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Two new documentation directories were merged into the upcoming 2.6.23 mainline kernel, containing translations of the HOWTO and stable_api_nonsense.txt documents in Japanese and Chinese. Greg KH explained, "here are some patches that add some translations of some procedural documentation files to the Documentation/ tree." Regarding some of the concerns that were expressed with merging translated documentation into the mainline kernel tarball, Greg noted, "these files change _very_ slowly over time, and are quite easy to keep up to date by the translators."

Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 3 is the third alpha release of Ubuntu 7.10, and with this new alpha release comes a whole host of excellent new features. Note: This is still an alpha release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be released in October 2007.

Linux vendor Xandros has bought privately owned open source email and calendaring provider Scalix for an undisclosed sum. Scalix president and CEO Glenn Winokur will stay through the transition only and become a member of the Xandros advisory board. Vice president of finance Walter Lim will also leave the company; the sales support staff and the staff of engineers - a total of about 13 people - will all stay on with Xandros, told Xandros CEO Andy Typaldos.

Playing around with radio-frequency transmission and reception used to be restricted to those of us with hardware skills. That has been changing for some years, though, as processors get faster and software techniques advance; now, many radio transmitters and receivers are built with simple (but flexible) hardware. The hard work of generating the signal to be transmitted is done in software. Some wireless network adapters work that way now, as do a number of other devices. There is a well-advanced project - GNU Radio - which enables experimenters to do amazing things with software defined radio (SDR) systems.

The alpha 1 development release of Damn Small Linux (DSL) 4.0, which hit the Net on Tuesday, is "a very different version" that includes a number of features requested by users on the DSL forums.

Acronis, Inc. announced it is a Silver Technology Partner with Novell and is committed to the development and delivery of technology solutions, services and offerings that support SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell. Acronis will create new storage management solutions for SUSE’s Linux Enterprise customers and provide advanced disaster recovery, backup and restore, partitioning and data migration solutions including centrally managed online server backup, server disk imaging, and bare-metal restore solutions for SUSE.

After years of sticking with Windows, once I discovered that you could download an ISO file, burn it to a bootable CD and run a whole new operating system, easy as that, I've been distro hopping. It all began with Knoppix, went from Puppy and Damn Small Linux, through Ubuntu to Debian, with many a stop in between. Over the 300 or so entries of this blog, I've run probably 15 to 20 different distributions of Linux and tried unsuccessfully to run maybe another 20. I might be exaggerating, but not by much.

Subscription-based computers have never proved very popular but now a California-based outfit has come up with a new twist: a subscription-based environmentally friendly computer that will cut electricity bills. CNet reports reports that the Zonbu will sell for $99 with a $12.95/month subscription charge. The company say that the deal is better than it looks because the 15-watt PC can save up to $10 a month in electricity compared with a standard 200-watt PC.

Capetonian Ian Gilfillan is the author of Mastering MySQL 4 and an authority on database management. But, as Vincent Maher found out, he also has a philosophical side that helps rather than hinders him. Vincent first met Ian at the Digital Citizens Indaba last year where they co-presented a panel with Mike Stopforth. Last week he interviewed him for Tectonic.co.za.

In a continued thread about how the recently mergedCompletely Fair Scheduler affects the nice command, Ingo Molnar offered a history of nice levels in the Linux kernel. He began by describing the three most frequent complaints he has received.Ingo then noted,"CFS addresses all three types of complaints".

Ready to try Linux but want some hand-holding when you do? Here are three videos that walk you through the process of installing Kubuntu, the KDE-based version of Ubuntu. These little Linux.com video distro tours are not intended to be comprehensive tutorials. They're here to give you an idea of the look and feel of various popular Linux distributions to help you select the one you like best. They are available in Flash video and Ogg Theora.

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

With lots of changes here at the Los Angeles Daily News, I find myself in a good position to put Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty to work posting Web content via the Clickability publishing system and for the more mundane tasks of writing memos and reports, reading e-mail and the like. So get ready for my latest dip into the Ubuntu pool, plus some Red Hat/Fedora-based Live CDs and a little bit on my long-delayed Puppy 2.16 review and a detour through Sabayon and Gentoo to Simply Mepis.

A few years ago, the idea that savvy developers and IT professionals would need to know anything about intellectual property law would have been dismissed as a bad joke. Oh, certainly, there were arguments from time to time over fine points in the GPL Version 2, but for the most part, it didn't matter.

A petition that has been created is "essentially proposing that GPL v3 software in the UK be granted immunity from patent infringement - therefore requiring an alteration of the Copyright, Designs and Patents act. The petition will run until 10 November 2007 and can be signed by persons who hold British citizenships, or by persons residing in the UK."

In response to another merge request, Andrew Morton retorted, "argh. I have a backlog of maybe 300 patches here which I am cheerfully ignoring while concentrating on preventing 2.6.23 from being less of a disaster than it has already been." He noted that he was not planning to merge any new code into his -mm tree for 2.6.23 inclusion, "the door for new 2.6.23 material shut two weeks ago. Here, at least."

In a recent interview with Microsoft's COO Kevin Turner, the executive was asked about the future of Windows. In response, Turner had this to say: "Certainly, this last year has been an unprecedented year for Vista and Office and the launch," Turner said. "And we are still committed to the desktop. There will be another release and launch of a Vista-type operating system. [And] there will be another release of Office."

The majority of Linux users have gotten used to keeping more than one operating system on their hard disks. Most frequently the second system is a version of Microsoft Windows needed for running some application WINE refuses to start. Constant switching is irritating. Fortunately there is another option. Virtualization technology allows us to run several systems on the same computer, at the same time. In the article Paulina Budzoń introduces you to virtualization basing on the Vmware Server Console v. 1.0.3

HP and the MIT Libraries today announced the formation of the DSpace Foundation, a non-profit organization that will provide support to the growing community of institutions that use DSpace, an open source software solution for accessing, managing and preserving scholarly works in a digital archive.

The progress of a technical specification from development to adoption has a certain, often-lamented glacial quality to it, due to the consensus process involved. But while that process may be slow, it is not inexorable, and that which starts does not always finish.