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Welcome to Free Software Magazine’s fortnightly newsletter, keeping you up to date with all things free software! Enjoy!

The One Laptop Per Child platform was always going to present some interesting security challenges. Millions of identical, network-attached systems will be deployed into some remote parts of the world, where they will be managed by people who are not security experts. The systems will be obvious targets for theft, self-propagating malware, and the creation of botnets. None of these activities feature highly on the OLPC project's list of educational objectives, so it stands to reason that some significant thought needs to go into how to prevent them.

Welcome to this year's 7th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! It was a fairly quiet week, with only Mandriva's new beta release and Linspire's announcement about its partnership with Ubuntu making major headlines. In this week's issue, we have the honour to bring you a rare interview with a female entrepreneur and Linux enthusiast: Dianne Ursini from Pioneer Linux. The news section then starts with a sad news of Florent Villard (Warly) leaving his employer (Mandriva) of eight years, before it continues with an observation about the Linspire announcement, comment on the Fedora release notes issue, update on the second release candidate of Debian Installer, and information about the status of Ulteo. Finally, don't miss several interesting links, such as the story of the RPM package manager and an interview with "Jaromil", the founder and developer of the dyne:bolic multimedia live CD. Happy reading!

In this article we are going to discuss how to create a PHP-based RSS reader. It would be helpful if you know something about XML, but not really necessary. RSS documents have three main tags: Title, Link and Description. And they all do exactly what their names suggest. I will go into detail about these tags in my second article dealing with “building an RSS file.” For now, we will only focus on the “reading” part of the article.

It's a mixed bag this week from Studio Dave. I'll skip the preliminaries and just invite you to dive in and check out some of the latest news from the ever-expanding world of Linux sound and music software. There's far more going on than I can possibly cover in my allotted space, but here's a quick survey of some recent remarkable activity.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Much-requested "Page scaling" zoom mode introduced to KHTML. Work on the XPS document format backend, and intergration of a Phonon-based audio player for embedded document sounds in okular. More maps added to KGeography. KMines becomes the latest game to move toward a scalable graphics interface, with continued work on KBlackBox and KGoldRunner. scuba and wmap datasource additions to Kst.

Today, in a friendly 3-hour long meeting, the location of the Debian annual conference for 2008 was chosen, and it will be the city of Mar del Plata, Argentina.

SLAX is one of our favorite mini Linux LiveCD distributions so when SLAX 6.0.0 Pre 3 recently came out we couldn't help but to try out the new SLAX 6. New in this third pre-release of the SLAX 6.0 LiveCD is the Linux 2.6.20 kernel, bootable LiveUSB support in both Linux and Windows, udev replaces hotplug, full sound support with ALSA 1.0.14, NTFS read and write support, and more.

LXer Feature: 11-Feb-2007

Here is a review of some the events and people I talked too on the second day of SCaLE 5x in Los Angeles.

James Ketrenos announced a new 80211 based driver for the Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection adapter. He explains, "this new driver uses the new d80211 subsystem previously only available as part of the wireless-dev tree." An earlier incarnation of the driver code was much criticized for its inclusion of a userland binary-only daemon [story], prompting the OpenBSD project to create their own blob-free driver for the card [story]. "The [new] iwlwifi driver for the 3945 does not require the user space daemon, but does require a new microcode image," James explained, "over the past year we were able to make the necessary changes to the microcode used with the 3945 such that we were able to remove the regulatory daemon."

SYS-CON Events announced today that Laszlo Systems and webMethods joined SOA World 2007 East Conference & Expo colocated with Enterprise Open Source Conference & Expo as "Charter Sponsors."

LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit speaker Jeremy Allison explains some tricky details of Linux/Windows interoperability, what the Novell/Microsoft deal really does for interoperability, and a vision for a future easy-to-administer network filesystem.
Excellent read and very informative[Abe]

Opinion: It's becoming clear that Oracle's Unbreakable Linux isn't so much a product as it is an attempt to undercut Red Hat. (Linux-Watch)

JBoss taps Bob McWhirter, a seasoned open-source software veteran, to lead its community site.

The move comes less than a week after Microsoft and its partners finished work on the Open XML Translator, an add-on to Microsoft Word that is available for download and use at no cost.

OpenOffice is a good suite, yet I'm betting that most of us who get to see, and work with, Office 2007, as I did with the beta version, will suffer from "applications envy." The menu format of Office 2007 is for me rather compelling, delivering a cleaner, crisper interface. The new Word 2007's tools make it easier to do more things with a document quickly, creating impressive formats.

Kodak said Thursday that it had created a new extension in conjunction with Mozilla that would make it easier for users of the popular alternative browser Firefox to upload and share their digital photos. The application supports drag and drop functionality, photo albums, and the ability to add captions directly in the browser window for use when the album is uploaded to Kodak's online gallery.

Sometimes, we are required to resolve our internal domains on a local nameserver and external (internet) domains on our ISP's nameserver. There are different solutions to this problem, but in this tutorial, we are going to solve it through configuring a combination of caching-nameserver and BIND 9.

We are one week into the nomination period for candidates for the position of the Debian Project Leader. According to the constitution (5.2. Appointment), project leader elections should begin "nine weeks before the leadership post becomes vacant, or (if it is too late already) immediately."