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In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Fortune-teller and Keyboard Layout applets for Plasma, KNewsTicker resurrected for KDE 4.0 as a Plasmoid. Rewrite of canvas tag support in KHTML. Various new language syntax highlighting in Kate. Internal database storage work in Digikam. More playlist handling work, and support for Magnatune "streaming membership" in Amarok 2. OpenDocument loading of charts in KChart for KOffice 2. Various graphics fixes and a user handbook for the Bovo game. Kolourpaint is now fully ported to Qt4. Continued work on the Eigen 2 library. Further porting away from KDEPrint to the printing facilities provided by Qt4.

Fedora 8 test releases have a surprise for all users interested in graphics: a release candidate for the new GIMP 2.4, meaning the final version will get the stable GIMP 2.41. This is exciting news, as the previous major release, GIMP 2.2, is several years old, and a lot of new features were added in the meantime.

Not all major software versions carry the same weight. Consider the last two releases of the Fedora distribution. Fedora 7 offered little that was obvious to desktop users, despite some behind-the-scenes improvements and the opening of the release process to public scrutiny. By contrast, if Test 3 of Fedora 8 is any indication, the upcoming release, scheduled for next month, returns to the distribution's tradition of introducing a variety of innovations. Some of these innovations, like the new firewall tool, are minor, if still welcome. Others, like the IcedTea version of Java and Codec Buddy, are flawed, but may eventually find their way into other distributions.

Still seeking OASIS approval, The Open Document Foundation (ODF) has quietly ended all work on its da Vinci project after failing to secure approval from the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

Hackers twist ad network into Trojan network. Hackers have rooted into a server owned by internet advertising network24/7 Real Media and used it to serve malware-laced banner ads that tried to circumvent security mechanisms on end users' machines, Symantec researchers said. The malware exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in Real Player that was patched on Friday.

When it comes to managing processes, many people use old reliable commands such as ps, top, kill, and nice. These commands are handy, useful, and found in every Linux distribution. However, sometimes a GUI process manager can be useful, especially when you're trying to teach new Linux system administrators who aren't used to shell interfaces. Qps Visual Process Manager is a GUI ps substitute that lets you sort, manipulate, and manage processes.

Adding to its list of Linux partners, Microsoft has extended its collaboration agreement with Asian Linux vendor Turbolinux. Promising collaboration efforts and controversial intellectual property assurances for Turbolinux users, the deal could be seen as the latest attempt by Microsoft to extend its reach into the rich prize that is the Asian market.

Oracle is taking its Unbreakable Linux down a slightly different path from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. First, let's make this clear. Oracle Unbreakable Linux was, is now and is for the foreseeable future going to be based on Red Hat's Enterprise Linux codebase. It is not, however, going to be simply RHEL's twin in every way. When Oracle first announced the release of Unbreakable Linux, many people saw it as a purely anti-Red Hat move. Larry Ellison, Oracle's CEO, doesn't like competition. What he likes is winning.

When you type a URL into Firefox's address bar a drop-down menu appears based on your history. To select the most relevant entry you use the arrow keys (or your mouse) to select it. For better URL auto-completion have a look at Firefox's about:config area and set the browser.urlbar.autoFill value to true.

"Sysrq-p is pretty useless unless you can force the keyboard interrupt and the spinning process onto the same CPU," noted Chuck Ebbert during a discussion centered around debugging tasks stuck in a running state. Pressing the

key combination is used for debugging, dumping the registers and flags from the CPU that handles the keypress interrupt to the console. UltraSPARC maintainer, David Miller, replied, "yes, I find this a painful limitation too,"

Dimdim calls itself the world's first free Web meeting service based on an open source platform. Users can share their desktops and files while chatting and videoconferencing with meeting participants. Dimdim was originally licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), but the possibility of a big deal with a university made Dimdim executives eventually change to the GNU General Public License (GPL) instead. By changing the software's license from the MPL to the GPL, "we are making it easier for the community to use our product," says Dimdim founder DD Ganguly.

SourceForge.net, through good times and bad, has established itself as the core outpost of open source development on the Web. A look inside one of the open source community's strongest assets.

The Linux developer says it will now focus on its Qtopia platform and leave the hassles of hardware to other companies.

It is customary for communities of every sphere to stand up occasionally, and take a good, long look at what's going on in the world around them. For us here at Linuxsecurity.com, we felt it was a great opportunity to put it all together. Since 1996, Linuxsecurity.com has been bringing open source news, HOW-TOs, Feature stories and more to the open source community with comprehensive coverage. As one of the veterans in this area, we'd like to see you chime in. With so much going on in Linux and security, what does the community really care about?

"The fact is, security people *are* insane. You just argue all the time, instead of doing anything productive. So please don't include me in the Cc on your insane arguments - instead do something productive and I'm interested."— Linus Torvalds, in anOctober 19th, 2007 posting to the Linux Kernel Mailing List.

Reconfiguring your laptop's wireless network settings every time you go to a new client's office or a friend's house can be tiresome, and carrying around little papers with notes about network names, keys, and IP addresses doesn't seem too professional. openSUSE's System Configuration Profile Management (SCPM) can help. SCPM lets you adapt your machine's configuration to different environments and hardware configurations. The need to reconfigure your settings is most common in laptops, where you may need not only several different network configurations (with or without DHCP, firewalls, gateways, and proxies) but also different hardware. For example, sometimes you may need to use a Wi-Fi USB device, and you may or may not always have a printer available.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 106 for the week of October 15th.

Tectonic is compiling a directory of all South African suppliers of Linux distributions. If you are a supplier, or know of one, please let us know.

"It wouldn't be efficient for you to implement something new, only to have it criticized again. I'd suggest that you come up with a concrete design, describe to us what you propose to do and let's take it from there."— Andrew Morton, in anOctober 17, 2007 posting to the Linux Kernel Mailing List.

A file browser is a file browser. Unless it is Nautilus which has tons of plug-ins available for it that give it the edge. Perhaps the best of these for real tech-heads is the nautilus-actions plug-in which allows you to add items to the right-click context menu. If you're handy with scripts this could open up a whole new world for your desktop productivity.