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Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 106 for the week of October 15th.

With its legal options running out, Microsoft bowed today to pressure from the European Commission and agreed for the first time to sell some confidential computer code to rivals at nominal cost, ending a 32-year-old practice of designing closed systems to bolster its competitive advantage.

Tectonic is compiling a directory of all South African suppliers of Linux distributions. If you are a supplier, or know of one, please let us know.

"It wouldn't be efficient for you to implement something new, only to have it criticized again. I'd suggest that you come up with a concrete design, describe to us what you propose to do and let's take it from there."— Andrew Morton, in anOctober 17, 2007 posting to the Linux Kernel Mailing List.

A file browser is a file browser. Unless it is Nautilus which has tons of plug-ins available for it that give it the edge. Perhaps the best of these for real tech-heads is the nautilus-actions plug-in which allows you to add items to the right-click context menu. If you're handy with scripts this could open up a whole new world for your desktop productivity.

Welcome to this year's 43rd issue of DistroWatch Weekly! It is dedicated to the recently released Mandriva Linux 2008, with a first look review at Mandriva's latest release, an interview with the company's Director of Engineering, and a brief note comparing the new releases from the traditional European Linux power houses - Mandriva and openSUSE. In the news section, Canonical releases impressive "Gutsy Gibbon", Fedora mulls development changes, KDE reaches its third beta, and Slackware updates Current branch. Finally, for those of you who enjoy the DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics, don't miss the Site News section, which summarises a brief experiment that took place on the web site last week. It's a bumper issue, so get yourself a cup of coffee and enjoy the read!

This document describes how to set up a Mumble voice chat environment with Fedora 7. Mumble is a low-latency voice chat software with focus on games.

If you weren't lucky enough to attend PodCamp Cape Town this past weekend (or perhaps you were too busy readying for the rugby?) then head on over to Zoopy where you can find some of the videos shot during the day.

I found this on the Ubuntu user forums, thanks goes out to (deadlydeathcone) here is his post.

There are literally dozens of plugins and extensions for Nautilus, the default file manager on the GNOME desktop environment, but there is just one that allows you to customize the Nautilus context menu items. The Nautilus-actions extension enables you to add customized entries to the context menu such that, when you right-click a file, the context menu will show options specific to that file.

Becta, the United Kingdom government's adviser on IT in schools, has taken Microsoft to the Office of Fair Trading over anti-competitive practices--but open source campaigners say Becta is still effectively promoting Microsoft.

LXer Feature: 22-Oct-2007

Welcome back! In part 4 we ranged all over the place, from how to manage and edit your photo archives with Linux, some discussion on choosing lenses, and finally getting down to the most important part of getting high-quality photographs: understanding aperture, shutter speeds, and ISO. Part 4 covered the fundamentals of aperture, so let's leap in to shutter speeds and ISO. This applies to point-and-shoot cameras as well as the fancy DSLRs with herds of different lenses; if you don't understand these three photography fundamentals, you won't understand how to get the best photos.

"Sometimes I'm tardy and miss things for weeks and need prodding, and sometimes I pull almost before you've sent the'please pull' message. I'm unpredictable. Or keeping you on your toes. Or incompetent. Pick whatever suits your mood ;)"— Linus Torvalds in anOctober 17, 2007 message to the Linux Kernel Mailing List.

As GNU/Linux becomes more popular, the motives behind its inceptions are often forgotten. Linux is a free operating system, but its broadening userbase perceives this freedom as pertaining to cost, not rights and liberty.

GnuTLS, which released version 2.0.2 last week, removed the TLS Authorization capability, due in part to an effort to circumvent the IETF standardization process.

To a business user of Linux, the development of its kernel may appear so Byzantine, with dozens of people maintaining different pieces and hundreds more volunteers submitting code, that it's hard to see where new features are headed.

What's Linux worth? The question has been a favorite of technology groups and cocktail party conversations ever since a character named Jeff V. Merkey offered $50,000 for a copy of Linux. The offer was a ploy. Merkey wanted it under the BSD license, which would have undermined the terms of the GPL. So he didn't get it. But we know, at least, that $50,000 proved to be a low bid.

Jeff Garzik posted a series of nine patchs to the lkml titled to "remove [the] 'irq' argument from all irq handlers", explaining, "the overwhelming majority of drivers do not ever bother with the 'irq' argument that is passed to each driver's irq handler. Of the minority of drivers that do use the arg, the majority of those have the irq number stored in their private-info structure somewhere." He noted that he had no intention to push the patches upstream anytime soon.

While Linux desktop surveys are nothing new, no recent polls have looked specifically at Linux graphics when it comes to X.Org video drivers, hardware, and related video features. We, however, at Phoronix see a need for this information to be profiled and have launched the first-annual Linux graphics survey. This survey is intended to allow the development community to get a better understanding of the video hardware in use, what open-source and closed-source drivers are being used, and other relevant information.

When asked how to best refer to kernels between official releases and release candidates, Linus Torvalds pointed to his automated git snapshots. "I still call them 'nightly snapshots', but they do in fact happen twice a day if there have been changes, so that's not technically correct," he noted. The latest snapshot is 2.6.23-git15, "this is an exact name, because you can go to kernel.org and look up the exact commit ID that was used to generate it (there's an 'ID' file associated with each snapshot there)."