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Welcome to this year's 47th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Following our review of Fedora 8 last Monday, this week's DistroWatch Weekly offers a few more observations about Red Hat's community distribution - this time from the perspective of your DistroWatch maintainer. While clearly an excellent product, it nevertheless suffers from a few annoyances and dubious design decisions. In the news section, Red Hat Magazine introduces GNOME Online Desktop, Ubuntu releases a specialist distribution for virtual appliances, Oracle's Larry Ellison fires more ugly shots at Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Kurmin's Carlos Morimoto considers the future of the popular Brazilian community project. Finally, for those interested in Computer Aided Engineering, don't miss the new release from CAELinux. Happy reading!

Last month, following the availability of Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" was the release of Mythbuntu 7.10. Mythbuntu is an Ubuntu derivative and has been around for less than a year, but they have been making great progress with this MythTV-optimized distribution. We have been testing out Mythbuntu 7.10 in several different configurations over the past few weeks and today we have our thoughts to share on it as well as a rough overview for those that may have not yet tried this Linux distribution.

This is the first of a series of articles about using Tex system. A good place to begin would be by asking the question “Why is it worth using TeX?” We’ll also take a closer look at the various tools available to us, which makes working with TeX much easier. In the next articles we will focus on Master Thesis writing, Presentations and Correspondence.

"Ok, I've been slacking on the -stable front for a bit here, and didn't realize how far behind I've gotten. Everyone has been sending patches in, which is great, but now we are facing a HUGE 114 patch release," began Greg Kroah-Hartman. He continued: "As there's no real way that everyone can review all of these patches, I've decided to split them up into 6 different categories, and will be sending patches out in these categories for review. If people can just glance over the ones in the areas they care about, I would really appreciate it."

LXer Feature: 18-Nov-2007

With the holidays upon us I thought a Top-10 gift ideas for the Linux Gadget Geek would be good reading. gOS makes a big splash, Info and opinion on Walmart selling $199 PC's, a DSL 4.0 review, Linux continues to dominate the TOP500 World’s Fastest Supercomputers, Forrester thinks that Linux is for real, Carla Schroder continues her "Linux Backups For Real People" series and a computer consultant finally installs Windows..for the first time ever.

This document describes how to set up a Fedora desktop - including how to enable special mouse buttons, improve laptop support (depending on your model), set up printers (especially HP) and the usage of Compiz Fusion. The result is a fast, secure and extendable system that provides all you need for daily work and entertainment.

What he seems to be implying here is that if you use FOSS products, there’s no one to phone up and complain to if something with that product goes wrong. There’s no accountability. You can’t hold someone liable for something going wrong. What he’s also saying is that buying commercial (read : proprietary) software, then all these negatives Go Away. Not only that, but with the purchase of the commercial software, you’re getting a “guarantee that what you have will perform, and has been tested”, that you can hold the publishers of that software liable if something doesn’t work. Oh, really? Yeah. Right.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is extending the Red Hat battlefield to the channel with an extension to Oracle's longstanding alliance with IT reseller CDW.

The Berlin-based union of the German police issued a press release two days ago, where they said that their “Poliks” system to handle reports isn’t stable and reliable enough. The demand of the police union now is to drop the Microsoft-based software and to reconsider the usage of free and open source systems instead. The saved money could then be used to pay the officers their full christmas gratification.

Last weekend I posted an article called Comparing Linux Distributions where I reviewed eight different Linux distributions on five different machines. I had used the freshly released Beta version of Linux Mint and kept getting read errors on the disk. This weekend I downloaded the real version of Mint 4.0 and was able to install it on my Dell Dimension 4300S.

The Fedora Project builds a world-class Linux operating system, consisting of entirely free (meaning both zero-cost and full source code available) software, that is used by companies, organizations and individuals worldwide. Fedora emphasizes the importance of transparency at all levels of hierarchy. From top-level decision making to the source code that goes into our packages and build systems, we continue to ensure that Fedora is as open as possible.

On October 28th, Intel released the reviews on the new "Penryn" Core 2 processor, specifically the Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core QX9650. The QX9650 has a lot of new features and welcomes a new generation to the Core 2 processor family. So what are these features and how will they equate into benefits to the consumer and, more specifically, Linux users? That's what Linux Hardware is here to unravel. In this review I'll cover all the high points of the new "Penryn" core and talk to a couple Linux projects about the impact on end-user performance.

The recipients of the 2007 Linux Medical News Freedom Award are:Domestic category: Co-recipientsWeb Reach, Inc. Mirth Project.WorldVistA for WorldVistA EHR CCHIT Certification.International Award:Paul G. Biondich, MD, MS Regenstreif Institute for OpenMRS project.Distinguished Achievement Award:Gerry Douglas, MD Malawi RHIO.It was a particularly tough year to choose since all the entrants were excellent. Congratulations to all!

Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the third release candidate for the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel summarizing, "hmmm.. Lots of small fixes, some cleanups, and a few things like the cris updates that aren't really either, but which won't affect any normal user, and will hopefully make it easier to sync up in the future. Network driver fixes, some IDE and infiniband updates, some late cpufreq updates, and a hwmon update."

When you travel a lot, once in a while it just seems that you are on"The Trip from Hades", and you wonder why you travel as much as you do. That is the way my most recent trip to a conference called "WALC2007", held in Coro, Venezuela seemed to start. First of all, the conference invitation came late, and I was already engaged to go to another conference. However, that conference could not confirm that they could pay my travel expenses (my only request), and I eventually opted to go to Venezuela, which I had first visited in 1994, and again a few years later.

"HAMMER work is still progressing well, I hope to have most of it working in a degenerate single-cluster (64MB filesystem) case by the end of next week. (cluster == 64MB block of the disk, not cluster as in clustering)," noted Matthew Dillon on the DragonFlyBSD mailing list. He continued, "gluing the per-cluster B-Tree's together for the multi-cluster case is turning out to be more of a headache and will probably take at least 2 weeks to get working. Some fairly sophisticated heuristics will be needed to avoid unnecessary copying between clusters."

IBM Binary Prober is a tool for instrumenting binary executable files running on the AIX and Linux on POWER platforms with user-supplied instrumentation code. In addition, it has built-in code coverage that can be imported to FoCuS, and profile capabilities that can be loaded into Code Analyzer.

Miklos Szeredi posted a request for comments titled "fuse writable mmap design". He explained, "writable shared memory mappings for fuse are something I've been trying to implement forever. Now hopefully I've got it all worked out, it survives indefinitely with bash-shared-mapping and fsx-linux. And I'd like to solicit comments about the approach."

ODF first made the headlines in Massachusetts when presidential hopeful Mitt Romney was its governor. Now, another presidential candidate has pledged his support for them as well. On November 14th, Barack Obama revealed his detailed IT plan for a more open and technically enabled government in a speech at Google's Mountainview campus.

Ultumix is the new Linux distro that combines everything you want for you and your computer customers already installed. It's already up to date and has a Vista like interface. I'm sure you can use it. However it's 1.3GB.