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Since its inception, the Xfce desktop environment has aimed to provide high functionality with only modest demands on system resources, with the overarching goal of leaving more facilities for the user to run applications. One of the significant changes in recent releases of Xfce 4 is the Thunar file manager, which replaces the original xffm. Thunar does a good deal to advance the goals of its parent project: it's fast and lean, especially by today's standards of hardware, yet it offers rich functionality. Like its namesake, Thunor, the Saxon god of thunder, Thunar is much smaller than "giants" like Konqueror and Nautilus, yet powerful in its own right. If you want some of the functionality afforded by the GUI file managers of the larger desktop environments, but with less overhead, Thunar may fit your needs.

I want to show you how to install Xoops on Ubuntu. I used the Ubuntu 6.10 Server Edition, but it will probably work on other systems as well. Xoops is a modern Content-Management-System which can be extended with a variety of modules.

South African Linux service provider Synaq says open source and Linux email messaging is a rapidly growing trend that businesses need to consider.

Programmers have begun serious work to cut consumption, extending PC Linux battery life and easing server costs.

Welcome to this year's 26th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! A Linux distribution is not just a CD image we download from the Internet; for many of us the social part of a project, such as any interactive communication channels, are equally important. In this week's feature story, Mark South examines how one or two poisonous individuals can spoil the experience for many other users. In the news section, we take a look at the importance of the various language-specific distributions on the market, examine the new features in Ubuntu 7.10, introduce a new YaST module for creating custom live CDs, and link to a story featuring the PCLinuxOS Control Center. Finally, don't miss the excellent article written by Linux Weekly News on the subject of backporting newer software and patches into a stable distribution. Happy reading!

Let's face it; some distributions have better controls for handling display issues than others. Two that do it right out of the box that come to mind include Fedora (Red Hat) and OpenSuSE (Novell). Each includes tools that minimize the need to do what I gleefully refer to as the “Xorg dance.” Basically, these options mean you are going to be spending more time exploring what these distros have to offer, yet less time wondering why your resolution looks completely off.

Posting a series of three patches, Nick Piggin announced that he was working on a rewrite of the buffer layer which he calls fsblock, "the name is fsblock because it basically ties the fs layer to the block layer." As to just what the buffer layer is, Nick explained, "the buffer layer is a layer between the pagecache and the block device for block based filesystems. It keeps a translation between logical offset and physical block number, as well as meta information such as locks, dirtyness, and IO status of each block. This information is tracked via the buffer_head structure."

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Introductions of a Dictionary, Photoframe, and Facebook Plasmoids, and a Weather and Solid DataEngine in Plasma. Usability improvements and optimisations in KListView, used for icon views in Konqueror and Dolphin. The start of a shared, common location for vocabulary files across KDE-Edu applications, with initial implementation in Kanagram...

The June edition of The GNOME Journal was released on the 24th of June. Articles: GStreamer audio effects, an interview with Ken VanDine, an introduction to Accerciser and a summary of GNOME.conf.au 2007.

The Amarok team released version 1.4.6 of their player. The newest release includes a new icon set, faster SQLite and many bugfixes. Release notes can be found at on the Amarok website and packages are available for download for Kubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, Gentoo and others. Their website announces that "next week the annual KDE conference, Akademy, in Glasgow is starting, keep an eye on the developer blogs to follow the happenings there. Thanks to your continued donations and support from KDE e.V, 7 Amarok developers will be present They are looking forward to a very productive week hacking on exciting new Amarok features."

"I was poor. I was desperate. I wanted to be on this bandwagon of this Internet thing, and I wanted to find a business that wouldn't require large amounts of bandwidth or large amounts of capital. The key was Linux. It was Linux that let me connect to the Net so I could start soaking up this knowledge," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux.

Following a recent patch that translated Documentation/HOWTO into Japanese, a new patch offered a translation of the same document into Chinese. Li Yang noted, "currently Chinese involvement in Linux kernel is very low, especially compared to China's large population base. Language could be the main obstacle. Hopefully this document will help more Chinese to contribute to Linux kernel."

When I was using Windows XP I would use UltraVNC to access my desktop remotely, then when I “upgraded” to Vista I did not take to the time to do that, instead I used the built in Remote Desktop feature. Now that I have truly upgraded to Ubuntu, I want to be able to access my machine remotely. This blog post describes two methods.

In this tutorial I will show how you can set up a Postfix mailserver as a backup mail exchanger for a domain so that it accepts mails for this domain in case the primary mail exchanger is down or unreachable, and passes the mails on to the primary MX once that one is up again.

At Phoronix we are constantly exploring the different display drivers under Linux, and while we have reviewed Sun's Check Tool and test motherboards with Solaris in addition to covering a few other areas, we have yet to perform a graphics driver comparison between Linux and Solaris. That is until today. With interest in Solaris on the rise thanks to Project Indiana, we have decided to finally offer our first quantitative graphics comparison between Linux and Solaris with the NVIDIA proprietary drivers.

Now that the Vista to Ubuntu switch is complete and I have had some time to use Ubuntu in a productive environment... I can say that I love Ubunutu (I have had experience with Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, QNX and Debian in the past)! Even running Windows XP under VMware is great. I was doing some Photoshop editing under VMware on some large files and it seemed faster than when I was running Photoshop natively on Vista.

This April Mandriva presented its new distribution called Spring. Despite the fact that it is “only” 2007.1 it has changed a lot since 2007.0. Changes can be seen everywhere — starting from installation through chosen applications till the 3D desktops.

"So, considering what we have seen and what the OSI is currently doing, the question begs to be asked. After 10 years, do we really need Open Source or can we get back to the real issues at stake, that being software freedom?"

Despite the resent FUD campaign that Micro$oft has launched against Free and Open Source Software they seem to be supporting FOSS at the same time by sponsoring FOSS advocacy events such as FOSS-ed, look for the "Gold Sponsors" at the end of the page.

LXer Feature: 24-Jun-2007

The big stories this week include Bolivarian Computers made in Venezuela, an illuminating comparison of ODF and OOXML, Mandriva's CEO says publicly that they will not sign a cross licensing deal with Microsoft, Miguel de Icaza shows off Microsoft's Flash replacement and an "expert" on Innovation vacillates on his own definition in reference to Open Source software. All these stories and more for your reading enlightenment.