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KDE4 Libraries have witnessed major changes in order to make coding KDE applications an easier task. Many shining points in this new edition which make of the future of KDE more promising.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS -- the distribution's first "long term support" release -- now has a new installer that incorporates some 600 bug and security fixes and makes installation easier, especially on servers. It's no secret that Canonical, the company that runs Ubuntu, is making a big play both for the desktop and more-lucrative server markets, and a big part of that play is the LTS release.

Asus's Eee PC, an ultra-light notebook that runs Linux, will be available with Windows XP before the end of the quarter. Pricing has not yet been announced. It will be interesting to see which OS consumers choose.

Whether by wind, vibration, or shaky hand, we have all taken blurry photos. But in the digital era, there is no need to despair -- you can remove shake and blur from your pictures after the fact. Several Linux-friendly utilities can help you. Deconvolution is the general process that helps remove the effects of camera shake and blur. If you want to understand the math behind the process, start with the articles referenced at Wikipedia and you can find as much detail as you want. In a nutshell, it involves taking the Fast Fourier Transform of the image (which makes it easier to see the tell-tale signs of blurring), smoothing out the artifacts, then transforming the image back into its original form. It is a CPU-intensive process, but for a shaky image there is no better use of your MHz.

We kickstart a major development into the next version of openSUSE: openSUSE 11.0. A very early alpha version, Alpha 1, is now available for download and testing. Despite many other products being developed in parallel to Factory, we have seen a heavy stream of development on it, so it is really worth a try if you have time for testing. Screenshots at The Coding Studio.

After the star studded talks of the main event day, the final day of the KDE 4.0 Release Event returned to the un-conference format of small group talks, demos and discussions. KDE Dot News listened in to some of the sessions, read on for brief summaries. Benjamin Reed (RangerRick) started the day with a Q&A session on the Mac port of KDE. The Mac builds of KDE are available and work reasonably but there are a number of issues to be sorted yet as well as some bugs that have appeared with Qt using the latest version of OS X so it is not recommended for everyday use. Some unresolved issues include the duplication of Strigi against Apple's Spotlight and lack of a Solid backend. Benjamin hopes to have stable builds available for KDE 4.1.

Brightside is a small utility for extending the functionality of Metacity, the default window manager for the GNOME desktop. Now at version 1.4.0, it currently offers two mutually exclusive functions: corner actions that are activated when the mouse cursor moves to one of the desktop's corners, and scrolling with the mouse between desktops. Although its home page has been down recently, Brightside is widely available in the repositories of major distributions. A wiki for the project has been registered with SourceForge.net -- although no content or contact information has been added yet -- so the project may be in the process of moving.

Arch Linux, which was inspired by the CRUX is an i686 optimized lightweight distribution with a great package management tool. Arch releases usually contain a core cd image (~160 MB) that has a core system without any graphical servers and an FTP install image (~30 MB) with which you can install the entire OS from an FTP server. I decided to try arch as it seems to be one of the fastest and highly customizable distribution around(The real reason was since arch seems to be more of a "geek's distro" , I thought I could check my "geek level" with it :) ).

A notification is an email, page or SNMP trap that is generated when a host changes its state or when a service check has exceeded the configured thresholds. Notifications are sent via three modes of communication: e-mail, SNMP trap, and pager. These can be acknowledged via e-mail. Only e-mail and pager notifications require acknowledgement, as SNMP traps do not participate in the escalation process.

I was eating breakfast in my favorite restaurant today and I noticed a sign up on the wall that said: "Free Range Eggs, $4.00 per dozen" Now at first I had the common knee-jerk reaction to the word "Free" that everyone does, thinking of the concept of "gratis". Then I realized that the word "Free" was related to "Range" and not the price of the eggs.

I have two of these posters for auction. They are both original Unix Magic posters, in mint condition, rolled up for 20 years and never touched or hung....Proceeds will go to the DevChix Scholarship Fund, now that DevChix is nonprofit!

A dissertation is composed of two elements: the content and the form. The author is certainly the person best qualified to speak about the content. We, however, will focus on the form. We are going to see how to get a fine composition with low time expenditure using LaTeX.

Innotek VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software. Some of the features of VirtualBox are: Modularity,  virtual machine descriptions in XML, guest additions for Windows and Linux and shared folders. The following workshop describes how to install VirtualBox (OSE) on OpenSuse 10.3 and to install  a WindowsXP guest addition.

Red Hat has launched a testing and certification facility in Beijing, as well as opened another research and development (R&D) center in the Chinese state. These moves come under an initiative to encourage deployment of open source software in the country, which Red Hat has termed Open Source Collaborative Innovation (OSCI).

Annvix is a distribution aimed at providing a secure, stable, and fast base for servers. Be warned, however: Annvix is not for everyone. When you boot the Annvix netinstall CD, you're greeted with a shell and informed that the root password is "root" and should be changed. It also advises that you set up your network and use lynx on another terminal to browse the documentation for the install. Already I could tell that this was not going to be your average user-friendly GUI installer.

In the past, I’ve noticed that reviews of the various GNU/Linux OS distributions have frequently made point of their downfalls when compared to one Microsoft OS or another. This doesn’t make much sense in the grand scale of things, because most-if not all-of Microsoft’s advantages come from being the long-time market leader, not the better OS. So, in light of that, I decided to right a few wrongs by creating a review of Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (which is arguably the best Microsoft OS to date) as if Linux were the market leader, and Microsoft, the upstart.

Is the real challenge for PR just "influence"? Or is it something bigger thatn that? If so, are there ways we can help PR move past its history of spinnage and into a future of usefulness?

As a Linux administrator, you may be called upon to set up a control system for file access. You probably already know how to set read, write, and execute permissions on files, and you will need to make extensive use of that knowledge. But, sometimes, you'll need more than just these permissions settings to get the job done.

Actually not a FOSS story, but FOSS users may find it interesting in that it addresses resistance to forced upgrades; in this case to Windows Vista. From the article: "In many respects, Vista is like the Windows Millennium Edition that was meant to replace Windows 98 in 2000 but caused more trouble than it was worth." Ouch!

The Intel Open Source Technology Center is pleased to announce the release of version 0.1 of LatencyTOP, a tool for developers to visualize system latencies. Slow servers, Skipping audio, Jerky video --everyone knows the symptoms of latency. But to know what's really going on in the system, what's causing the latency, and how to fix it... those are difficult questions without good answers right now. LatencyTOP is a Linux tool for software developers (both kernel and userspace), aimed at identifying where system latency occurs, and what kind of operation/action is causing the latency to happen. By identifying this, developers can then change the code to avoid the worst latency hiccups.