company name seems an unfortunate choice to anyone with a British or Australian ear, even if it doesn't have the same connotations in its US home) has announced a series of computers based on generic components but is playing up the potential for running a variety of operating systems. The specs are pretty typical - 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 500G hard drive, DVD burner, 2G RAM, nVidia GeForce 7300GS video card, Gigabit Ethernet and so on - and the only operating systems the company is actually selling are Windows XP and Vista. Fedora or Ubuntu Linux are available as factory options as a service to customers.

6 months after the release of KDE 4.0, the KDE community today announced the released of the second feature release in the KDE 4 era. Lots of changes have gone into this release and the KDE community hopes to be able to make most early-adopting users happy with this release. Lots of feedback from people trying out KDE 4.0 has gone into KDE 4.1, filling most of the gaps people experienced with the 4.0 releases. Highlights of KDE 4.1 are the KDE PIM suite, which has returned in its KDE 4 incarnation, a more mature Plasma desktop and many, many new features and applications.

An updated version of the updated version of the Thesaurus script we put up a while ago. Many thanks :)

Gospel Direct and Maranatha Record Co., sister companies based in South Africa, have exercised their faith in a Linux-based accounting program. Jaco Jacobs, manager of the finance and IT departments at Christian music and book retailer Gospel Direct and at Christian record label Maranatha Record Co., says that the companies chose Quasar because of their dissatisfaction with applications such as UltiSales and Syspro.

Google Gadgets for Linux is a free opensource (licensed under Apache License) platform for running desktop gadgets under Linux, catering to the unique needs of Linux users. Learn how to install configure and use Google Gadgets in openSUSE

Don't complain about your situation; do something about it. That's the gist of what Danese Cooper, senior director of open-source strategies at Intel, said in her keynote at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention here. Cooper said her talk, titled "Why Whinging Doesn't Work," was initially written for women, and she gave a version of it at a women's conference recently. Cooper said she came up with the idea for the talk after receiving an e-mail from Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, saying, "Can you girls please stop whinging about this?'"

Finding hardware that works with GNU/Linux is hard enough. But if you also want a completely free system -- one that requires no proprietary drivers or firmware to run -- then the task is almost impossible. While resources like OpenPrinting and the SANE database for scanners offer guides to simple functionality, advice on free systems is almost non-existent. To fill this gap, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been developing its own hardware list, and, as the next logical step, has been working with Los Alamos Computers (LAC) to develop a line of free (as in speech) computers pre-installed with GNU/Linux.

Whenever I write about software liabilities, many people ask about free and open source software. If people who write free software, like PasswordSafe, are forced to assume liabilities, they will simply not be able to and free software would disappear. Don't worry, they won't be. The key to understanding this is that this sort of contractual liability is part of a contract, and with free software -- or free anything -- there's no contract.

Results of a recent poll show that the stagnant economy may be leading more organizations to adopt open-source software to save on licensing fees, according ot the Open Solutions Alliance. Customers also are concerned about interoperability between open-source software and Microsoft Windows.

Last October we were the first to deliver a full-review of DeviceVM's SplashTop which was an instant-on embedded Linux distribution at the time found on a lone ASUS motherboard. Since then there has been a commitment to SplashTop on all ASUS motherboards and even on ASUS notebooks. While ASUS has been the primary partner with DeviceVM up to this point, other manufacturers are exploring this market. One of our few gripes about SplashTop is that it's limited in the current applications available and doesn't allow for much tweaking with no terminal access. However, members of the Phoronix Forums have hacked SplashTop. They have been able to run SplashTop from a USB stick on non-ASUS motherboards, boot SplashTop within a virtual machine, run custom applications, and launch a terminal within this proprietary Linux environment.

To help developers audit Web application security, Google has released an open source tool called ratproxy. It is a non-disruptive tool designed for Web 2.0 and AJAX applications that produces an easy-to-read report of potential exploits.

Recently Greg Kroah Hartman showed some very interesting Linux kernel development stats. I decided to do some too and the result are 5 cool things you probably didn’t know about the kernel code ;-) These aren’t anything I’ve seen so far about the kernel.

Bordeaux 1.4 was released today and its a significant upgrade over the prior 1.2 release, version 1.4 comes with support for Microsoft Office 2003, Visio 2003 and Project 2003. Version 1.4 has improved Office 2000 menu support and Cellar support fixes. There has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks on the backend to improve the speed and reliablity of all the supported applications and games.

KDE 4.1 was finally released to the public today. After all the controversy since the release of KDE 4.0, I'm happy to announce that KDE 4.1 simply rocks. The introduction of KDE 4 marked the introduction of the new Plasma desktop, which provides not only the panel that you interact with, but also widgets (or "plasmoids") that extended the desktop further. In KDE 4.1, one of the most welcome changes to Plasma is the return of multiple and resizable panels from KDE 3.

"Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation [ASF]. This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software," said Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft. He announced the move on Friday in a speech at the Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon. Ramji also noted Microsoft's support of Apache on the software company's Port 25 blog.

Microsoft has installed a software development laboratory in the Bandwidth Barn innovation hub that is currently the only one that offers open source developers the opportunity to test their software running on a proprietary system. Called the Microsoft Innovation Centre and Interoperability Laboratory, it will combine various software approaches to assist in developing solutions for various sectors within the local economy. The initiative is also aimed at start-ups and incubators that want to take their products and services to market in the near future.

Dan Kaminsky earlier this month announced a massive, multi-vendor issue with DNS that could allow attackers to compromise any name server - clients, too. These two articles explain how you can fix a BIND9 nameserver on Debian Etch and Fedora/CentOS so that it is not vulnerable anymore to DNS cache poisoning.