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Low-cost computers meant to usher poor children worldwide into the digital age are being mass produced in China as US nonprofit One Laptop Per Child strives to deliver on its promise. The first of the XO laptops being built at a Quanta Computer facility in Changshu are destined for Uruguay, marking a milestone for the charity group founded by Nicholas Negroponte in Massachusetts two years ago. "Against all the naysayers ... we have developed and now manufactured the world's most advanced and greenest laptop and one designed specifically to instill a passion for learning in children," Negroponte said.

Welcome to this year's 46th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! The Fedora project has once again risen the bar of desktop usability, especially in the area of hardware support, but what do the users think? Find out in our exclusive review of Fedora 8 by Simon Hildenbrand. In the news section, openSUSE announces the creation of openSUSE Board, Mandriva continues to fight the Nigerian Classmate PC deal, Fedora unveils the feature list for version 9, and LinuxTitans.com interviews creator of paldo GNU/Linux Jürg Billeter. Also in this issue, two sets of statistical analyses in the never-ending quest to find out which is the most popular distribution. Happy reading!

Fabian pointed to an interesting article from a Red Hat engineer about CentOS and Red Hat's position. An interesting question popped up that I asked myself before: "Why is there no SLES alternative distribution ?". Given all the benefits a free Enterprise Linux brings to Red Hat, Novell must be eager to want to tap into this resource, right ? One comment suggested that Novell did not release SRPMs and therefor it was impossible to create a free SLES clone. Reality seems a bit different: Novell does release SRPMs. There are a few reasons why there is no Open Source SLES alternative.

Fedora Games spin is a custom variant of Fedora targeted at Linux gamers. This is to demonstrate the gaming potential of Fedora without altering user's existing configuration. The Live DVD also allows installation to hard disk or USB flash.

As of Wine 0.9.49 Safedisc (copy protection) has had many fixes and most safedisc 2/3/4 games should now work with this and later Wine releases. Another major change is that Wine now enables GLSL (shader model 2.0/3.0) by default when your video drivers support it.

A while back the good folks behind Freespire, the free version of Linspire, sent me a CD with version 2.0 for me to review. I was very happy to look at it as Linspire has been a leader in getting preloaded Linux systems into retail and online outlets, something I believe is critical for mainstream Linux adoption.

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Fedora 8 server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of Fedora 8, but should apply to the 64-bit version with very little modifications as well.

Blue Gnu Media & Technology announced today that its flagship service, Blue GNU, has seen strong, steady growth in readership for the first quarter, a positive impact on various Free Software projects, as well as new clients for its advertising and marketing services.

Mandriva 2008 Powerpack is a commercial Linux product built by Mandriva. They provide the Linux Community with a free version but today I will take a look at Powerpack. Mandriva 2008 Powerpack is easy to install and configure and I hope you enjoy this quick look at this excellent Linux OS.

Missing Manual guru David Pogue himself wrote this sleek, informative book on Apple's latest technology for the masses, making me wonder if he's an avid iPhone user and fan rather than just writing this "manual" to satisfy the demands of the public. Actually, despite the fact that only Pogue is given cover credit as the author, I discovered in the "Missing Credits" that J.D. Biersdorfer (I thought the days of female author's needing to disguise their gender by using initials for their first and middle names were long gone) wrote the iTunes, syncing, and accessories chapters. I've said in the past that no one person writes a book and in fact, it takes a talented and dedicated team to see a book from conception to book store shelf (or Amazon.com) and this credits section supports that statement completely.

Got a Linux Gadget Geek on your shopping list? You can't fail with a gift from this guide to the ten hottest Linux-powered devices gleaned from LinuxDevices.com's news throughout 2007. There's something for everyone, at prices from $150 to $1,000, organized from least to most expensive. Enjoy!

With the first anniversary of open-source Java coming up November 13, a Sun official believes the project could bear a sought-after fruit in the Java community: The porting of Java to the Apple iPhone. Apple has not made Java capable of running on the popular device. But Sun's Terrence Barr, technical evangelist for the Java mobile and embedded community, believes Apple's plans to release an SDK for iPhone in early-2008 may result in the open-source phoneME version of Java ME winding up on iPhone.

LXer Feature: 11-Nov-2007

Some of the big stories this week include the Open Document Foundation, a call for papers for SCaLE 6x, four ways to extract the current directory name, the BBC admits a massive underestimate of its Linux users, Linux Backups For Real People, Part 2, a Linux game company opens its doors, Vista vs. desktop Linux: One year in and never use Babel Fish to talk to a foreign minister.

Every industry needs an old, crotchety curmudgeon. We have the always-entertaining John C. Dvorak who’s lately seemed to be slowly slipping into senility. That’s okay, though. That’s okay. He’s our grandpa and we love him and you don’t just cut people out of your life because they’ve started going crazy. His latest outburst is against the Google-led Open Handset Alliance. He thinks it won’t work. That’s a fine opinion but it needs to be backed up with a convincing argument. The reasons he gives are far from convincing, however.

Flyback is a backup and recovery tool loosley modified by Apple’s “Time Machine”.. So here is a Linux implementation (built off of rsync, of course). No fancy OpenGL, but quite functional none-the-less.”

Linux desktop users looking for good financial software to run natively can forget about Quicken and Quickbooks. One glance at Intuit's website should be enough to convince even devout users of that company's products that despite Quickbooks for Linux servers showing strong growth, a port to Linux desktops is a long way off and a Linux version of Quicken is not even on the radar. So what are the alternatives?

After a much publicised spat between Mandriva and Microsoft over an 11,000 computer deal with the Nigerian government it seems Nigeria has decided to stick with Mandriva Linux, the original plan.

Microsoft Corp. on Friday introduced a new pilot program to encourage refurbishers to install legitimate copies of Windows XP on used PCs. The new Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher (MAR) program offers a discount off the retail price of Windows XP, along with deployment tools to help refurbishers reinstall Windows and all of the relevant drivers on renewed PCs in as little as 15 minutes, said Hani Shakeel, a senior product manager on the Genuine Windows product marketing team. When MAR is fully expanded, it will also help stem what Microsoft acknowledges as widespread flouting of Microsoft's XP licensing rules by price-pressured refurbishers.

For those of you that follow my blog, you must have noticed that I’m a Mandriva user. Recently though, I took an interest in Ubuntu: I installed version 7.04 on a laptop, and it did look interesting, enough to make me doubt my commitment to Mandriva’s products. Thus, when 7.10 came out with a bang in the media, and I got another laptop to de-borgify, I downloaded the Ubuntu 7.10 ISO along with the install CD for Mandriva 2008.0 Free. So, I did a test drive, trying to level the field as much as possible. Here are the results.

So, you just delivered that new PC to your customer and gave them a quick tour of what's new and then watched their eyes glaze over with confusion. After a few seconds, the questions start. Questions that should be easy to answer, but turn out not to be! Where is my start button? Where are my programs? What happened to the Menu in Internet Explorer? Why is the system constantly asking for my permission to do simple things? Why does my system take so long to boot? Now your eyes glaze over, not with confusion, but with frustration and you have to ask yourself: What did I do to deserve this? It's simple; you sold your customer a computer with Windows Vista installed, when that customer was somewhat satisfied with Windows XP. The answer lies with the open-source community and more specifically, Linux.