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Welcome to this year's 31st issue of DistroWatch Weekly! The Linux world is starting to heat up again after a brief break - following the first beta release of Mandriva 2007 and KDE 3.5.4 last week, a new test release of Fedora Core 6 will be out today and the third alpha build of openSUSE should appear on the download mirrors on Thursday. Besides the usual news round-up, a short article takes a look at the current status of Linux in the countries and territories of the South Pacific. Finally, with this being the first issue of DistroWatch Weekly of the new month, we are pleased to announce that the July 2006 DistroWatch donation of US$500 goes to the Blender Foundation. Happy reading!

I recently attend a Philadelphia Area Linux Users Group (PLUG) meeting presented by Toby DiPasquale titled “Google Internals” Slides here: Google Internals talk for PLUG by Toby DiPasquale. Why is this of interest on a Linux blog? As many of you may already know, Google uses a version of Red Hat to power their servers, running on old kernels (it is speculated that they run on 2.0 or 2.2 kernels). This Google Internals talk takes you through the basics of how Google uses their approximately 450,000 servers to run everything from Google search to GMail worldwide. The slides are based on information gathered from reliable Google sources, including talks given by Google staff, and gives you a very basic framework for understanding what is “under the hood” over at Google.

An article documenting the ability (or lack thereof) of a Linux box to function in an all-Microsoft environment.

Did you ever wonder what our editors do in their spare time? We don't -- because most of the time we figure we're better off not knowing. In any case, it seems that Robin 'Roblimo' Miller got turned on to a YouTube video called Al Gore's Penguin Army and decided to spread the word with his own YouTube video that this corporate-sponsored piece misused our favorite mascot, Tux, and didn't even bother to give appropriate credit to Tux creator Larry Ewing. Oh, the humanity!

YouOS.com reports - YouOS is a web operating system that lets you run diverse applications within a web browser. Small applications like sticky notes or clocks. Large applications like word processing, mp3 players, and instant messaging. Even better, it's very easy to tweak an existing application or write your own. OSDir has some nice screenshots of YouOS in the YouOS Alpha Screenshot Tour.

Under the GTS, unemployed degree and diploma holders are given the opportunity to pursue 13 different courses ranging from English and graduate development courses to professional certification in Linux, Microsoft and Cisco applications.

Here's a sober talk about the reality of the mainframe today

I've been a big fan of Firefox since practically the beginning, back when it was called Phoenix or Firebird. I like the way Firefox does things. It's feature rich and the UI is well thought out. Sadly, lately, for me Firefox has become unusable.

As in the PC world, Linux is emerging in the mobile industry as the chief check on the power of the Microsoft platforms, but until now handset Linux has been fragmented and inadequate and the Nokia-dominated Symbian has been the most successful operating system for high-end phones.

[There is some confusion as to the author of this article. In the heading it shows, "by Peter Branton", but at the end of the article it says, "The author is Caroline Gabriel, Experture Expercycle Analyst, Experton Group"]

[Strange. Commentary from some U.S. citizens might lead one to believe that GNU/Linux is not the "chief check" on MS power in "the PC world", due to mysterious, non-specific fear and uncertainty about device support. Perhaps the author analyzed facts in that area, as well as in the current article, to arrive at such a conclusion. The author certainly makes a very credible analysis of the global power struggles among mobile phone makers, in which Linux plays a significant role, based on events in recent news. -- grouch]

When it comes to open source operating systems, most people consider Linux the only choice. This is simply not the case. No, there is one operating system known as BSD that has gone largely ignored by the mainstream world.

This talk was on converting a really large (over 3 terabytes, largest table is 1.8 billion rows) data warehouse database from Oracle 8i to PostgreSQL. The reason for the conversion was to save in licensing costs. They wanted to move their Oracle licenses over from the data warehouse DB to use them on the online transaction processing (OLTP) system.

Most companies think they are prepared for disaster by backing up critical data, which they can quickly restore if a loss occurs. Few companies, however, are prepared for a catastrophe-total system failure-in which they lose all their data as well as the entire operating system, applications, settings, patches and more, reducing their system to "bare metal" and experiencing costly downtime.

In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to arrive at DEFCON 14 early Friday morning in hopes of avoiding some of the crowd at registration. Nonetheless, in spite of several spurts, sputters, and delays, it is now safe to say that the occasionally ordered chaos that is DEFCON 14, the largest hacker's conference in the world, is off and running.

Your browser's cache may be helping hackers to help themselves to your information.

Organizations adopting Linux might not abandon Unix entirely. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for example, has migrated its e-mail system from Sun hardware and Solaris to HP servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. But even though the use of Linux on production servers is growing, the practice isn't yet the norm at the laboratory, said Douglas Hughes, a service engineer at JPL Information Services.

LinkGear is shipping a small form-factor, ultra-low-power network appliance device that comes preinstalled with Linux, and targets WiFi bridging and routing applications. The LinkGear Series 100 (LG100) is powered by an SH-4 (SuperH) processor, draws only two Watts (typical), and costs $200 in quantities of 25+,

Some prominent people have called free software “communist” in an attempt to bring Cold War bugaboos to bear against the movement—a kind of “nuclear option” of FUD. I remember the paranoia of the Cold War personally, and I thought then (and I still do now) that it was “just stupid”.

So rather than react as some have done with a knee-jerk “no it’s not!”, I propose to accept the label and see where that insight takes us. Maybe there is something communist about free software? I think we will see, however, that the idea behind free software is far more radical: no less “communist” than “capitalist”, but no more so, either.

Could we be heading towards the end of all technological proggress? If "Trusted Computing" initiatives with their "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) have their way, we may be.

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) announced today that Mapbender, a portal-based suite of software for geodata management using Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) OWS architectures, has met all of the legal and community requirements to become the first official product supported by OSGeo.

"Math hasn't changed since Isaac Newton," declares Scott McNealy. So why, he asks, is California paying some $400 million annually to "update" grade-school textbooks?

That's just one of the practices questioned by the Sun Microsystems chairman. And one of the problems he believes can be solved.