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While every Fedora fans enjoy the newly released Fedora 11 Linux-based operating system, the developers are working hard on the next release, Fedora 12, due for release in November-December 2009. Make sure you visit our website, starting with August 8th when the first alpha will be released, as we will do a full coverage of the Fedora 12 development process. Without any further introduction, let's have a look at the release schedule..

One of the questions I see the most in forums and sites like Yahoo Answers is : "What is the best Linux distribution for beginners?" or "What is the easiest Linux distribution?" Well, unlike what you may think these questions are not that easy to answer, as the easiest Linux distribution is not necessarily the best for all beginners because other factors like the availability of support and commercial applications availability have to be taken into account.

One of the topics of ongoing interest in the kernel community is that of maintaining quality. It is trivially obvious that we need to maintain and even improve quality. It is less obvious how best to do so. One broad approach that has found some real success is to increase the visibility of various aspects of the kernel. This makes the quality of those aspects more apparent, so this tends to lead to an improvement of the quality.

Steven Edwards of the Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 1.8 today. Bordeaux 1.8 has had many changes on the back end. The build process has been totally rewritten, packaging has been totally rewritten, the .sh installer is terminal based now and the dependency for pygtk and pango has been removed, the .sh installer will now run on any supported platform Linux, BSD, Solaris and Mac. Our winetricks script has been synced to the latest official release, Steam should now install and run, There has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks. This complete rewrite gives Bordeaux a much more clean and portable codebase, making new improvements much easier to provide. We already have some exciting things in the works for the next release.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Fedora 11 desktop (GNOME) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

IDG World Expo has announced speakers for its inaugural OpenSource World 2009 show (formerly LinuxWorld) on Aug. 12-13 in San Francisco. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen will keynote the conference, which will feature presentations on Linux desktops, netbooks, Android, mobile devices, enterprise, security, troubleshooting, and numerous "cloud" topics.

Today we are launching the Social Desktop Contest. As you know the idea of the Social Desktop is to connect online webservices with desktop applications. We give away great prices to developers who help making this vision reality. The Open Collaboration Services API has gotten many new features in the past few months and is now stable. The first features will ship with KDE 4.3, but this is only the beginning. Now that the infrastructure is in place we think that it is a good time to open up the development to more developers.

You can’t be half-pregnant. And Hewlett-Packard can’t be half-committed to Ubuntu Server Edition. Over the next few months, I think you’ll see HP make a far more comprehensive commitment to Canonical’s Linux server strategy.

Microsoft is burying $10,000 somewhere on the web for Australians with IE8's user agent string (*cough* User-Agent Swticher plugin for Firefox).

Amazon is now making new source code available for its Amazon Kindle. Basically what it represents is Amazon's responsibility to make the GPL licensed source code that is used in the Kindle available to others. That's part of the GPL license and Amazon is doing its part. Digging into the code that Amazon is now making available provides some really interesting insight into the underlying structure of the Kindle. For one, Kindle (at least the DX) is using a modified Linux 2.6.22 kernel

Linux Against Poverty is much more than an installfest. It is an effort between the Free Software Community in any given place and the greater community that holds it. Lynn Bender's people will now begin soliciting companies and corporations in the Austin area for physical donations. He has secured the swank and popular nightspot known as Union Park for both the actual event and the party afterwards. The Park will be full of volunteer Austin Geeks, ready to accept the incoming machines, triage them and place them into different staging areas. One of the brightest tech guys I know, Andy Krell from nFusion will be there in person to lend a hand.

FTP, file transfer protocol, is widely used on the Internet for transferring files. Though FTP has a terrible security record it continues to be very popular, mainly because it is so simple to setup and use. This course is designed to take you step by step through the proper setup of a FTP Server on CentOS.

The PostgreSQL developers have published a first release candidate for version 8.4 of the free database system with a final version due later this month. The release candidate from the PostgreSQL Global Development Group includes a number of bug fixes to the previous beta release, including the elimination of some crashing bugs and changes in the handling of NULL values being passed to internal functions to prevent denial of service attacks.

IDG World Expo has announced speakers for its inaugural OpenSource World 2009 show (formerly LinuxWorld) on Aug. 12-13 in San Francisco. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen will keynote the conference, which will feature presentations on Linux desktops, netbooks, Android, mobile devices, enterprise, security, troubleshooting, and numerous "cloud" topics.

If you haven't heard the words "smart grid" before, that's likely to change soon. That's especially so if you live in the U.S., where billions of dollars in incentive spending is pouring into making the smart grid a reality. As you might expect, since I'm talking about it here, the smart grid will rely on standards to become real. A whole lot of standards, in fact, and that's a problem.

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Wireshark 1.2 introduces a few "new and exciting" features for its network protocol analyzer software. Wireshark's trend in its new release is toward geo-targeting features: the tool now does GeoIP database lookups on demand for geographic locations for IP addresses and integrates the results with OpenStreetMap.

Open source doesn't mean open to all. New open source-powered commercial products from Red Hat are set to roll out -- but for now, it's only for an invited few. The actual products that Red Hat is making available to its private beta customers include the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers and the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops.

An annual call for help...

The trouble with the present FOSS brand is that it is not created by those with a stake in it; rather, it is created and controlled by those who oppose FOSS and all that it stands for. Bruce Byfield reports on the importance of defining the FOSS brand outside the community.