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Welcome to this year's 30th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! The beginning of August is traditionally a month when many Linux distributions launch new development drives and outline some of the planned features for their upcoming releases. And indeed, if all goes according to the plan, we should see the first test release of Fedora 8 and the first beta release of Mandriva Linux 2008 later this week. Before that happens, we'll bring you the highlights of the past week, including updates on Debian "Lenny", the launch of the OpenBSD Foundation, an initiative to provide extra packages for Red Hat and Red Hat-derived distributions, and a coverage of the Ubuntu Live conference. Finally, don't miss our brief article featuring the Linux User Group of New Caledonia, complete with a few thoughts on the availability of bandwidth in remote parts of our planet. Happy reading!

64 Studio has released version 2.0 of the multimedia-focused GNU/Linux distribution built on Debian and available as both an install and a live CD version.

The Linux Expo of Southern California has opened theCall For Papers for the 6th AnnualSouthern California Linux Expo, to be held February 8th, 9th,& 10th, 2008

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma continues to mature, with improvements to the Twitter applet (and the creation of a complementary data engine), and the adoption of a common visual style for Plasmoids, and the integration of support for SuperKaramba applets through the creation of the SuperKaramba Plasmoid. More work on the re-implementation of the Magnatune interface within the new music store framework, and integration of the recent Plasma work for Amarok 2...

Crustless peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, a way to move sideways on a swing, a technique for exercising cats using a laser pointer — these are among the inventions patented in the United States over the years. Now Congress is trying to cut down on poor-quality or downright ridiculous patents, and at the same time adapt the patent system to a high-tech era in which computers and other electronic devices may contain thousands of patentable parts.

Some people seem to have a short circuit in their minds when they try to explain why Windows has such an enormous desktop market share. Some of them have the delusion that Windows is technically better than the competition. It never was. It isn't now. And, considering how Vista is staggering along, it never will be. No, Microsoft wins because it does whatever it needs to do to win. If that means strong-arming the PC companies, so be it. If that means breaking the law, that's fine too.

Neil Horman posted an enhancement to a /proc/sys/kernel interface for redirecting core dumps, "allowing the core_pattern to contain arguments to be passed as an argv array to the userspace helper application. It also adds a format specifier, %c, which allows the RLIM_CORE value of the crashing application to be passed on the command line, since RLIMIT_CORE is reduced to zero when execing the userspace helper". Andrew Morton was skeptical at first, "this all seems to be getting a bit nutty. Who needs this feature and what will they do with it, etc?"

It has been a while since we last reviewed an ASRock motherboard, but this budget manufacturer has kept churning out new and more innovative products. The ASRock motherboard we have our hands on for this Linux and Solaris review is the ALiveNF7G-HDready, which combines NVIDIA's GeForce 7050 and nForce 630a MCP with a wealth of integrated extras such as IEEE-1394a Firewire to offer a rather good package for its low price. This motherboard is also capable of handling 720p H.264 video playback with low CPU Utilization and HDCP decoding -- with supported software.

Why cron and at suck, and what can be done about it.

We went to OSCON, hoping to uncover some fresh details on Sun Microsystems' "Project Indiana." We mostly failed in this endeavor. Sun's operating system chief and Debian author Ian Murdock was at the event, elaborating on Project Indiana. He covered, for the most part, ground we've already been over, which places Indiana as Sun's quasi copy of Red Hat's Fedora project. The core of the new project revolves around Sun's mission to release a fresh, supported version of OpenSolaris every six months.

Will Microsoft ever stop treating Linux users as idiots? Probably not while it treats its own users in the same fashion. Just take a look at the latest FUD to arrive from the Microsoft chiefs of staff.

This article shows how you can use an iPod on a Linux desktop with Amarok. It covers how you can upload MP3 files from your desktop to your iPod, download MP3 files from your iPod to your desktop, and how you can delete files on the iPod. Normally, Apple's iTunes software is needed to manage an iPod, but iTunes is not available for Linux. Fortunately, there are Linux alternatives such as Amarok that can handle the task.

LXer Feature: 29-Jul-2007

This week we have some details about the Linspire-MS deal, a great article by Danijel Orsolic, Open Source in Outer Space, my Interview with Dave Wreski, a short list of good command line tools and much more.

We are now nearing the end of the first (out of two) week of this vote. At the time of writing, 190 people have voted, out of a potential 1035.

Detailed stats are to be found at:
http://master.debian.org/~srivasta/gr_dm/

People who have voted should see their names at: http://master.debian.org/~srivasta/gr_dm/voters.txt

The question of what units you are working with is one that will at one time or other have plagued anyone who studied a science or a branch of physical engineering. Teachers go to great lengths to make sure students remember to specify their units. It is not enough to say that the answer is 42. Forty-two what? 42 metres? 42 electronvolts? 42 furlongs per fortnight? Without a clear understanding of what units are involved, certain results and claims can be meaningless, misleading or simply expensive.

Yakuake is a Quake-style terminal emulator based on KDE Konsole technology which makes the console more user friendly. If you need the ability to quickly pull down a console to run a few commands with a keystroke, and then make the console disappear again with another quick keystroke. YaKuake is exactly what you are looking for.

Not exactly the clearest of titles... recently I had to setup and configure several subvesion servers that use webdav for authentication. Setting up the authentication and repositories for a single repository is pretty straightforward. If many repositories need to be created and maintained that are completely seperate, then a script (or set of scripts) definitely makes life easier. In the text below, just such a scenario cropped up and my first pass at working a script.

Yasunori Goto posted some documentation for memory hotplugging which can be used to increase or decrease the amount of memory available to a live kernel. The documentation explains that this functionality is useful for virtualization and capacity on demand solutions, as well as for physically adding and removing RAM from NUMA-nodes. The document itself, "is about memory hotplug including how-to-use and current status. Because Memory Hotplug is still under development, contents of this text will be changed often."

How appropriate that we caught Chairman Tim O'Reilly ogling Portland's tram schedule just a few minutes before the Pirate Party's founder Rickard Falkvinge took the stage at O'Reilly's own conference. Chairman Tim plotted his escape from OSCON, as Falkvinge prepared to talk to the people about things that matter. O'Reilly seemed to miss the crucial issues of the day at every turn, during OSCON.

This article provides a reference for a good discussion on how to use gperf for effective command-line processing in your C/C++ code.