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As we reported last week, the release of OpenSolaris 2009.06 would come on Monday, and sure enough, it has been released by Sun Microsystems. The OpenSolaris 2009.06 release presents network virtualization support with Crossbow, SPARC support, Intel Xeon 5500 series hardware support, MySQL and PHP DTrace probes, improved usability with its package management system, and much more.

Sun is giving opensolaris a major overhaul in the new 2009.06 release, the new release includes enhanced networking, virtualization and storage capabilities for the open source operating system. "This is really a transparent development step toward the next generation of the Solaris platform," Dan Roberts, director of product management datacenter software marketing at Sun, told InternetNews.com. "Initially, OpenSolaris had a developer-and desktop-centric flavor, but in this release we've moved from just desktop and developer to a datacenter-capable mission-critical operating system."

The kernel developers have added new features to thousands of the Linux kernel's existing drivers and integrated numerous additional drivers. This further increases the variety of hardware supported by Linux. A few days ago, Linus Torvalds released the seventh Linux 2.6.30 release candidate. According to Torvalds, most of the merged changes are minor, and the next big kernel version is nearing completion – although Torvalds does still anticipate an eighth release candidate. The Kernel Log takes this opportunity to discuss what's new in the driver arena of Linux 2.6.30; the final version of the forthcoming kernel will probably be released in one to three weeks.

Welcome to this year's 22nd issue of DistroWatch Weekly! OpenSolaris 2009.06, the third official release of the increasingly influential UNIX alternative for the desktop, is here! With a large number of new features and updated applications, it is bound to excite everybody interested in free operating systems. But will it also entice the average desktop user? That remains to be seen. In other news, Fedora slips the release of version 11 "Leonidas" by another week, FreeBSD gets set to enter code freeze in preparation for version 8.0, NetBSD receives a new binary package manager to offer a more APT/YUM-like package management experience, Debian gets improved support for Eee PC netbooks, and the openSUSE community announces Goblin - a new Moblin and openSUSE-based distro for netbooks. Also in this issue, the feature article takes a look at a minimalist, yet highly usable and well-designed Debris Linux, while the tips and tricks section returns with an article on running "Factory", the openSUSE development branch. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the May 2009 DistroWatch.com donations is SliTaz GNU/Linux. Happy reading!

This seems to be the popular stigma or stereotype that is floating around the internet. If you use Linux then you are automatically a geek, an unwashed, pizza eating, cola and coffee swilling, obnoxious and scruffy rebel who just wants to stick it to the man. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sure there are people of that type who do use Linux. These same type of people also use and feel exactly the same way about other operating systems.

The folks at Tungsten Graphics, which are owned by VMware, have been busy with new software releases so far this summer. Mesa 7.5 is coming along well and the Gallium3D driver architecture is now merged into the Mesa mainline code-base for release with Mesa 7.6. When it comes to Gallium3D an OpenVG state tracker has been released along with two OpenGL ES state trackers to accelerate the OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 APIs. There are also OpenCL and OpenGL 3.1 state trackers under development.

For those of you who think Google Wave is all that and a bag of chips, I put on the brakes and give you a few questions to ponder.

This guide shows how you can install and use BleachBit on an Ubuntu 9.04 desktop to delete unnecessary files. BleachBit deletes unnecessary files (such as cache, cookies, Internet history, localizations, logs, temporary files, and broken shortcuts) to free valuable disk space, maintain privacy, and remove junk. It wipes clean Adobe Reader, APT, Bash, Beagle, Chromium, Epiphany, Firefox, Flash, GIMP, Google Earth, Java, KDE, OpenOffice.org, Opera, RealPlayer, Second Life viewer, Skype, VIM, XChat, Yum, and more.

LXer Feature: 01-Jun-2009

We have a lot of big stories is this week's roundup like the news that the U.S. Army has decided to upgrade from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2007 and Vista in order to “bolster Internet security”, which begs the question, why isn't the entire military already using SELinux? For those who want to learn some Linux/Unix history and happen to have spare 40ft wall, then this poster might be for you, and SourceForge takes down the rtmpdump project after receiving a cease-and-desist notice from Adobe.

Novell, having reported its second quarter financial results yesterday after Wall Street closed, said it had inked a deal with Dallas-based Affiliated Computer Services to have that outsourcer take over its ERP systems and related data center in Provo, Utah. While the operating system supplier is headquartered back in Waltham, Massachusetts, a big chunk of its operations are still back in Provo. And in an effort to cut costs and to get ACS on board using Novell's products in its outsourcing engagements, Novell has cut a two-way deal with the outsourcing firm.

There was a time when SCO was a great company. No. Seriously. SCO Unix was a great Unix for x86 systems, and, for a brief shining moment it looked like SCO would bring together the best things of both Unix and Linux. Then, SCO's ownership got it into their heads that trying to take IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and anyone who else who used Linux was a great plan. Ha! As Pamela Jones, editor of Groklaw, points out, SCO appears to be heading towards Chapter 7 Bankruptcy. For those of you who don't know, Chapter 7 can be thought of as the Go to Jail card in the game Monopoly. "Go directly to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200." Or, go out of business; do not come back; please leave the plumbing in the restrooms on your way out the door.

Truong Nguyen Quang has announced the release of Hacao Linux 4.21, a beginner-friendly, Vietnamese desktop Linux distribution based on Puppy Linux and supporting Intel Classmate PC and other low-cost portable computers. This version is based on the recently released Puppy Linux 4.2.1, but has been modified to include full support for Vietnamese and other enhancements designed for the local market. The release comes in two editions - the 120 MB "Standard" edition includes Unicode support, Unikey, Font and Stardict, while the 319 MB "Pro" edition also contains OpenOffice.org 3.0.1, a Vietnamese spell-checking utility, Skype with video support, the GIMP image manipulation program, WINE for running Windows software, and other popular software applications.

GNU Screen is a terminal multiplexer program that Linux folk have used for ages. It allows you to turn one terminal into many, and run processes even after logging out. In this article we will give a brief overview of screen usage for the uninitiated, then talk about how Ubuntu's defaults and new screen-profiles package have taught us about new and wonderful features of screen.

The GNU C library (or glibc) is a fundamental component of the Linux operating system. It provides much of the user-space interface to the kernel as well as a sizable portion of the utility routines that are used by virtually all Linux applications. A variant of glibc—known as Embedded glibc or EGLIBC—is not very well known outside of the embedded space, but that looks to be changing with the announcement that Debian will switch from glibc to EGLIBC.

Sometimes, you just have to let go. Not all Netbackup media management problems can be solved by the book

Adobe Systems is today expected to release code for an environment to unify design and development, plus code and a major re-branding for its next Flash and AIR RIA tool. The company will that announce Flash Catalyst, previously codenamed Thermo, is available as a public beta. Accompanying Flash Catalyst is beta code for Flex Builder 4.0, the next version of Adobe's Eclipse-based IDE that's yielded to the marketing iron and emerged as Flash Builder.

Now ready for testing Tiny Core V2.0 Release Candidate 4 and introducing MicroCore a 7MB no X environment iso based on Tiny Core.

Database vendor Ingres has teamed up with Red Hat to offer an open source developer stack with features intended to be comparable to proprietary offerings from the likes of IBM or Oracle. The Ingres Development Stack for JBoss combines the Ingres database with Red Hat's JBoss Developer Studio and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. This allows the development of Java applications and provides the middleware and database software to support those applications, Ingres said in an announcement.

The New Zealand Open Source Society is calling on Auditor-General to scrutinise government procurement of Microsoft software after the collapse of negotiations for a new three-year all-of-government software licensing deal.

The stream editor, sed, is a filtering program that automates repetitive editing tasks and is used to process information sent from other Linux commands in pipes. In the simplest form sed looks like...