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In this week, we have announcements on Fedora 8 Test 1, Virtual FudCon and our new column called AskFedora. Speaking of AskFedora, we received several good questions including License Issue, Backups and Problem with Pup. In Developments, we have continuing discussions on CodecBuddy, Yum, Kmods, RPM Roadmap, KDE4 Status and more.

Your Linux distribution probably arrived with a "kitchen sink" kernel. It doesn't take much to build a better one that's tuned to your hardware's needs.

aKademy 2007 hosted two mini-summits, one for Schools and Education and one for Text Layout. The Text Layout Summit was a true cross platform event, and followed from the one last year at the Gnome Summit. Text layout is a complex area requiring advanced knowledge of dozens of different writing methods. With funding from The Linux Foundation they brought together people from Pango, Qt, IBM ICU (Intl. Components for Unicode), SIL Graphite, Unifont.org, m17n, W3C and DejaVu. Getting the various widget sets to have the same high quality support for all scripts is a problem the summit hoped to solve. Read on for details of what they discussed.

smartctl command controls the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) system built into many ATA-3 and later ATA, IDE and SCSI-3 hard drives. The purpose of SMART is to monitor the reliability of the hard drive and predict drive failures, and to carry out different types of drive self-tests. smartctl is a command line utility designed to perform SMART tasks such as printing the SMART self-test and error logs, enabling and disabling SMART automatic testing, and initiating device self-tests. This article demonstrates usage of smartctl tool to test if hard disk is going bad.

August 7th, 2007 – ALLENDALE, NJ - Guardian Digital is happy to announce the release of EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.16 (Version 3.0, Release 16). This release includes many updated packages and bug fixes, some feature enhancements to Guardian Digital WebTool and the SELinux policy, and a few new features. They include completely new support for virtual machines (KVM), a new, quick download process, improvements to the navigation interface and more. In distribution since 2001, the Community version of Guardian Digital’s commercial portfolio has been a staple for security enthusiasts, administrators and organizations for almost a decade. As one of the very first security-centered platforms based completely on Open Source, EnGarde has been engineered explicitly for protection and security, while providing the ability to build a complete Internet presence. Utilizing robust SELinux policies, intrusion detection, Web & email content filtering, DNS and more, EnGarde has become an integral component in some of the world's largest organizations.

Terminal and network computing giant Wyse has announced plans to support Novell's thin client Linux OS in "next generation" products. Wyse said the deal will offer greater flexibility and choice to its customers, especially those wishing to standardize on SUSE Linux throughout the enterprise. The announcement appears timed to counter competitor HP's recent investment in Linux-based thin client computing. HP last month revealed plans to acquire Neoware, an early leader in Linux-based network computing. If approved, the deal would bring HP close to Neoware's claimed 39 percent of the global thin client market, HP officials said.

Matthew Dillon created DragonFly BSD in June of 2003 as a fork of the FreeBSD 4.8 codebase. KernelTrap first spoke with Matthew back in January of 2002 while he was still a FreeBSD core developer and a year before his current project was started. He explains that the DragonFly project's primary goal is to design a "fully cross-machine coherent and transparent cluster OS capable of migrating processes (and thus the work load) on the fly."

This is a puzzle-based adventure game in Second Life that will test your coding and building skills while working your brain.

There are many articles written about the reasons why users may wish to convert to Linux. Frequently cited reasons include the favorable licensing terms, the freely distributable software (with source code), support from the Linux community, improved security, open file formats, the fact that Linux can run on a wide variety of platforms, etc. However, unless a desktop user is provided with real alternatives to the existing software he or she currently uses, migration to a different operating system is going to be very difficult.

Lenovo and Novell today announced the industry’s first Linux-based ThinkPad mobile workstations, which will run Novell’s recently released SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 operating system. The workstations are based on Intel(R) Centrino(R) Duo mobile technology. This groundbreaking innovation, the result of a two-year research and development effort between Lenovo, Intel and Novell, allows electronic engineers engaged in integrated circuit and board level design the necessary support solution for numeric intensive applications in any mobile environment.

A friendly penguin has told us at Phoronix that Google is looking to team up with OpenMoko for their "gPhone". Google will not be using the FIC Neo1973 GTA01, but they will be bringing the open-source OpenMoko platform to their own hardware.

Blue GNU interviews Al Chu, of the FreeIPMI project about their efforts to provide a free implementation of the IPMI specification for managing & monitoring hardware.

FreeBSD Update is a system for automatically building, distributing, fetching, and applying binary security updates for FreeBSD. This makes it possible to easily track the FreeBSD security branches without the need for fetching the source tree and recompiling. This article talks about using combinations of various tools to keep your FreeBSD system up to date.

In this newest "letter" from Granny, she shares how easy installing and using Linux really can be. She also has many grateful words to share with the team at KDE and PCLinuxOS... Complete article

Dell and Ubuntu broke the barrier for major vendors to preload consumer desktop Linux, and now Lenovo and Novell have shattered the wall for Linux-powered business desktops. On Aug. 6 at LinuxWorld in San Francisco, the companies announced an agreement to provide preloaded SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 SP 1 on Lenovo ThinkPad laptops with Lenovo also providing Linux support.

Dana Blankenhorn has started a newZDNet healthcare blog with a strong emphasis on open source in healthcare software. So far he has four articles of note. First he commented on the new Misys open source move. He has commented on thePossiblityForge Java OpenEMR, an article on What open source can teach medical computing. Most recently he has asked the great question: What is stalling open source in healthcare?Trotter

Defcon 15 followed hard on the heels of the Black Hat Briefings last week. Black Hat closed at Caesar's Palace on Thursday evening, and Defcon started at the Riviera Friday morning. Both shows are the creation of Jeff Moss, but while Black Hat is aimed directly at the professional side of network security, Defcon is all about community, mad fun, hacking, and games.

Mind mapping, the practice of visually representing linked ideas in diagrams, is a controversial technique. Some people find mind mapping's branching trees and multiple colors to be a distraction from the main task of organizing ideas. Proponents counter that the resulting diagrams are concise, quick, and reveal patterns you might otherwise miss. Either way, GNU/Linux offers a number of such programs from which to choose. The most useful ones I've encountered are kdissect and VYM (View Your Mind). Both offer a powerful graphical interface, and both extend the concept of mind mapping by allowing you to attach text and graphics to a diagram and by supporting filters to export results into forms usable with other programs.

They've been in chains so long that they don't have the frame of reference to guide them into knowing the difference. Oh sure, some do...you are one of them. Chances are, you migrated away from Microsoft Windows into Linux as a full-time deal and haven't looked back. You "get it". They don't, but it's easy enough to get your point across quickly....some of us will get a perverse pleasure from this.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work in Plasma, with extra sources for the Weather data engine, work on the applet browser, and the start of SystemTray and RSIBreak plasmoids and a "next generation" application launcher, named Lancelot. Cut-down versions of Korundum and Smoke libraries for writing scripted Plasma applets. More interface work for Amarok 2. More work on XESAM (a shared metadata specification) integration in Strigi. An Akonadi resource for Facebook information.