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A new release of Ubuntu Server, version 8.04, is scheduled to be available for free download Thursday with more enterprise qualities than previous releases. The move puts Canonical's Ubuntu, heretofore a consumer-oriented, desktop version of Linux, on more of a collision course with Red Hat Enterprise andNovell Suse Linux Enterprise. Ubuntu Server 8.04 will be supported for five years, only the second version of Ubuntu to be guaranteed Long Term Support, with the previous 6.06 version also receiving the LTS designation.

I'm very pleased to report that with the post-Fedora 9 election, the Board composition will be a better reflection of the strides our community has made in self-organization and self-governance, and of our healthy partnership with Red Hat. Starting with this election, the Board will move to a composition of five (5) community-elected seats and four (4) Red Hat-appointed seats. This is an issue I've been advocating over the past couple of weeks, and I'm delighted to be able to make this change following my first release as Fedora Project Leader.

Nokia is on the side of openness in the mobile industry -- in fact, history says it's inevitable, according to, Bob Iannucci, chief technology officer of Nokia Corp. Openness seems paramount, but how to get there? The telecom world isn't the model, Iannucci said. "If we imagine the telecoms' way of doing that, you imagine these smoke-filled rooms where people make a decision, and seven years later, some outdated technology comes out. We can't do that," he said. But neither can mobile vendors realistically replicate what the computer industry keeps doing. The mainframe, minicomputer, and PC worlds each saw the value get sucked out of hardware and shifted first to software, then to services. Computers had dominant players that dictated some hardware standards, though; mobile phone vendors aren't likely to let one player decide everything, no matter how popular the iPhone gets.

[Read between the lines. It's yet another industry who's business model is threatened by openness and who's afraid of actually having to provide services to make money instead of peddling cheap hardware at too high prices. - Sander]

I'm not one to give up, although I seem to do it all the time. If I install an OS, and it doesn't work out, chances are I'll pull it off and replace it with something else. But I keep going back to what didn't quite work all the way, and so I'm back in the world of PC-BSD. Why both desktop FreeBSD projects -- DesktopBSD and PC-BSD -- insist on pushing KDE and not offering even a spin on Xfce, or GNOME, I don't know. Whether it's habit, preference, or prejudice, I'm more comfortable in GNOME, although I like a well-appointed Fluxbox, Fvwm, or Xfce desktop, and use them fairly often. The fact that PC-BSD installs with Fluxbox as an alternate window manager means I'll have an alternative environment to play with right away.

The next day, I re-installed Slackware Linux, but this time on my entire hard drive. No Microsoft Windows. None! No safety net, no fancy GUI to hide all the registry options, no programmer in Redmond telling me what I wasn't allowed to do. I had "cast off the bow-lines" and bravely sailed into new waters.

Frustrated software programmers unable to sign up to the voluntarily run community of developers behind the Debian GNU/Linux operating system have criticised the management of the project. Voicing their frustration on discussion forums, including Planet Debian, developers had begun to question the Linux-based operating system's future, according to reports.

Sun on April 23 announced a Solaris software as a service (SaaS) push. But one blogger is wondering how soon Sun will add MySQL and potentially Ubuntu Linux to its SaaS strategy. Here are the details from MSPmentor.

Red Hat has published a "preview release" of Fedora 9, the next version of its freely available Linux distribution, which will be the last public release before the final edition next month. The final version of Fedora 9 was initially planned for next week, but the release has been put back by two weeks to 13 May, according to the Fedora Project.

SCO has filed its monthly operating reports for SCO Group and SCO Operations for the month of March, and it looks like SCO Group has achieved its goal of having no money left for Novell, although it's hard to tell, since the document for Group is almost blank. I totally know nothing about accounting, so I'll just list what I notice, and you can figure out what it means.

Preparations for Akademy 2008 are in full swing, but KDE e.V. is already looking forward to next year and asks potential hosts to submit proposals for Akademy 2009. For the first time we also invite proposals to hold Akademy and GUADEC, the GNOME community conference, in the same location. More information can be found in the Call for Hosts for Akademy 2009 below or in the joint press release of KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation.

On Thursday, the Ubuntu 8.04 magic happens. The operating system - called Hardy Heron at playgrounds around Silicon Valley - goes up for download in its various forms, most notably Server and Desktop. Like most open source jobs, these Ubuntu OS releases are protracted affairs. Canonical, the corporate body behind Ubuntu, has already told everyone what to expect with the OS during the beta process. We covered most of the major new features last month and won't bore you with the details again.

Learn to monitor your systems resources, troubleshoot, and analyze system capacity in Part 6 of six tutorials on Linux certification exam 101 topics. Part 1 walks through LDAP concepts and architecture, directory design, and schemas. In Part 2 learn about server installation, configuration, and programming, then dive deeper into configuration in Part 3. Learn to search your LDAP tree and use command-line tools in Part 4, and how to integrate your server into Microsoft Active Directory in Part 5.

News of an effort like this has no choice but to eventually get the attention of the Corporate Linux World. It also helps if you also call them directly and tell them what you are doing.

Bob Bickel, co-founder of Ringside Networks, says companies need to harness the power of social networking and entice customers to visit corporate Web sites with the same eagerness they show for sites like Facebook. He believes the Ringside Social Application Server -- an open source platform that puts social networking tools on any existing Web site -- is the answer CEOs are looking for.

Robert Shingledecker has announced the final release of Damn Small Linux 4.3. From the changelog: "Updated Firefox browser to version 2; updated murgaLua to 0.6.8; updated nano-tiny to 2.0.7; updated and consolidation of mydslBrowser with new mydslBrowser.lua; new picture puzzle added to Games collection; new calculator.lua replaces Calcoo; optimized minirt24.gz - much smaller; new background and theme for both JWM and Fluxbox; updated 'noicons' boot option to suppress icons in JWM; fixed removal of mydsl extensions on traditional hard drive installations; dropped SCSI modules for needed space - available in the modules section; fixed CD recording scanbus device error by adding scsi/sg.o module; updated editor.lua - menu issue resolved for new murgaLua version...."

One of the perqs of being a journalist is that I often hear about software and events before most people. A case in point is Writer's Tools, an extension for OpenOffice.org Writer being developed by my fellow journalist Dimitri Popov, whose articles about macros have taught me most of what I know on the subject. As the name suggests, Writer's Tools is a collection of various utilities that might be useful for writers. It's a little rough in places, being only at version 0.9.27, and possibly a little idiosyncratic, but like Emacs, Writer's Tools is so varied that it undoubtedly has something for everyone, regardless of their writing habits.

Last month distro-review ran an article titled 10 ways that Linux is outgrowing the stereotype and becoming the best OS. While I agreed with all 10 points in the article something just didn't sit right with me. I bookmarked the article and gave it a good long think. My conclusion: the facts are correct but there are problems with both the premise and the goal of the article.

Registration is open for the tenth annual edition of OSCON (Open Source Convention), as well as for a co-located Ubuntu Live conference. Scheduled for Jul. 21-25 in Portland, Ore., O'Reilly's OSCON 2008 is expected to draw some 2,500 open source experts, visionaries, and hackers.

Asustek Computer plans to share its experience with open-source software in its popular Eee PC low-cost laptop at the OpenTechSummit Taiwan 2008, which runs from April 25 to 29, the company said. The Taiwanese PC vendor is the largest corporate sponsor of the event and is currently selling the most popular laptop that carries an open source OS, the Eee PC.

I have been trying to digest two unrelated stories from last week. The first was the report by the Standish Group on the $60 Billion dollars open source is purported to be costing the proprietary software industry. The second was Steve Reubel's, "The Web 2.0 World is Skunk Drunk on Its Own Kool-Aid". As I looked introspectively into these stories I wondered how relevant they were. I came to a realization that while the one of the most commonly espoused virtues of open source is more eyeballs generating better code that perhaps one of the least mentioned strengths is their marketing ability. Bear with me as try to explain why.