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LXer Feature: 13-May-2007

A weekly recap of the big stories concerning Linux and Open Source.

Lead Camino developer Mike Pinkerton has announced that the next Camino release will be 1.5 rather than 1.1. Mike cites the large number of improvements as the reason for the version number hike: "Personally, I don't think calling it Camino 1.1 does it justice, it's more like a 1.5, so that's exactly what we've done."

Mozilla has released Bugzilla 3.0, with many new features and code improvements. Bugzilla, a server-based application designed to track and manage software development bug reports, began life as an internal program within Netscape, before version 2.0 was open-sourced in August 1998. In the nine years between versions 2.0 and 3.0, Bugzilla has been adopted by numerous companies and open source projects.

Ubuntu Studio 7.04, a Ubuntu Linux variant aimed at audio, video, and graphic enthusiasts, was released on May 10 by its U.S.-based project team. The distribution, based on a 2.6.20 kernel and the GNOME desktop, includes a collection of open-source applications that assist with multimedia creation.

Some people have been anxiously waiting for the summer blockbuster movies to arrive. Many Linux fans, on the other hand, have been waiting impatiently for what they hope will be the next Linux desktop box-office smash hit: KDE 4.0.

It's the release that Gaim users have been waiting for since December 2005. After seven beta releases, several interface revamps, and a name change, Pidgin 2.0 is finally available in the wild. It's an improvement over the Gaim 1.5 series, but it's disappointing that after all that time, voice support for instant messaging networks that support that feature is still absent.

OpenVZ has made a live Linux CD for users to try out its virtualization technology as it continues to work its way into the virtualizaiton mainstream.

There's no connection between Dell's Microsoft/Novell deal and its Ubuntu patnership, but that won't stop Microsoft from FUDing about it.

The law school professor says he'll continue his advocacy of open source, but wants to step out of the limelight.

The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first alpha release of the KDE Desktop Environment, version 4.0. This release is a basis for the integration of powerful new technologies that will be included in KDE 4.

As with Firefox, you can add new features and extend OpenOffice.org's functionality by installing extensions. Here some of the most useful ones to try.

In addition to the seven official tracks, this year's Red Hat Summit has an unofficial eighth track for the press. Day 2 saw two official announcements: Red Hat Exchange and a new partnership with Sybase. In addition to covering the press conferences, I had time to sit in on some interesting presentations.

Founded by Ian Murdock and John H. Hartman in 2000, Progeny Linux Systems seemed for years like a modestly successful free and open source software (FOSS) company. Although it abandoned its original plans for revolutionizing networks, it survived the dot-com crash while many other companies had gone under, and its efforts to commercialize Debian were profitable after its first year and a half. By early 2005, Progeny had reinvented itself by offering update services and modular components for building specialized GNU/Linux distributions. Yet on April 30, Progeny ceased operations. What happened?

a series of ten patches, Mathieu Desnoyers posted an updated version of the Linux Kernel Markers. In the first patch he explains the need for markers: "With the increasing complexity of today's user-space application and the wide deployment of SMP systems, the users need an increasing understanding of the behavior and performance of a system across multiple processes/different execution contexts/multiple CPUs. In applications such as large clusters (Google, IBM), video acquisition (Autodesk), embedded real-time systems (Wind River, Monta Vista, Sony) or sysadmin/programmer-type tasks (SystemTAP from Redhat), a tool that permits tracing of kernel-user space interaction becomes necessary."

Keith Packard announced the availability of drivers for Intel's 965GM Express Chipset. Jeff Garzik responded, "great news. Here's hoping that Intel produces a standalone video card eventually, to further take away market share from closed source competitors." In Keith's announcement he explained:

The official release of the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) is still a couple of months away, yet already, the misunderstandings about it are almost as numerous as those for the second version (GPLv2).

The first full day of the Red Hat Summit flew by at furious pace. After the opening keynotes, which I reported on yesterday, I attended a session on GPLv3 by Eben Moglen, met one-on-one with Chris Blizzard, the man in charge of developing Red Hat Linux for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, and attended two press conferences.

In the scope of the KDE 4 Usability Review Cycle that started on May 9, the KDE Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Working Group hereby announces the HIG Hunting Season to be open. Read on for more details.

For those of you who (like me) separate the root partition & user data, and don’t bother backing up the former because it’s a standard install & therefore easy to recreate: note that whilst this is in general true, it may not be in the case of /root.

VMware 6 implements native Linux virtualization technologies and improves its overall Linux compatibility.