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In this week's roundup of new releases: Ubuntu Gutsy beta rolls out, Pioneer Linux gives really long-term support, PC-BSD updates and Freespire adds an improved CNR plugin.

In this second and final part I'll demonstrate some of the loop-specific tools I've found in Ardour, Reaper, and Audacity. Tutorials and links to project demos are included, so warm up your headphones and let's get loopy.

Kick-start your week with four easy (but still cool) tricks on your Linux desktop. Install the media server you've always wanted but never got around to, or fine-tune your hardware to squeeze out a few more hours of battery power ... All this an more in this week's How To Roundup. Oh, and send us your favourite Linux tricks.

LXer Feature: 30-Sept-2007

Big stories this week include the "Give one, get one" OLPC promotion, an LXer Feature by Paul Ferris entitled, Linux Education in America: Inspiration from Russia?, The 7 Most Influential GNU/Linux Distributions, The Top 21 Linux Games Of 2007, GPLv2 and GPLv3 for beginners, Slackware: the classic distro and an article you shouldn't read.

One of the most important recent events in the world of free software has been the release of version 3 of the GNU GPL. There were fierce arguments about its utility while it was being drawn up, and although the rhetoric has abated somewhat, there is still a big question mark over its eventual success. Some evidence suggests that GPLv3 uptake is coming along nicely, while other reports indicate a reluctance to adopt it (but note also Matt Asay's neat reconciliation of these contradictory messages). To see what's likely to happen in the long term, it's useful to look back at the past history of licence adoption.

"The fact that we continue to expose internal data structures via sysfs is a gaping open pit [and] is far more likely to cause any kind of problems than changing an error return," Theodore Ts'o noted, responding to a thread discussing a patch to fix an error return code. Andrew Morton agreed, "I was staring in astonishment at the pending sysfs patch pile last night. Forty syfs patches and twenty-odd patches against driver core and the kobject layer." He continued, "that's a huge amount of churn for a core piece of kernel infrastructure which has been there for four or five years. Not a good sign." Andrew then added a humorous quip, "I mean, it's not as if, say, the CPU scheduler guys keep on rewriting all their junk. oh, wait.."

Rubinius is important. A whole lot of folks agree.Ola Bini wrote up a whole post abouthow important he thinks it is. In it, he writes:

2,500 years ago, the Chinese philosopher Confucius asked Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism, "What is Tao?" Lao-tzu opened his mouth but said nothing. Confucius left with a smile, but his students were puzzled. Confucius explained, "Lao-tzu has passed us the Tao. In his mouth, there are no teeth but only a tongue. The hard ones (teeth) died, but the soft one (the tongue) lives; the soft power is stronger than the hard power. That's the Tao!"

The creator of the Suse distribution says its Linux sales have grown by 243 percent, largely due to partnership with Microsoft.

My friend Dave just built a machine to run CentOS. Last night he lamented that he didn’t like the video player. I cringed, “Is it well-known free software video player? I’ve not had much luck dealing with the developers and I recommend another well-known free software video player.”

Opinion: Vista has turned into the desktop operating system no one wants, and even Microsoft is beginning to get it. Today, I think of Vista as the zombie operating system. It stumbles around, and from a distance you might think it's alive, but close up it's the walking dead.

This week a friend posted on her blog that she was marking all of her Flickr images “all rights reserved” (instead of with a Creative Commons license) and “friends and family only” (instead of publicly viewable) because of this story. A person uploaded photos of her daughter to Flickr. One was used without permission by Nerve Media’s Babble.com on an article about children and lead poisoning. The photo had been marked “all rights reserved,” and Nerve/Babble blamed the error on an ill-informed intern.

Do you find open source licenses a puzzle? Does reading stories about the legal side of open source give you the heebie-jeebies? If so, then we have the document for you. A couple of years ago, I was bemoaning the fact that I'd gone from writing about technology to the law. Lord knows I hadn't planned on it. I'd come into technology journalism by being able to translate from techno-babble to English.

Nokia plans to ship WiMAX-enabled Internet tablets next year. The as-yet unnamed model or models in Nokia's Linux-powered "N-series" Internet Tablet line will use Intel "Baxter Peak" WiMAX chips and will support Sprint's "Xohm" WiMAX service, the top phone-maker has revealed.

The annual KDE World Summit, Akademy, has found a home for 2008 in the heart of Europe, Belgium. The event is the most important conference for the contributors of the KDE project and will be held from Saturday August 9th to Saturday 16th at the De Nayer Institute, an associated campus of the University of Leuven. There are three sub-events: a contributors conference, the KDE e.V. annual general assembly and a week long hacking session. Akademy offers a great opportunity to the community to discuss all issues face-to-face. We also look forward to the chance to mingle with all KDE enthusiasts who want to drop by.

Slate has acautionary tale for public/private initiatives or 'how municipal Wi-Fi is such a flop'. This may shed some light on the failings of RHIO's:Today, the limited success stories come from towns that have actually treated Wi-Fi as a public calling. St. Cloud, Fla., a town of 28,000, has an entirely free wireless network. The network has its problems, such as dead spots, but also claims a 77 percent use rate among its citizens. Cities like St. Cloud understand the concept of a public service: something that's free, or near-free, like the local swimming pool. Most cities have been too busy dreaming of free pipes to notice that their approach is hopelessly flawed. The lesson here is an old one about the function of government. When it comes to communications, the United States relies on a privateer system: We depend on private companies to perform public callings. That works up to a point, but private industry will build only so much. Real public infrastructure costs real public money. We already know that, in the real world, if you're not willing to invest in infrastructure, you get what we have: crumbling airports, collapsing bridges, and broken levees. Why did we think that the wireless Internet would be any different?

Well, from the start of October, we hand over Reg Developer to Gavin Clarke, who's a Register employee (we were freelance) and works from California, where he sits at the development tools coalface and gets first crack at the news. Be kind to him.

When Fedora 7 was released, one of the big features that we talked about was the idea of customized spins of the distribution. Now that Fedora 8 is on the way, it’s useful to look and see how we have done, and what sort of custom spins have been created.

The most recent release of StartCom Enterprise Linux is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.0 and provides all the base functionality you'll find in that distribution. That begs the question "why bother?" Freely available might be one good reason to start with

The idea is floating around again: Let's make a special Linux distribution for women! We're smarter than that, aren't we? I say, let's spare ourselves and the world yet another pointless and less-than-useful version of Linux.