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The latest and as they say one of the most ground-breaking versions of Mandriva Linux has been released as scheduled. Mandriva Linux 2009 is jam-packed with exciting new features and innovations that will try to cater everyone’s desktop needs. I had fun with Mandriva 2008, so I was really looking forward to this latest release.

LXer Feature: 12-Oct-2008

In this week's Roundup Linux turns 17, Google releases their Linux repositories, a new Linux Broadcom driver arrives and Sean Michael Kerner asks if .NET on Linux is finally ready or not. Also, an introduction to free music production software, Debian leader Steve McIntyre says Lenny might be late and in what I would consider to be an extremely bad idea, the ISO offers to take over maintenance of the ODF standard from Oasis, stating that they are not dealing with defect reports fast enough.

Warrington School, in Otago, will not get paid funds allocated for Microsoft licences after moving to open source software, simply because the school was never billed, says the Ministry of Education. The school is deploying the GNU/Linux operating system, aiming to have free software across the board by 2010, and the complete switch to Linux has been approved by the MoE, says the school’s principal, Nathan Parker.

Do you remember using old-school IRC chat rooms? Well Michail Blestas does, and he tells us how that has become Chat on the XO in this second OLPC interview by Robert Scoble. He also gives us a good idea of how many XO laptops are connected to the Internet - about half.

The KDE Community today launches the new KDE Forum. The new forum uses the bulletin board software MyBB offering users, developers and people interested in KDE a place to help each other, discuss KDE-related topics and exchange ideas. The KDE Forum complements KDE's UserBase, the home for KDE users as a valuable support resource.

Rishi Patel had an epiphany when he saw"Toy Story" more than a decade ago. The Smyrna, Ga., resident has long been interested in merging science and art -- he graduated with a physics degree from the University of Georgia and enjoyed making clay models as a child -- and the Pixar movie drove the point home.

In hindsight it might have been smarter for me to have moved my older version of Thunderbird onto the new desktop, then upgraded [1.] However, I noted that the new version offered by Ubuntu was two minor number versions later. Hence, I installed the newer Thunderbird and then copied over the entire dot thunderbird directory for my email user identity and the entire coded default content further down. To my dismay, nothing worked after I misinterpreted an installation option that might have saved me from a tremendous amount of harassment, I made the situation worse. The situation became so dire, I thought my only option was to kill the entire installation of Ubuntu 8.04 and start afresh [2.].

An Israeli firm will ship a smartphone that runs Linux to the Russian market, according to industry reports. Possibly manufactured by Sharp, Emblaze Mobile's "Edelweiss" phone will offer GPS and an unprecedented 854 x 480 touchscreen, while running the Access Linux Platform (ALP), reports suggest.

An ASUS public relations representative in Australia has released details of a new ASUS Eee PC, the S101. Whilst an official release date was not stated, it is understood that the device is soon to be released in Australia. The spokesperson said that "the S101 is unique to the Eee PC family in terms of its design. Its focus is more as a luxurious Eee PC".

People who either dabble or work in computing enough are probably used to the idea that some operating systems are better than others as creative platforms; Mac OSX generally seems to be the preferred place for video editing, thanks to the likes of Final Cut Pro. They’ve also got the fantastic GarageBand program for audio production as part of their iLife suite, and with Windows, ProTools is often considered industry standard when it comes to audio production. But these popular, household names of programs come with a price; often a pretty hefty one, actually. If you’re thinking of getting SONAR 8 Studio for your audio needs, be prepared to shell out $369 for it. Today, we’re going to explore how with Linux we can make music, and from a software standpoint, it’s going to cost us nothing.

"It is a race, and we're not slowing down." That is how Ross A. Mauri, the general manager of IBM's Power Systems product series, describes competing against Sun Microsystems and HP for the Unix server market. IBM announced a number of new products and upgrades Tuesday to help keep its current lead in revenue.

As a director of the Linux Foundation and a Linux SCSI developer, James Bottomley opened the Linux-Kongress in Hamburg, Germany this week with a keynote investigating the commonalities and differences among the various Open Source operating systems. He describes Linux as the liveliest variant among them.

Back in the early days of Linux, a developer wishing to meet his or her peers at a conference had a relatively small number of alternatives. Two of those - Linux Expo and the Atlanta Linux Showcase - were held in the United States. But it has been a long time since the US has hosted a serious developer-oriented conference - especially for developers who are working on the lower layers of the system. The US-based conferences died out as a result of a combination of a number of factors, including poor management, competition from the Ottawa Linux Symposium and (yes, really) LinuxWorld, and a feeling among certain developers that becoming the next Dmitry Sklyarov would not be a fun way to spend the rest of the year.

Part of an ongoing series of on open-source geographic information system (GIS) programs, this article offers an introduction to uDig GIS. uDig is for GIS users of all levels, from beginners to advanced.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the winners of the OpenOffice.org(TM) Community Innovation Challenge designed to fuel innovation and community around OpenOffice.org, as the community prepares for the imminent launch of its next-generation productivity suite, OpenOffice.org 3.0. The contest was part of Sun's million-dollar Open Source Community Innovation Challenge Program, a multi-year program supporting several Sun-sponsored open source communities. "It has been a pleasure to contribute QATrack, which gives the OpenOffice.org Community the ability to track the qualification of the many releases being worked on," said Gold Medal winner Per Eriksson. "I look forward to future involvement with this truly innovative, global project."

Military IT folks wondering if their use of Apache, Perl, Linux and other open source software is copacetic with the brass will soon get some answers from the Defense Department's Office of the Chief Information Officer. The office is preparing a memorandum that further clarifies how open source may be procured and used within the services. The memo should answer many lingering questions still surrounding the open source, said Daniel Risacher, the data strategy leader for the Office of Secretary of Defense who is drafting the memo. The draft may point out some potential benefits as well.

Debian project leader Steve McIntyre has dismissed claims that the next stable version of Debian – codename Lenny – could be delayed until June 2009. Based on the number of outstanding release-critical bugs and the time it has taken to fix them on previous releases, Debian developer Bastian Venthur estimated it will take a further eight or nine months to bring Lenny up to release quality.

After introducing the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop to the teachers and then the third and fourth grade students involved in our OLPC pilot project in Ouéléssébougou, Mali, we finally got to see how exactly the kids use the XO laptops. We found out in the fifth and sixth weeks of the program lots of good news: the kids love the XO, especially since they have now started taking the small green laptops home at night. In addition they have really taken to navigating the Sugar OS and have become speedy typers. Even better is the collaboration that takes place in the classroom to teach each other how to use certain applications.

Virtualization software can help you run programs that your native Linux distro wouldn't. While Linux users have many virtualization options, none comes close to the all-encompassing VMware Workstation 6.5. Introduced last month, VMware Workstation 6.5 continues the tradition of outshining and outpacing the competition with a host of useful new features, and boldly goes where no virtualization software has gone before -- into the realm of virtual machines with accelerated 3-D graphics. Despite the advances, some of the new features are still in beta, so Workstation 6.5 might not be the best virtualization option for everyone.

Yesterday, I looked at the major applications in the first beta for KOffice 2.0. Now it's the turn of the rest of the beta: The KPlato project manager, KChart, the vector graphics editor Karbon, and the raster graphics editor Krita. These four graphical and charting programs have always been among the best-regarded of the KOffice programs. All of them have matured much faster than the traditional office applications KWord, KSpread, and KPresenter. In the case of KPlato and KChart, they have done so because they were limited applications with relatively few features. By contrast, the graphics editors Karbon and Krita have done so by attracting users who were not interested in office applications so much as design.