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Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 103 for the week of September 24th.

Back in February, Ralph Green asked me to speak at the North Texas Linux Users' Group. I discussed Linux administration and then took questions. Some one in the audience asked me about Mono. I gave a cavalier answer having a bias against it. Then someone else in the audience said that I needed to get my facts straight.

Ubuntu's Fridge is reporting that Kubuntu is taking the Canary Islands. KDE is being installed on all of the school computers in the Canary Islands by the way of mEDUXa and in their universities with Bardinux, both derivatives of the Kubuntu GNU/Linux operating system. KDE's Aaron Seigo and Jonathan Riddell toured the schools in which mEDUXa is in use and spoke with the developers during the Jornadas de Software Libre conference. During that conference, Aaron Seigo presented KDE 4 and its exciting capabilities as well as an introduction to KDE and Qt programming.

The confusing world of standards for mobile versions of Linux became a little less confusing last week with a declaration of "alignment" between two key players.

Register Developer is changing. We've moved our base of operations form the UK to Silicon Valley, where under a new editor - the Register's former software editor, Gavin Clarke - we will build on the work of Martin and David, who successfully established Register Developer.

Ever wondered how much your contribution was worth to a project? If you are a Java developer helping out one of the hundreds of open source Java projects, head over to SourceKibitzer. It's a social network of Java developers that provides various metrics for open source Java projects.

COSSFEST 07 (Calgary Open Source Systems Festival) will bring together professionals, students and enthusiasts who share a common interest in Open Source software. This one-day conference and expo will be made up of speakers and hourly workshops. Booths featuring hardware vendors, software companies, services companies, and (of course) user groups will be on hand. This event is the largest free technology event in Calgary!

On Monday. European think tank the Globalisation Institute made a submission to the EC proposing that all PCs and laptops should be sold without an OS in order to foster competition and bring down prices, saying the current practice "imposes an extra cost on virtually every EU business." Three-quarters of silicon.com's 12-strong CIO Jury IT director panel have now backed that call for naked PCs, although the argument is far from straightforward.

Over the years of reviewing ASUS products we've seen a number of interesting motherboards but the one we have our hands on for review today is one of the most interesting we have ever seen. This motherboard is the ASUS Blitz Extreme and packed onto this ATX PCB is Intel's P35 Chipset with ICH9R Southbridge, dual-channel DDR3-1333 memory support, CrossFire support, "voltiminder" LEDs, load-line calibration, Stack Cool 2, SupremeFX II audio, LCD poster display, and the ASUS Fusion Block System. The Fusion Block System is an integrated thermal hybrid cooler designed to cool the motherboard's chipset and other key components, but can also be inserted into your computer's water cooling loop for even greater performance. The ASUS Blitz Extreme belongs to their Republic of Gamers line with other motherboards such as the Striker Extreme, Blitz Formula, Crosshair, and Commando. This may be the ultimate gaming and overclocking platform, but how well does this $300+ USD motherboard work with Linux? We will tell you today.

This is presented to you as dictated from helios. Ken is away having medical needs met and this is being typed as I listen to the playback. I will assure you that I present it literally and without personal input. - perseis

LXer Feature: 01-Oct-2007

I have to wonder- where on Earth did Ms. Fairchild get the idea that alienating her customers is a good business practice? So what if she finds sexist, demeaning humor funny? It doesn't belong in Linux Journal. I paid my subscription money in good faith for many years, trusting to receive good Linux articles. If I want to read about blowjobs or read about how helpless and stupid women are, I don't expect to find it in Linux Journal. There are abundant sources for that elsewhere.

If you spend most of your computing life in Firefox, it makes sense to consolidate other online activities in your browser. There are extensions that can help you to do just that: you can manage your bookmarks with the del.icio.us extension, chat on IRC channels using Chatzilla, and read RSS feeds in Sage. Jabber instant messaging users have their own extension: the SamePlace, a nifty IM client that, besides the basic Jabber functionality, offers a few unique and useful features.

In Part 1 of a three-part series, A. Lizard dives into his notes for resources and methods he's found useful in the last three years in keeping his systems running, to give novices some idea what to do once one gets "under the hood" of one's computer at a application/OS level.

Java Platform, Standard Edition 6 (Java SE) focuses on performance, with expanded tools for managing and monitoring applications as well as diagnosing common problems. This article outlines the basis of monitoring and management in the Java SE platform and provides detailed information about the relevant enhancements in Java SE 6.

Our cross platform IA-32 emulator friend, Bochs, has a powerful new competitor who offers more than the emulation we have all come to know and dread...err...I meant love.

MySQL has announced the availability of MySQYL 5.1.22-rc, the first 5.1 release candidate version of the popular open source database.

Powertop is a command-line tool released by Intel that shows you the power consumption of the applications running on your system. It works best on notebooks with Intel mobile processors and can help you find out the programs that put a strain on your notebook battery. It requires kernel 2.6.21 or newer with tickless idle enabled (CONFIG_NO_HZ) (which is currently available for 32-bit kernels only). Fedora 7 comes with a 2.6.21 kernel by default, so we can use Powertop on it.

I was an 18-year-old chemistry major working at Dunkin' Donuts when I got my first help desk job. Over a weekend, I went from deep-frying old fashioned donuts to fixing whatever computer a student brought in off the street. And I spent months in the computing center with guys who told stories. Thirteen years later, I'm a sysadmin and a programmer. I still pull all-nighters tweaking Perl scripts or helping a friend move their blog to a new ISP. And I still mostly work with men. We know that Open Source communities want more women. But what can we do to get there? Here are some things that I think we can do right now.

Hal Steger and Alberto Onetti - both of mobile open-source leader Funambol - discuss open-source marketing in the Enterprise Open Source Journal. Well worth a read, especially for those who persist in believing that open source succeeds in the absence of good marketing. In fact, real commercial success in open source comes as a direct result of savvy marketing.

I have been using the same computer for over seven years. I know that this sort of thing doesn't become a Borg like me but that is just how it is. To rectify this situation I have been slowly, piece by piece, assimilating components to create a new Locutus that will be more than just a bitzer but a new version of itself. Due to my experiences with windows I was semi-expecting it to not boot, have a kernel panic, the network wouldn't work and I would have to find some way of installing a lot of drivers. This didn't happen at all. Everything worked as it was supposed to. There were no errors, no popups, no installing of drivers needed. Everything just worked.