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The KDE development community announced today the official release of version 4.1, the first major update of the new 4.x series. This release finally delivers on the promise of a next-generation desktop environment and resolves most of the problems that afflicted the original 4.0 release. The new version includes a huge number of interface enhancements, application improvements, bug fixes, new software, and new infrastructure components; according to statistics released by the KDE developers, over 20,803 separate changes have been committed to the version control system since the 4.0 release.

PostPath is a drop-in Microsoft Exchange alternative based on the open source Postfix MTA. PostPath director of product management Sina Miri calls PostPath the "only" drop-in Exchange replacement, and he says that ability is the reason why his company makes PostPath available only with a proprietary license, despite its open source roots.

The next version Debian has come a step closer to completion with the freezing of the current testing distribution version codename Lenny. This will form the basis of Debian 5.0, expected in September. The freeze means that package developers who have not uploaded software for inclusion in the Debian 5.0 release have effectively missed the boat. It also means that their packages will almost certainly be omitted from the next versions of popular Linux distros such as Ubuntu, Xandros and Linspire that are based on Debian.

Solid state drives (SSD) have many advantages over traditional spinning-platter hard drives including no noise, low power and heat generation, good resistance to shock, and most importantly, extremely low seek times. To see just how much an SSD might improve performance, I used Bonnie++ to benchmark a contemporary SSD as it might be used in a laptop computer. Without going into details, SSDs may use single-level cell (SLC) or multi-level cell storage, with SLC drives typically offering better performance.

Mozilla continues to improve its flagship browser and the latest major release, Firefox® 3.0, offers something for just about everyone. XML developers were certainly not left out—the new version improves basic parsing, DOM, XSLT, SVG, and more. In this article, learn of the new features Firefox 3.0 offers for XML processing; pay close attention to how the added EXSLT extensions open up fresh possibilities for XSLT on the browser.

Not too long ago, I reviewed The Official Ubuntu Book, Third Edition published by Prentice Hall (July 13, 2008). The thing about reviewing a later edition of an already successful book, is that you need to make sure it updates to the current version of whatever it's describing, which in this case is Ubuntu 8.04, the Hardy Heron. I dinged the Benjamin Mako Hill, et al. book, primarily because it didn't address readers who were already dedicated Ubuntu users and who needed to know the ins and outs of upgrading vs. doing a clean install. I've since learned (and it wasn't addressed in the Prentice Hall book) that there actually is a direct upgrade patch from 6.06 to 8.04 (and this information was a little hard to come by). I needed that information, because performing that upgrade was the task I needed to perform. Rickford Grant's third edition book arrived at my home yesterday. How will this book appeal to the complete Ubuntu newbie vs. the experienced "non-geek" with upgrade needs?

The obvious thought came to me while writing last week's column ("SCO Group: Its future is all used up") that about the only folk (other than the deluded and amoral management of the SCO Group) that want the SCO Group effort attacking Linux and other open source initiatives to succeed is Microsoft. So I decided to explore that side in this follow-up column, but a bit of reading led me to the conclusion that things are not as simple as they appear.

Although not actually available until September in the UK, ASUS has announced the full specification of its new Eee Box. Everyone and their Auntie seems to be spinning cartwheels over the Eee PC, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that there is a little surge of nervous energy running through my fingertips as I write about the UK launch of the new Eee Box.

BIOSLEVEL.com takes an in-depth look at the performance of HighPoint's two-channel RocketRAID 3120 SATA RAID controller in Linux. HighPoint's GPL-Licensed driver was recently integrated with kernel 2.6.25, but is the hardware ready for Linux?

There's a common theme here: replacing GNU/Linux at the bottom of the open source stack, and making the applications more Windows-friendly. Microsoft seems to think - rightly, in my view - that the free software threat to its business will be blunted considerably if it can move users of enterprise open source applications onto Windows by encouraging and optimising ports to that platform.

At this point in the game, Microsoft should really come clean with a statement that rescinds its Linux/patent/suing threat altogether. Granted, Microsoft put itself in a hard spot with this one, since it had its channel singing the same tune for those murky months after the threat. If it stands up says,"Sorry, just kidding!" that won't make the channel partners happy, particularly if they used the threat to convince customers they must buy SUSE or Windows over Red Hat and other distros. But the fact is, we are seeing actions by Microsoft that indicate that the"suing Linux users" jig is up.

We rely very much on journalists to help us sift through the muddier waters of the river of truth, and Joe Barr was one of the best

Interoperability is fast becoming a key watchword in business computing circles. Open source products continue to gain enterprise acceptance. With that acceptance comes an increase in users who demand that data produced with one application to work with data produced for another application -- or even another operating system.

Hard drives are slow and fail often, and though abolished for working memory ages ago, fixed-size partitions are still the predominant mode of storage space allocation. As if worrying about speed and data loss weren't enough, you also have to worry about whether your partition size calculations were just right when you were installing a server or whether you'll wind up in the unenviable position of having a partition run out of space, even though another partition is maybe mostly unused. And if you might have to move a partition across physical volume boundaries on a running system, well, woe is you.

With its 4.1 release, KDE is taking few chances. While the 4.0 release's announcement emphasized excitement and significance, the tone of the announcement for 4.1 is more subdued. This time, the announcement talks about maturing technologies and underlying improvements, and the only claim is that the 4.1 desktop "can replace the KDE 3 shell for most casual users."

This is the first in a two-part series from Summit presenter and Red Hat/Fedora engineer Bill Nottingham. It is based on the talk he gave at this yearâ??s Red Hat Summit. Part two will be published later this week.

RSOL PC (that company name seems an unfortunate choice to anyone with a British or Australian ear, even if it doesn't have the same connotations in its US home) has announced a series of computers based on generic components but is playing up the potential for running a variety of operating systems. The specs are pretty typical - 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 500G hard drive, DVD burner, 2G RAM, nVidia GeForce 7300GS video card, Gigabit Ethernet and so on - and the only operating systems the company is actually selling are Windows XP and Vista. Fedora or Ubuntu Linux are available as factory options as a service to customers.

6 months after the release of KDE 4.0, the KDE community today announced the released of the second feature release in the KDE 4 era. Lots of changes have gone into this release and the KDE community hopes to be able to make most early-adopting users happy with this release. Lots of feedback from people trying out KDE 4.0 has gone into KDE 4.1, filling most of the gaps people experienced with the 4.0 releases. Highlights of KDE 4.1 are the KDE PIM suite, which has returned in its KDE 4 incarnation, a more mature Plasma desktop and many, many new features and applications.

An updated version of the updated version of the Thesaurus script we put up a while ago. Many thanks :)

Gospel Direct and Maranatha Record Co., sister companies based in South Africa, have exercised their faith in a Linux-based accounting program. Jaco Jacobs, manager of the finance and IT departments at Christian music and book retailer Gospel Direct and at Christian record label Maranatha Record Co., says that the companies chose Quasar because of their dissatisfaction with applications such as UltiSales and Syspro.