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Welcome to this year's 4th issue of DWN, the newsletter for the Debian community. The Debian listmaster determined as part of the spring cleaning effort several unused and obsolete lists that will be closed down. Tony Mobily noted that the last GIF patent has finally expired. Gustavo Franco reported that Second Life runs on Debian servers because it is suited to scaling massively with a small IT staff.

Simple file encryption is useful, but sometimes it's more useful to encrypt a complete filesystem or disk, such as when you need to protect a large set of files. Or you may need not only to protect, but to completely hide the presence of sensitive data from prying eyes. For these cases, here are several options for securing your systems.

One of the best ways you can participate in the free and open source software (FOSS) revolution is by helping to test software and reporting bugs and issues to project developers to help them improve their code. Even in the wild and woolly, sometimes undisciplined approach to development that we see in FOSS projects, there are ways to test more effectively. Here are more than a dozen tips suggested by testing gurus and developers that can help you become a successful tester.

Tuomo Valkonen, who you may know as the author of the Ion window manager has a rant about the brokenness of the megafreeze development model, where a Linux distribution attempts to stabilize the entire system. As an upstream contributor, I find it highly frustrating to release a new version of my software and have users contact me for about ancient versions I no longer want to support.

In a bid to promote the mainstream adoption of Linux, Canonical and Linspire announced a technology partnership. Linspire will start to base Linspire/Freespire on Ubuntu, while Canonical will in turn use Linspire's CNR application delivery service.

Given a copy of the Linux- based educational software package tuXlab to review, James Archibald revisits school days and gives it a run through.

Hello readers, and welcome once again to Free Software Magazine’s fortnightly newsletter, keeping you up to date with all things free software! Enjoy!

LynuxWorks has launched a new version of its commercially supported embedded Linux operating system aimed specifically at Xilinx FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays). BlueCat Linux Micro Edtion (BlueCat-ME) supports Xilinx FPGAs with embedded PowerPC cores, and those that use their programmable logic elements to run Xilinx's 32-bit MicroBlaze softcore.

Once again, the Debian project is gearing up to elect a new project leader, with voting set to begin late this month. As we did last year, we asked the DPL candidates to sound off on some of the issues that will face the Debian Project in the next year.

Mandriva on March 8 announced the launch of the beta version of Corporate Desktop 4.0, its enterprise-dedicated Linux desktop. While best known for its home user Linux desktops, Mandriva (formerly Mandrakesoft) has long been angling for the business market with both its server and desktop offerings.

Welcome to our issue number 80 of Fedora Weekly News. In this issue, we have following articles:

1 2 Million Fedora Core 6 Installs
2 Fedora Core 6 Linux Eclipses 2M User Mark
3 Talking points for Fedora 7 release
4 Fedora Infrastructure needs your help!
5 Fedora 7 and the wireless world
6 Ambassadors Report: Chemnitz LinuxTag
7 Review: Fedora 7 Test 2
8 Security Week in Review 2007-03-04
9 Fedora Weekly Reports 2007-03-05
10 Fedora Core 5 and 6 Updates
11 Contributing to Fedora Weekly News
12 Editor's Blog

Scott Handy started with IBM in 1983 as a systems engineer and went on to sales, marketing, and strategy positions covering large accounts, channels, small and medium business, and IBM products for Windows NT, Sun Solaris, and OS/2 Warp. Now, as vice president for Linux and open source, he is one of the main public faces articulating IBM's open-source strategy. IDG News Service Senior Writer Elizabeth Montalbano caught up with Handy at the sidelines of the recent LinuxWorld Open Solutions Summit in New York. He talked about how the industry giant manages to support a vast product portfolio for Linux and open-source initiatives.

First, blogs moved from personal platforms to corporate tools. Now, wouldn't it be great to put social networking to work in your organization? Elgg is an open source application for creating social networks. It can be customized with themes and extended with plugins to work with other social networks or plug into an organization's existing wiki and forum boards. It lets users collaborate on projects within organizations or share notes within a university.

Home Automation projects can always use tiny, silent PCs, and here's a new one. The little disk-less Linutop PC is around £230 and runs Xubuntu from a USB stick... "Linutop has Linux-based diskless computer. It offers has completely silent, low-power operation in year extremely small package. Its hand purpose is to surfing the Internet.

Mozilla Corp. is still wrestling with adding a security feature to Firefox that its browser rival, Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer 7, uses on Windows Vista to keep malware from hijacking computers. In Vista, IE7 uses a technique Microsoft calls Protected Mode -- another name for "low rights" -- that blocks disk access to all but a temporary-files folder. The idea is that if an exploit -- a drive-by download, for instance -- attacks IE7 through a browser vulnerability, it can't install code on the PC's drive.

Open-Xchange, a provider of open source collaboration software, has inaugurated the opening of the Open-Xchange Community project and the availability of source code and development documentation for its latest AJAX-based e-mail and groupware technology.

Starting this summer, 1,154 parliamentary desks will feature Linux-based PCs.

Bivio Networks has added a high-end model to its line of Linux-based network appliances for deep packet inspection. The B7000 runs the company's Linux-based BiviOS on an interesting AMP (asymmetrical multiprocessing) architecture claimed capable of wirespeed network application processing at 10 gigabits-per-second.

In an effort to share the knowledge that is embodied in the software labs of Zend Technologies and IBM as it relates to PHP on the iSeries and System i5, and to help in the creation of a new Redbook for PHP on that platform, Zend and IBM have announced a collaborative Wiki for PHP on the iSeries.

It's free! You can tailor it to your own needs! There's a distro for every need! Sure, Linux is tempting, but getting started isn't so easy. eWEEK Labs offers advice for getting your head, and your organization, around Linux.