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Only the very brave can pick winners amongst the current crop of Web 2.0 start-ups, social networks and other sundry services. And whatever the outcome might be, it is safe to say that the popularity of open source database MySQL and programming language PHP will only increase.

LXer Feature: 28-Aug-2006

Neoscopio adheres closely to the principles of Free/Open Source Software by providing customized solutions and services based on available software projects. LXer's Don Parris interviews the Neoscopio team.

If you ask any Novell watcher to rate the software vendor's abilities, the chances are that observer will give the company a low grade for marketing. Novell has struggled with how to position its products for years and now hopes it's finally on the right track with a new focus for its SuSE Linux distribution.

[This is from early last week, but you might find something worthwhile in this. We'll try to get the upcoming edition in a timely manner. - dcparris]

Coverage from Gentoo's booth at the San Francisco Linux World Conference and Expo, a call for translators for Slovak and Greek languages, and some very important information about future upgrades to GCC and glibc, all in this week's Gentoo Weekly Newsletter. Also in this issue, developer of the week, two Gentoo events that will take you away from your comfort zone, and more.

Welcome to this year's 34rd issue of DistroWatch Weekly! The essence of this week's issue is a comment on the status of Linux distributions. Why are there so many of them? What motivates developers to create new ones? Wouldn't we be better off if there were only 10 - 20 major projects, instead of hundreds of one-man distros? We attempt to give some answers. Also in this issue: a long-term SUSE user explains why Kubuntu meets his needs better, openSUSE's Andreas Jaeger comments on the reasons behind removal of proprietary kernel modules from the popular operating system, and Gentoo's Donnie Berkholz argues that democracy is not always a good thing for the advancements of the largest source-based distribution. Updates on Fedora Core 6 and Mandriva Linux 2007, together with links to two resources comparing and rating several popular distributions conclude the news section. Happy reading!

Imagine if you will, a world where your ideas and perhaps, even your own creative works became part of the OS of tomorrow. Consider the obvious advantages to an operating system that actually morphed and adapted to the needs of the users instead of the other way around.

The new "Linux-enabled" Lenovo laptop launched this week at LinuxWorld will not actually come "pre-loaded" with Novell SUSE Linux, a high-ranking Lenovo official said today, contradicting some industry reports stating otherwise. Together with Novell and Intel, Lenovo formally unveiled the new PC at a press conference on Tuesday, following months of industry speculation about an impending Linux announcement from the mobile PC maker.

Reliance on open source code runs deep among Google's developers, and the company uses open source in its production systems, too. The software has been Google-ized--something new added to make it fit Google's way of doing things.

[I wrote a piece similar to this when Google presented at my local LUG some months ago. - Scott]

upstart is a replacement for the init daemon, the process spawned by the kernel that is responsible for starting, supervising and stopping all other processes on the system.

Trusted Computer Solutions Inc. (TCS), a supplier of multi-level security and cross-domain information sharing applications for government and industry, announced in partnership with IBM the launch of the TCS SecureOffice suite of cross-domain guards based on Linux.

Luis Villa is absolutely right in his castigation of our X update on Wednesday this week. As a team we made a series of errors, and the result was a desktop that was broken for thousands of users, for several hours. It has been a severe lesson in QA, something Luis knows plenty about.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: as the Summer Of Code draws to a close, a mass code import in the Physiks project, and other notable commits for several of the other affiliated projects.

KDE's legal body KDE e.V. has published its second 2006 quarterly report.

Image management application KPhotoAlbum has launched a splash screen contest.

The New Zealand Open Source Society (NZOSS) is claiming a moral victory over Microsoft’s patent of XML schema after the software giant made changes to its patent.

My column last week on virtualisation and the Linux kernel drew some flak from readers who didn’t agree that VMware’s VMI (Virtual Machine Interface) proposal offered a better approach than that of the open-source Xen project.

[And then he mislabels Free Software purists as 'Linux' purists. Oh the irony! - dcparris]

THIRUVANANTHAPRUAM, AUG 25: After the cola ban, it is now the turn of Microsoft to log out of Kerala. Children in 12,500 high schools in the state, India’s most literate, will not be taught Windows. Instead, instructors are lining up Linux for them. This is because Kerala has chalked out a plan for migrating its high school students to free software platforms in three years.

Retrofitting a laptop with the Linux operating system is not always problem-free. Users who are not computer experts but who wish to use Linux are advised to look for laptops onto which the system has already been installed.

The folks over at RHAT haven’t wasted time putting me to work. I just spent two weeks working with investors, touring with Dion Cornett, the VP of Investors Relations. I don’t know how he does it. I used to see investors as a private company, mainly due to the impact we had on public companies at the time, but nothing like what I went through recently -- roughly 60 investors in three days.

The Free Standards Group (FSG), a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing and promoting open source software standards, announced that two applications on Linux -- RealPlayer and the MySQL database -- are certifying to the Linux Standard Base.