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The development team of VectorLinux have announced the release of VectorLinux 5.9 Final GOLD edition. This is the fruit that has resulted from several months of coding, debugging and testing by the core development team and the Vector community. This release follows our legendary tradition of stability (inherited from SlackWare-12), blazing speed on even modest hardware and simplicity of design and function.

Mozilla has released the latest beta of Firefox 3 today, and the Linux efforts behind it are starting to show even more. This release, being a beta, is surprisingly stable. Here’s the killer that makes this beta release amazing: more GTK support.

It was expected by some. For the third year in a row the Dutch Cartel Office (NMa) decided there were no reasons to look into the Dutch software market, despite requests made by people in the field of commerce and education and by the Dutch parliament. In a letter send to me (and perhaps the other writers as well, link to Dutch text), the NMa explains that there is no evidence to suggest an abuse of the domination market position by Microsoft in such a way that it prohibits other operating systems and software to compete.

paint-mono is a port of Paint.NET. The only way it could be built in the past was using a development version of MonoDevelop and there was no way of generating packages for it. Since then, MonoDevelop has progressed to the point where it can generate standard Unix makefiles and generate the proper scripts, pkg-config files and produce code that conforms to the Mono Application Deployment Guidelines from a Visual Studio solution. It is now easier than ever to try Paint.NET on Linux

The Ubuntu development community has officially announced the release of Ubuntu 8.04 alpha 2. Ubuntu 8.04—scheduled for release in April 2008—is a long-term support (LTS) release, which means that it will be supported on the desktop for three years and on the server for five years. This second alpha, which is available for download from Ubuntu's mirrors, is a development release that is primarily intended for testers.

Norway has established a new policy mandating government adoption of open standards. Starting in 2009, all documents published on state-operated web sites will have to use HTML, PDF, or ODF formats. The policy aims to stimulate competition between office software vendors and make government documents more accessible to the general public. Under the terms of the policy, HTML will be the standard format for all publicly accessible web content, PDF files will be used when the original appearance of the document needs to be preserved, and use of ODF is mandated in cases where a user needs to be able to modify a document downloaded from the government.

A mediocre e-mail client is one of the major weaknesses of Nokia's Internet Tablet products. Nokia's mail program chokes on my IMAP inbox, hanging and crashing when more than about 200 messages are present. Some relief may be in sight for those who want an e-mail client that is open source and made of sterner stuff. The first beta of the new open source Modest e-mail client for Maemo has officially been released.

Yes, I’m talking about amaroK, the free, open source music player, currently only for Linux and Unix, but soon to be available for Windows and Mac OS X. As the saying goes, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who use amaroK, and those who don’t. amaroK is the ultimate music management software, and for a casual music buff like me, it’s the best you can get out there. What separates amaroK from the other popular players in the market are its features which are targeted to make music management and playback easy, and a pleasing experience. Here, I’ve highlighted some of the key features of amaroK.

Joomla!, a popular content management system (CMS) for Web portals, is easy to install and maintain, and has thousands of components, modules, and Mambots for almost every thinkable function a Web site could possibly need. All of the extensions are open source, as is the CMS itself. Here are a few extensions that I find indispensable.

GIMP is the undisputed king of image editing in Linux platforms, and is next only to Photoshop in popularity in Windows and Mac platforms. With a large community of developers and an even larger pool of users, it is no surprise that GIMP is very popular. Much like Firefox, GIMP’s strength lies in its plugins, which are developed by the open-source toting community. Since the users themselves develop them, they know all the needs and conceive a plugin for everything.

Released just in time for the holidays. SimplyMEPIS 7.0 arrived at ReviewLinux.Com so we thought we would take a quick look at this new Linux OS. Check out our flash video of SimplyMEPIS 7.0 in action.

LXer Feature: 23-Dec-2007

It looks like people are starting to get their hands on some OLPC's and the reviews have started coming in too. We also have a review of Carla Schroder's new book, KOffice takes a stand against OOXML, screenshots of the BBS's new iPlayer and Damn Small Linux 4.2, Open Source alternatives to Adobe, how to make a holiday slideshow and one of our readers has a Debian adventure of their own.

A report generator to visualize query results with gnuplot has been added. Exception handling has been improved. The Snellen Chart has been reactivated. KVK handling has officially been included. More hooks and an improved example hook script were added. Demographics handling has been extended to now really support multiple names, addresses, comm channels, and external IDs. Furthermore, there are lots of GUI-accessible configuration options that were always there in the backend but didn't have a frontend to them. File format handling in document management has seen improvements.

I may have said that part 3 would be the last one, but there were just so many good comments. This part highlights a few great comments along with my response to them.

Now that OpenOffice.org does make some splashes in the IT press for the achievement of having created a "portable" version that can run from a USB thumbdrive (for only the Windows version, that is) -- isn't it time for klik to get ready for gaining its own share of public fame sometime soon? That's because klik does not only turn OpenOffice.org, but many thousand Linux applications into "PortableApps". And klik does not need painstakingly recompiling modified source code into portable binaries, one by one. But will re-utilize the marvellous work and special knowledge of all the dedicated Debian, RPM and Slackware packaging heroes out there and repackage 95% of its supported klik bundles fully automatically, including dependency resolution...

[ From my own experience, I can tell KLIK1 is great already, it made the CLI-only program 'csound' work on my Gentoo system. Gentoo doesn't have a csound ebuild in portage, and compiling from source failed. KLIK1 however did the job fine. I read the KLIK2 plans, and I predict as HD-spaces becomes cheaper, this will be the future of package-management and the end of all your dependency problems! - hkwint ]

As always, KDE will have a presence at next year's FOSDEM in Belgium on 23-24 February 2008. FOSDEM is a European meeting of free software developers, to listen to a plethora of interesting talks about anything related to free software. We are looking for people to give a talk in the KDE or cross-desktop devroom.

[ Planning to be there to cover the event for LXer - hkwint ]

How did quite possibly the most boring video clip ever become the YouTube number one this Xmas?

Do you know why do I admire Microsoft’s marketing whizzes? They made a deity out of their corporation. No, seriously. No figurative speech. Not a metaphor nor a parallel. Those nameless heroes did it literally.

The next big frontier for Big Linux Build-out will be at a back end that's as close as anyone can get the front lines of big video production. That is, to consumers who are now also producers. And the parties in the best position to pioneer that frontier aren't in Seattle or Mountain view. They're in your home town.

Kicking off the 2008.1 development cycle in earnest, the first alpha is here. This alpha features X.Org 7.3, KDE 3.5.8, KDE 4.0 RC2 (in /contrib), GNOME 2.21, kernel 2.6.24, OpenOffice.org 2.3, new NVIDIA and ATI proprietary drivers, PulseAudio by default and more. Despite being a first alpha, it is also in a fairly stable and reliable state. Check out the Mandriva 2008.1 Alpha 1 screenshots by The Coding Studio.