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As India opens up to open source more rapidly that ever, the three-day annual event brings together the who's who of the open source world on one stage, once again.

The term Linux desktop is a bit of misnomer since there are actually many Linux desktop environments, including KDE and GNOME. Xfce is another Linux desktop option. Xfce 4.4 is now available, boasting new features that will change the way that its Linux desktop looks and works. Both KDE and GNOME have been known to be resource-intensive desktops that limit their use and practical functionality on low-end hardware. But Xfce is a stripped down graphical environment that will run on low-end hardware and run faster due to its reduced resource requirements.

If you're running more than one Debian or Ubuntu computer on your network, you can speed up downloads and updates considerably by using a local package mirror. Packages need only be downloaded once to be available to all of your local clients.

Macraigor has joined Eclipse.org, and is offering free plugin-based GNU toolchains that support its low-cost JTAG probes. The "Macraigor Eclipse + GNU Tools Suite" includes ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and x86 toolchains, sample programs for popular boards, and an optional, tested Eclipse 3.2.1 IDE for Windows hosts.

Linux distributor Red Hat said last week that is has brought on Petra Heinrich to be its new director of channels an partners in its Europe, Middle East, and Africa region.

A full-service application server like Apache Geronimo needs to have a full-service security implementation, and that means more than just supporting SSL connections. It means securing the internal requests made within an application. In this installment, David Jencks talks to the renegade about the current and future view of Geronimo's security implementation.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything is one of the first efforts to explain open source and Web 2.0 to the traditional business community. This goal is revolutionary enough for the book's dust jacket to be covered with enthusiastic blurbs from major corporate executives and business academics. However, your opinion of the book is likely to depend on your familiarity with the subject.

Microsoft Corporation's products have been locked out of the on-going World Social Forum (WSF) in Nairobi Kenya. With over 300 computers provided for participants and the press, organizers of the WSF have preferred to provide open source software products and blocked all Microsoft related products for the forum's usage and its related activities. Participants attending WSF, which for the first time is entirely taking place in an African country say that this was a gesture done as a way of promoting the free social movement at the same time also as a way of fighting Microsoft's 'imperialistic tendencies.'

Mozilla Thunderbird 2 Beta 2 includes a theme update for Mac OS X, improved message preview text in new mail alerts, easy account setup for gmail and .Mac accounts, and many bug fixes based on Beta 1 feedback. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in over 30 languages. en-US beta 1 users will receive beta 2 via automatic software update.

A new search company backed by Sequoia Capital, Searchme, Inc., has launched an improved search engine for the reference site, Wikipedia. Also available as a destination site, Wikiseek is included inside Wikipedia as a Firefox extension. Wikiseek is based on proprietary technology developed by Searchme, which utilizes the suggestions of tens of thousands of vertical search engines to deliver more highly relevant searches. The result is a faster, richer Wikipedia search experience.

Thanks to the efforts of the KDevelop team and the bug squad, the number of bugs in KDevelop has been reduced by more than half -- as of the current count, 186 bugs! To find out more, please check out the KDE Bug Tracking System. As always, everyone is invited to help with bug triage. Bug triage is a great way to contribute to KDE, without requiring programming skills. All you need to do is have the latest version of the application installed to help confirm bugs.

A university student studying operating systems asked about why the Linux kernel uses two chained lists in its LRU (least recently used) page replacement algorithm. Andrea Arcangeli, whose virtual memory subsystem was merged into the 2.4.10 kernel, explained,"back then I designed it with two lru lists because by splitting the active from the inactive cache allows to detect the cache pollution before it starts discarding the working set." He went on to add,"a page in the inactive list will be collected much more quickly than a page in the active list, so the pollution will be collected more quickly than the working set.

Have you ever had your taskbar filled with 10 applications all doing something that involved waiting for a task to finish? Document Printing Progress, a K3b CD burning dialogue, Audio Encoding via KAudioCreator, File Transfers in Konqueror, Kopete, KTorrent, checking email in KMail... The new Jobs support in KDE 4 will unify the display of progress for these tasks, making it easy to see and manage what is happening on your system.

Tonight on The Linux Link Tech Show, episode 176:
Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony talks about rolling out CNR to other Linux distros
We interview Christian Schaller from Fluendo about their newly released proprietary multimedia codec pack for gstreamer
Linc picks up a Nokia N800
Supporting F/OSS projects by donating money
Returning to the Ohio Linux Fest in 2007 and other upcoming Linux conventions
And much, much more

Be sure to check us out live every Wednesday night at 8:30 PM, EST
Just point your favorite media player to any of the following streams:
http://www.binrev.com:8000/main
http://media.sysop.ca:8000/techshow
http://wdsmn.com:8000/techshow
http://audio.fatwallet.com:8000/tllts


You can also check out previous episodes from the download section of our home page

In the US, France and a few other countries it is already forbidden to play legally purchased music or videos using GNU/Linux media players. Sounds like sci-fi? Unfortunately not. And it won’t end up on multimedia only. Welcome to the the new era of DRM!

BOSS(Bharat Operating System Solutions) is a Linux distribution developed by C-DAC for enhancing the use of Free / Open Source Software in the country. Made specifically for the Indian environment , it consists of a pleasing Desktop environment coupled with Indian language support and other packages that are most relevant for use in the government domain. Subsequent versions will support the educational domain as well. - nrcfoss.org. Screenshots of BOSS 2.0 Beta are available at LinuxQuestions.org.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything is one of the first efforts to explain open source and Web 2.0 to the traditional business community. This goal is revolutionary enough for the book's dust jacket to be covered with enthusiastic blurbs from major corporate executives and business academics. However, your opinion of the book is likely to depend on your familiarity with the subject.

If you run a stable system, you don't have to miss out on the latest and greatest releases of your favorite applications -- just use a backport to get a package of a new release that's been "back-ported" to your older distribution.

Real-time embedded Linux vendor FSMLabs has joined the partner program of database vendor MySQL AB. The companies will work together to expand their telecom-specific consulting services around MySQL-powered software running on FSMLabs's hard real-time enabled Carrier Grade Linux and BSD distributions, FSMLabs says.

Welcome to this year's 1st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Erinn Clark, co-founder and leader of Debian Women is selected one of the top 10 girl geeks who are influential in Open Source. Linux-Watch posted Chris Fearnley's rebuttal to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argument that Debian is in trouble.