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Welcome to this year's 37th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Enthusiasm for Linux and open source software is clearly growing; with last week's announcements about Lenovo's preferred Linux distro poll and AMD's opening up its ATI video drivers, things have never looked this exciting on the Linux-supporting hardware front! But some questions remain: do we really want every major PC manufacturer to support Ubuntu only? And will other distributions be able to catch with the increasing dominance of Canonical's operating system? Read more in our editorial. In the news section, openSUSE shows faith in KDE 4.0, Puppy Linux launches a major upgrade, and StartCom announces a new release of its workstation for audio enthusiasts. Finally, if you live in or near Toronto, don't miss the upcoming Linux conference called Ontario Linux Fest. Happy reading!

Regional Linux users received a boost today as open source leader Red Hat announced the opening of a regional support centre for the Middle East. The Red Hat Certified Support Centre is set to open in Dubai on December 1. Red Hat's local partner Opennet will operate the facility, which will be only the fourth partner-operated centre in the EMEA region.

Recently on this blog, I wrote You Have the Right to Read Your Accuser. In this, I argued that any software with substantial risk to harm your life or liberty must be open source. I specifically mentioned some breathalyzer software that people were fighting to see the source code of. Though the Florida legislature and many regional prosecutors obviously feel that the breathalyzer company’s rights were more important the individual rights, the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered that source code to a popular breathalyzer be revealed. The results, if you’ll pardon the pun, are breathtaking.

Just some more images of the work done so far on the extensions for the plasma clock, that i have been working on with Riccardo Iaconelli. Right now i´m working on a time zone extension. The one you can see here is the date extension... Basically, what you get when clicking the date area ;)

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #56 for the week September 2nd - September 8th, 2007. In this issue we cover new Ubuntu and MOTU members, the Tribe 6 milestone, an Ubuntu get-together, the one year anniversary of French UWN translations, and, as always, much much more!

You finally got your Linux environment to crash. Ctrl+Alt+Backspace does nothing, nor do the F-keys. You know you shouldn’t have installed that bad driver, but you did it anyway. So you reach for the power button. Stop. Mashing in the power button to reboot could cause a problem if your hard drive is still being written to, and usually causes more problems than it solves. The Linux kernel includes a secret method of restarting your PC should it ever stop doing its job.

You've got to hand it to Microsoft. It hates ANYTHING and ANYONE that gets in its way of selling its software. Including, apparently, itself. In a very funny turn of events, Microsoft is out preaching to the industry that XP is a bloated expense hog, while svelte Vista will cure world hunger (or, at least, cost less). Anyway, Microsoft must really be hurting if it has to resort to beating up on its most stable product in years.

This past week the Phase 2 "Mass Market" schedule for the OpenMoko Neo1973 was revised. OpenMoko now expects the GTA02v3 design to be finalized by September 20 while on December 10 it will begin production in "moderate volumes". On December 20 the OpenMoko Neo1973 GTA02v3 will go on sale, and with "Santa's Sleigh Package Service", the OpenMoko Neo1973 will arrive on December 25 for those celebrating Christmas.

"I've just released Linux 2.4.36-pre1," announced 2.4 maintainer Willy Tarreau. He described a new feature found in the first pre-release: "In private discussions, Solar Designer proposed to restrict the ability to map the NULL address to CAP_RAW_IO capable processes only. The idea behind this was to prevent 'normal' users from trying to exploit NULL dereferences in the kernel which have not been discovered yet. This is purely a preventive measure."

As noted in the update to our review of Paterva Evolution, a personal data mining tool, Roelof Temmingh has removed the binaries for the application after having received legal threats over its use. In an email on the Paterva announcement's mailing list over the weekend, Temmingh revealed more about why the binaries had to be removed and unveiled his plans for future work on the project.

Nick Piggin posted an efficient algorithm for converting a data structure, "this is my 'data structure switch' algorithm that can convert one data structure into another, with just a single unlikely branch in fastpaths and no locking or atomic operations (the branch is only triggered when the data structure is in the process of being converted). A pointer indirection is generally also needed when converting a global data structure."

Ever wanted to run RISC OS apps on a Linux powered PC? Simon Willcocks has, and he's done something about it.

This past week AMD raised the Linux graphics bar by not only announcing their new fglrx graphics driver, which delivers Radeon HD 2000 support, immense performance improvements, and AIGLX, but it was accompanied by an announcement that they will be delivering specifications to the X.Org development community. These two announcements came after intense work internally at AMD and over a long period of time, but literally overnight it changed the minds of many Linux users on how they judge this company with its once notorious binary blob.

Adobe developed, specified and published the exact format of PPD files, starting more than 20 years ago. Ever since, PPD files have been used on Apple Macs and Windows PCs (and a few other platforms) to describe and drive PostScript printers. CUPS extended the concept of PPD files to non-PostScript printers as well (because CUPS uses a computer-based PostScript interpreter, and it can direct each job through a conversion filter to create a jobfile with a format feasible for the target printer). A CUPS printer named foobaz has its own model-specific print options represented in the file foobaz.ppd that lives in /etc/cups/ppd/. You can of course look at it in an editor.

Central Log Management System is a simple web based logging system which allows logging all syslog messages from various Network Devices, Unix, Linux, Solaris and Windows Servers. This allows the visibility of logs from all these devices in one single interface.

The long-awaited KDE 4.0 desktop environment will be available to users in December but a development platform version will be released on October 30 to give third party developers time to port their applications to the new platform.

Lenovo finally started shipping SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on its T-Series ThinkPads for its mainstream business users. Now, the company appears to be considering offering another Linux, very possibly Ubuntu, for the enthusiast market.

Howto Boot debian in text mode instead of graphical mode (GUI)

LXer Feature: 09-Sept-2007

The big stories this week include Microsoft and the ISO vote saga, the countdown is on to Ontario Linux Fest, The French Ministry for Education has migrated 2,500 servers over to Linux and The Women of Tech. All this and more in the LXer Weekly Roundup.

It seems that we are watching a project being eaten alive...and some of us are ambling over and stabbing a fork full for ourselves and wandering away without so much as a thank you or a glance back. But isn't that the way of the internet? If it's free, just take it and move on in search of the next freebie...right? It's not long before that freebie isn't there any longer...but hey...we got ours while it was there...right? Screw those too slow or too late.