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Sorry.. I was doing well for a while pulling all the relevant links together about Linux making headway worldwide, then I got waylayed. I've come out of retirement because of THIS monstrosity of an ad which I increasingly see coming up on Linux related pages. I hate advertising like this that is designed to confuse, but just in case you missed it: "State Government says Linux was too big a risk"

The following ballot is for voting on a Constitutional amendment: reduce the length of DPL election process. The vote is being conducted in accordance with the policy delineated in Section A, Standard Resolution Procedure, of the Debian Constitution. We are now in the second and final week of this vote. At the time of writing, 132 people have voted, out of a potential 1049. This is somewhat of an record for low participation.

Welcome to this year's 40th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! PC-BSD is fast becoming a highly usable alternative to Linux on the desktop and the project's latest release, version 1.4, is the most feature-full desktop FreeBSD ever. But can it stand tall against Linux? Read our review to find out. In the news section: openSUSE begins uploading the 10.3 CD images, Mandriva abandons its "Club" subscription service, Clement Lefebvre defends multimedia codecs in Linux Mint, Sabayon promises more bleeding-edge features in version 3.5, and Ubuntu closes on the upcoming "Gutsy Gibbon" release with a bunch of interesting new features. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the DistroWatch.com September 2007 donation goes to Damn Small Linux. Happy reading!

Way back in January, I announced a program to write Linux drivers for companies for free. When I did that, I never expected the response to be as large as it was. It turns out that there were two large groups of people who responded to the announcement, companies wanting drivers, and developers wanting to help out. My employer, Novell, has modified my position to now allow me to work full time on this project. Namely getting more new Linux kernel drivers written, for free, for any company that so desires. And to help manage all of the developers and project managers who want to help out.

Whew! What a weekend it was at the Ohio LinuxFest in Columbus, Ohio! Between the free (but not Free) beer, having to choose between apparently popular sessions, and the wide variety of booths, the biggest problem was choosing which fun to have.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Beginnings of a list view, and an applet browser integrated into Plasma. Optimisations in Konqueror. More work, including image practice support in Parley. XMP metadata support in Digikam, with new splashscreens announced. Work on playlists in Amarok 2. The Noatun music player becomes a KPart, with musings on its KDE 4 future. Further work on Phonon, with developments on the GStreamer backend. KNetworkManager is ported to work with NetworkManager 0.7. Deep refactoring in the Eigen 2 library rewrite. Kickoff is ported to KDE 4 as a candidate menu replacement option. A plan is hatched to get Kopete ready for the KDE 4.0 release. Import of the KBreakout game to playground/games in KDE SVN. Final moves in the recent KDE SVN reorganisation effort. The KDE Bug Tracker starts to be upgraded to Bugzilla 3.0.

What do you miss when you miss an event like Ohio LinuxFest? You miss information and opportunity.

Sitting around on a Sunday night so I thought I would take a quick look at a small Linux distribution call NimbleX. With only a 100 meg footprint this distro was fast to download and snap a few quick shots of it plus a short flash video. Enjoy!

Dossia a consortium of companies for"Lifelong Personally-Controlled Health Record" has announced that they will be using the LGPL (a FOSS license) licensed Indivo personally controlled health record software for Boston's Childrens Hospital Information Program (CHIP) "Since the inception of the Indivo system in 1998, we have firmly held that the best way to get vital and private medical information to the point of care is under the strictest control of the individual," said Kenneth Mandl, MD, MPH, CHIP researcher at HST and physician in Emergency Medicine at Children's Hospital Boston. "Dossia and Children's share a common vision of promoting widespread adoption of personally controlled health records and are excited to be working together to make this vision a reality."

In this week's roundup of new releases: Ubuntu Gutsy beta rolls out, Pioneer Linux gives really long-term support, PC-BSD updates and Freespire adds an improved CNR plugin.

In this second and final part I'll demonstrate some of the loop-specific tools I've found in Ardour, Reaper, and Audacity. Tutorials and links to project demos are included, so warm up your headphones and let's get loopy.

Kick-start your week with four easy (but still cool) tricks on your Linux desktop. Install the media server you've always wanted but never got around to, or fine-tune your hardware to squeeze out a few more hours of battery power ... All this an more in this week's How To Roundup. Oh, and send us your favourite Linux tricks.

LXer Feature: 30-Sept-2007

Big stories this week include the "Give one, get one" OLPC promotion, an LXer Feature by Paul Ferris entitled, Linux Education in America: Inspiration from Russia?, The 7 Most Influential GNU/Linux Distributions, The Top 21 Linux Games Of 2007, GPLv2 and GPLv3 for beginners, Slackware: the classic distro and an article you shouldn't read.

One of the most important recent events in the world of free software has been the release of version 3 of the GNU GPL. There were fierce arguments about its utility while it was being drawn up, and although the rhetoric has abated somewhat, there is still a big question mark over its eventual success. Some evidence suggests that GPLv3 uptake is coming along nicely, while other reports indicate a reluctance to adopt it (but note also Matt Asay's neat reconciliation of these contradictory messages). To see what's likely to happen in the long term, it's useful to look back at the past history of licence adoption.

In this article I will show how to install and configure BlockHosts on a Debian Etch system. BlockHosts is a Python tool that observes login attempts to various services, e.g. SSH, FTP, etc., and if it finds failed login attempts again and again from the same IP address or host, it stops further login attempts from that IP address/host. By default, BlockHosts supports services that use TCP_WRAPPERS, such as SSH, i.e. services, that use /etc/hosts.allow or /etc/hosts.deny, but it can also block other services using iproute or iptables.

"The fact that we continue to expose internal data structures via sysfs is a gaping open pit [and] is far more likely to cause any kind of problems than changing an error return," Theodore Ts'o noted, responding to a thread discussing a patch to fix an error return code. Andrew Morton agreed, "I was staring in astonishment at the pending sysfs patch pile last night. Forty syfs patches and twenty-odd patches against driver core and the kobject layer." He continued, "that's a huge amount of churn for a core piece of kernel infrastructure which has been there for four or five years. Not a good sign." Andrew then added a humorous quip, "I mean, it's not as if, say, the CPU scheduler guys keep on rewriting all their junk. oh, wait.."

o3 magazine were at Ohio LinuxFest 2007, live coverage from the event as well as a full round up is available on the o3 @ Ohio LinuxFest blog. Some photos from the event, along with the more Enterprise related happens from the event.

Novell ( makers of SUSE Linux ) had a great 243 percent increase in business due to their new partnership with Microsoft of Redman Washington. Now I can see maybe a small percentage of profit but 243 percent! That's huge!

Rubinius is important. A whole lot of folks agree.Ola Bini wrote up a whole post abouthow important he thinks it is. In it, he writes:

2,500 years ago, the Chinese philosopher Confucius asked Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism, "What is Tao?" Lao-tzu opened his mouth but said nothing. Confucius left with a smile, but his students were puzzled. Confucius explained, "Lao-tzu has passed us the Tao. In his mouth, there are no teeth but only a tongue. The hard ones (teeth) died, but the soft one (the tongue) lives; the soft power is stronger than the hard power. That's the Tao!"