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We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS-5.1 for the i386 and x86_64 Architectures. CentOS-5.1 is based on the upstream release 5.1, and includes packages from all variants including Server and Client. All upstream repositories have been combined into one, to make it easier for end users to work with. And the option to further enable external repositories at install time is now available in the installer.

The appearance in the past year of so-called "completely libre" distributions such as gNewSense and Gobuntu, especially against the backdrop of existing distributions, like BLAG, Dyne:bolic, Ututo and others, might seem to point to an increased interest in software freedom. Should we be looking for the "rise of the completely libre distros", or is there something more subtle that we should notice?

I’ve now updated to the latest openSUSE KDE4 Packages and got another video (first one being: KDE 4.0 RC1+ Video Tour) to add, and it’s one all about the new KDE 4.0 KWin composite; that is, the new desktop effects that will be available with KDE 4.0. You will no longer need to run Compiz to get many standard and convenient composite features: they will be available right inside KDE.

Mozilla's chief operating officer, John Lilly, revealed in a recent blog posting that the company estimated the number of Firefox users as at least 125 million, double from a year ago. This figure appears to be very conservative, however, and it does not seem to account for Linux users. But the good news is that it is growing rapidly.

The mayor of Birmingham, Alabama has agreed to purchase 15,000 of OLPC's XO laptops. The laptops will be given to children in grades one through eight. This will be the first major sale of XO laptops to a US school system.

This guide shows how you can create a Live-CD from your Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon or Linux Mint 4.0 system with a tool called remastersys. Remastersys is available in the Linux Mint romeo repository. You can customize your Ubuntu/Linux Mint system and then let remastersys create an iso image of it which you can then burn onto a CD/DVD.

A little while ago, I posted a blog entry that dealt with reasons why small businesses really should consider using Linux. I listed the freedom from vendor lock-in as one very important consideration and specifically stated that vendor lock-in here refers to data formats, not even specifically to Linux. Surprisingly (or not?), I got a very strange and negative reaction from some of my readers. They started to talk about Linux distro lock-in...

For the last year I've waged war across my desktop, wiping out Microsoft fortifications and bunkers in anticipation of abandoning Windows, but Redmond's last remaining stronghold is the Outlook Calendar.

Have ready some clean towels and a cardboard box, Sun Microsystems is whelping the first in a litter of virtualization products next month. Sun is sneaking off to a nice quiet closet to birth xVM Ops Center, the physical and virtual resource management stack for the xVM product family. This puppy will be available January 8, 2008. The software is based on the open-source Xen hypervisor project. The lineup will eventually center around xVM Server (the hypervisor part) and xVM Ops Center (the management part). Sun is heralding in Ops by releasing the source code used to build the software on the OpenxVM.org community site this month. The Common Agent Container source code will hit Dec. 10, 2007.

Looking for a lightweight Linux alternative? Damn Small Linux 4.1 is now available and clocks in at under 49MB in size. Get a copy and run it from CD, hard disk or even boot from a USB stick.

A friend of mine kept going on about how amazing Ubuntu was. He showed me some YouTube videos of the Beryl/Compiz interfaces and I got really excited. He assured me that it was possible to run it on my laptop. That night I installed it (it took a week to get everything working) and I haven’t used Windows since. I’m now on my second laptop (my old one didn’t have a good enough graphics card) and have since installed Ubuntu 7.10 (fresh install). I don’t hate Ubuntu (or Linux for that matter), I just have a long list of things that I hate about it.

[How often can you miss the ball in a single article? Quite a lot it appears... - Sander]

Gartner has gone on the warpath, smacking down proprietary vendors' practice of discounting upfront license fees in order to lock customers into lucrative, ongoing maintenance contracts. The ironic thing is that it sounds somewhat similar to how commercial open-source companies price their software, except that there is no upfront license fees.

Towards the middle of last month, NVIDIA had released the 169.04 Beta Linux Driver. The change-log was quite lengthy and what we had discovered while benchmarking the GeForce 8 series was that there were improvements to be found in this release and it was far more than a simple version bump. One of the reported changes for this driver release was "improved RENDER performance", and out of requests from readers and interest by the Linux desktop community at large, we have conducted XRender benchmarks using render_bench and have the NVIDIA results available today.

Red Hat has an announcement tomorrow that we'll be telling you about in due course. In the meantime, here's a snippet: a Red Hat vice president slated Novell's real-time SUSE Linux which launched last week, saying it's code that Red Hat would only treat as beta - and Red Hat should know because it wrote most of it.

I found a really interesting device today in the vast expanses of Internet. A company named Aleutia (established in London, 2006) sells an extremely mini PC that consumes a really small amount of energy (8 watts), runs Linux and can be powered by the sun! It’s named Aleutia E1 and is available starting at 250$ (180 EUR).

[Warning: Bad grammar ahead. - Sander]

"Interoperability" has become a weasel word. The word is regularly used to insinuate that two (or more) computer systems should work very well, but they usually work well for the wrong reasons.

This is the third in a series of articles that examine why the ODF Foundation closed down. The leaders of the recently shuttered OpenDocument Foundation have moved their attention and efforts away from the Open Document Format and towards the W3C's Compound Document Format, which they believe will be able to neutralize Microsoft Office by repurposing those documents.

No matter what Linux distribution you are using, chances are you'll find more than one graphical FTP client in its repositories, but if you are looking for a powerful command-line FTP tool, your best bet is lftp. Of course, you can always use the good old ftp command, but lftp takes the task of managing files and directories using the FTP protocol to a new level. To see what I mean, let's use lftp to write a script that creates a local backup copy of a Web site.

As a lawyer, law professor and software programmer, Eben Moglen is passionate about technology, software and user freedom. A former board member of the Free Software Foundation and the founder, president and executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center in New York since 2005, Moglen has worked to protect and advance open source and free software. Moglen recently talked with Computerworld about his work, his belief in open source and what he sees as the changing future of software in the world economy.

The NetBeans community has released the latest build of its open source, Java-based integrated development environment (IDE) with, among other new features, a dual-licensing scheme. NetBeans 6.0 Beta 2 is licensed under both the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2 with ClassPath exception and Sun Microsystems' Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). NetBeans creator and primary corporate sponsor Sun Microsystems proposed adding the GPL license option.