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The KDE community today released KDE 3.5.8. While the developers' main focus lies on finishing KDE 4.0, the stable 3.5 series remains the desktop of choice for the time being. It is proven, stable and well supported. The 3.5.8 release with its literally hundreds of bugfixes has again improved the users' experience.

Welcome to a new blog here atLinuxJournal.com,"Linux Products Insider". I'm James Gray, Products Editor atLinux Journal. After the spam has been deencrusted and hucksters repelled, I'll use this space to update you on the latest and greatest products and services that I find using my secret channels. This week, I had the chance to take part in a press conference with Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu. Read on to learn why Shuttleworth's is so fired up about the new Ubuntu 7.10"Gutsy Gibbon" (available this week), as well as why he thinks Ubuntu is so darned successful.

The folks at Canonical have started to prepare their servers for downloads of the latest Ubuntu release - 7.10 or "Gutsy Gibbon." Past Ubuntu releases have been marred by downed servers, as the Umbongo faithful rush to get their fresh code injection. So, this time around, Mark Shuttleworth and crew are doing their outreach early. They've started talking up the OS before it's available on Thursday, hoping to spread out demand a bit. With 7.10, Umbongo users will find fresh additions for the client and the server.

Prizes up for grabs as awards encourage students to get involved with free and open source projects and make a difference.

O3Spaces is a proprietary integrated collaboration and document management application for workgroups and businesses. Almost a year after its launch, the company behind the software has released version 2.2 beta. While the new version doesn't offer any earth-shattering new features, O3Spaces 2.2 sports a wealth of improvements aimed at solidifying its position as a viable alternative to Microsoft SharePoint.

rr -- short for retain and recall -- is a small utility that's both simple and useful. When you need to work on a config file buried deep in the bowels of your system and don't want to type its full path name to do so, rr is just the thing.

Development of native Linux audio plugins and softsynths may not be so relentlessly rapid as it is in the Windows and Mac sound software worlds, but new things do appear. This week I profile a cool new (well, relatively new) Linux softsynth, William Weston's Phase Harmonic Advanced Synthesis EXperiment, also known asPhasex.

For several years Puppy Linux has been breathing life into old and dated hardware, but instead of being just another minimalistic distribution, Puppy boasts smart features that save resources without cutting down the number of applications. The latest major Puppy release, Puppy 3.00, continues this trend by making the less than 100MB distro binary-compatible with Slackware 12 and providing other enhancements.

After trying out a number of Linux photo-management applications, I have settled on Digikam. It has some great tools for managing vast photo archives, wonderful RAW support, and an array of good photo-editing-and-fixing features.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Replacement of the "toolbox", and a new KRunner in Plasma, with many applets moving from playground into extragear in KDE SVN. SuperKaramba is now fully integrated into Plasma. A move away from KDEPrint facilities, towards more basic functionality for KDE 4.0. More work on restoring the functionality of the Klipper applet. Basic sound support in Parley. General work on KHTML, with more specific work on image loading and testcases. More work on KDE colour scheme handling...

Eclipse has released Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) 1.0 for developing and deploying rich Internet applications (RIAs) using the Eclipse development model, plug-ins with the Eclipse workbench extension points and a widget toolkit.

LXer Feature: 16-Oct-2007

Sunday was the second day of T-DOSE in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, a technical open source event aimed at developers. See our previous article for the coverage of the first day. Today's topics: Search Engine development with AdvaS, A GNU Edu overview, Sebastian Kügler about KDE 4.0 and an overview of Free Software events in Europe. I was also able to talk in person with a few people, such as Olivier Cleynen, who's presentation from yesterday about FOSS marketing is also covered in today's article.

The first-ever Ontario LinuxFest, unapologetically modeled on Ohio's conference of the same name, took place on Saturday at the Toronto Congress Centre near the end of runway 24R at Toronto's international airport. With only a few sessions and a lot of quality speakers, the organisers kept the signal-to-noise ratio at this conference as good as it gets. The charismatic Marcel Gagné gave the first talk I attended. Gagné started his talk on what's coming in KDE 4.0, which is expected to be released in mid-December, by stating that KDE 4.0 is a radical departure from existing desktop environments, including current versions of KDE.

Michael J. Doyle has a distinguished entrepreneurial career. He recently joined Medsphere as its new President and CEO, replacing Dr. Kenneth Kizer. Doyle has served as President and CEO of Advantedge Healthcare Solutions, a New York-based Software as a Service (SaaS) outsourced physician-billing company backed by private equity investors. From 2000 to 2004, Mike served as Chairman and CEO of Salesnet. In 1989 Mike founded The Standish Care Company, a provider of assisted living and long-term care services.

The DebConf team has decided on having the next DebConf during the first two weeks of August 2008, in the city of Mar del Plata, Argentina. The whole event will be starting on August 2nd and ending on August 17th. DebCamp will take place from the 3rd till the 9th and DebConf from the 10th till the 16th. Registation will open in late 2007.

The Eclipse Foundation says building rich internet applications (RIA) just got easier with the release today of its much-anticipated Rich Ajax Platform (RAP 1.0) toolkit. The toolkit enables developers to build RIAs using a combination of Java, Ajax and the OSGi standard within the Eclipse framework.

"The kernel newbies community often gets inquiries from CS students who need a project for their studies and would like to do something with the Linux kernel, but would also like their code to be useful to the community afterwards," explained Rik van Riel in a posting titled "WANTED: kernel projects for CS students". He offered a link to a Kernel Newbies wiki page titled"Kernel Projects" adding, "if you have ideas on what projects would be useful, please add them to this page (or email me)". Rik explained that he was assembling a list of projects on that page that meet the following criteria:"Are self contained enough that the students can implement the project by themselves, since that is often a university requirement; are self contained enough that Linux could merge the code (maybe with additional changes) after the student has been working on it for a few months; are large enough to qualify as a student project, luckily there is flexibility here since we get inquiries for anything from 6 week projects to 6 month projects."

Translating a command line tool to a graphical interface usually means a loss of functionality. However, in the case of the newly released trowser text browser, while I wouldn't swear that the transition has retained all the functionality of the less command that it is intended to replace, I doubt that anyone short of an expert is likely to notice the difference. Not only does trowser offer a comparable wealth of key bindings for moving about displayed text files, but it also adds such features as custom highlighting, a search history, and bookmarks as well. The result is an easy-to-use tool for developers who browse code listings, or anyone who browses log files, HTML pages, or other plain text files.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 105 for the week of October 8th.

The competition for market share between the leading desktop OSes, Windows, Mac and Linux, has seen no major revolution this year. But based on data from Net Applications, there have been subtle changes that suggest major shifts in the years ahead.