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Welcome to this year's 16th issue of DistroWatch Weekly and happy Easter Monday to all our readers who observe the popular Christian holiday. As usual, we'll start with re-visiting some of the interesting news events of the past week, including the release of SUSE Linux 10.1 RC1, the election of Anthony Towns as the new Debian Project Leader, and the announcement about a new 64-bit edition of Arch Linux. This is followed by links to a handful of interesting articles: an interview with Bruce Perens about reviving UserLinux, a new review of the latest alpha release of Ubuntu, and a useful tutorial about keeping a FreeBSD server farm up-to-date. Finally, a special report from Japan analyses the current state of Linux adoption in the country. Happy reading! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

ValueSYS, the leading promoter of Linux and Open Source Solutions from Novell and Loghat Al-Asr Magazine, the most popular IT magazine in Egypt has announced the launch of Open SUSE Linux virtual image CD to the Arab World.

Here is a quick run down of some of the top questions I had as a newbie to Linux. Hopefully this will help others as well. FYI, this is created for my personal record which means it's not all written by me. It's kind of a hodgpodge of stuff from the net. But rest assured, it's quite accurate!

I'm a big fan of languages; I see tremendous value in different human expression. Even with a language like English, a language I dream in, I'm told by my close friends I still pronounce things quite badly at times, often to hilarious effect. Blatant errors aside, language and its commonality can be crucial for community development; this is especially true for communities dealing with specific topics. Back in the day, in most of the Western world, scholars and scientists used Latin to communicate as an intellectual community.

Oracle is studying whether to launch its own version of the Linux operating system and has looked at buying one of the two companies currently dominating the Linux world, according to Larry Ellison, the software company’s chief executive officer.

{The Microsoft Threat}- It must, at all times, weigh upon the reader with more than just a minor discomfort. It should herald that invisible wrecking ball that thuds in your chest right after you have been badly frightened. Linux, or any other Operating System that dares exist in the same time as Microsoft will be crushed.

The first lavish dinner of China President Hu Jintao's historic visit to the United States next week will be in a big, secure house in Washington where the host is one of the world's most powerful men. The White House? No.

The most powerful man in China makes his first trip to the United States to meet with President Bush. This is a historic moment. On his first night in the United States, he is not going to the White House. No, He will be the in-home guest of Bill Gates. You make the connections.

When Peter Quinn announced the adoption of the new Massachusetts Enterprise Technology Reference Model (which included the OpenDocument Format) in September of last year, he specified January 1, 2007 as the conversion date for ODF. But did that make sense?

It was done without firing a shot. Firearms or missiles were not used in this victory, China's defeat, while not violent, was equally as pernicious. China laid the Sword of Surrender at the feet of Bill Gates.

The more, the merrier they say. If you can dual-boot with Boot Camp, why stop there? The people at OnMac.net have managed to get triple-booting working with OS X, Windows XP, and Gentoo Linux. There are instructions at their site, with, of course, the normal caveats.

I recently acquired a 256MB USB pendrive that I use for storing personal documents and work-related stuff. As a Linux fan who wanted to make the most of his new toy, I went looking for the simplest, smallest distro I could find that could boot from a pendrive. I found Debian-based Damn Small Linux, whose long list of bundled applications fits into a meager 50MB. The more I use it, the more I like it.

If you are using Firefox, whether on Windows, Linux or Mac, it's in your best interest to go and get the latest version from Mozilla's site!

  
There are plenty Linux reviews, though almost none of them are about Linux. You see, Linux is only a kernel, but most Linux reviews are about KDE, SuSE, the desktop and so on. Those reviews aren't about Linux, strictly speaking. In contrary, this review IS about Linux, made for the people who normally don't configure and compile their own kernel. In a previous LXer feature, my colleague Tom Adelstein said Linux is a me-too technology. That may be true for the desktop, but it is not fair to judge the whole Linux technology on its desktop. I hope to show, Linux (the kernel!) is full of innovation and peculiar features, which sometimes even sound like secret language, and is preceding its Big Competitor when it comes to features.

Whether an agency is replacing legacy systems or deploying new servers, a combined open source solution from Intel, HP and Red Hat is the most scalable, manageable and reliable alternative.

  LXer Feature: 16-Mar-06

LXer launches Solved! feature to offer readers a different kind of help column. Instead of readers getting help from the publication, the editors and readers post solutions to problems already solved. Readers can scour the Solved! articles in order to see how someone else solved a similar problem.

Right in between a car crash and Easter, I knew I had to write a Sunday Eve Column. So here I am, digesting vast quantities of chocolate eggs (and I don't even like chocolate), craving for coffee (for me about as special as breathing), with the goal of explaining to you my, well, obsession with microkernels. Why do I like them? Why do I think the microkernel paradigm is superior to the monolithic one? Read on.

Furious activity in Digikam, KmPlot and amaroK. Compile and linking fixes for applications in /trunk with CMake. Multi-platform porting fixes. KSmileTris is removed from /trunk/KDE/kdegames/.

Last November I described the Free Software's Surprising Affinity with Catholic Doctrine. Since then, several important things happened, from feedback by Stallman and other Free SW users to the birth, or acceleration, of some projects specifically based on the concept that Christians have even more reasons than others to adopt Free Software.