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A Linux-powered humanoid robot has been interviewed on 8-Fi, a French television magazine devoted to new technology. The hour-long show features Aldebaran Robotics's Nao robot conversing with company president Bruno Maisonnier, followed by a panel discussion on the state of robotics by several French robotics experts.

The second day of FOSDEM 2007 was as busy, if not more, as the first day. Many face-to-face interactions, of great benefit to cooperation between developers and projects, and time spend on hacking on and promoting KDE. The KDE developer room was well used, first by an Educational workshop, well led by Anne-Marie Mahfouf, followed by some more talks. Topics included Krita's present and future by Bart Coppens, a KDE 4 talk by Jos Poortvliet and a KDE e.V. talk by Sebastian Kügler. Read on for a report on day two.

Welcome to this year's 9th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! This week's issue starts with a first look at VectorLinux 5.8 SOHO, an enhanced edition of the Slackware-based distribution designed for small businesses and home users. The news section then covers a variety of topics, including a couple of recent "distro wars" between Ubuntu and its competitors, reasons for the longer than expected delay of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, an announcement about the upcoming Community edition of Puppy Linux, and a surprise merge between two Slackware-based projects. Information about the upcoming releases of SabayonLinux 3.3 and Pardus Linux 2007.1, followed by the usual list of new distributions, concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. Happy reading!

Folding@Home is a project at Stanford University, based on the distributed computing model. When installed, it runs in the background, using idle CPU cycles to compute protein folding. The project aims to find cure for diseases related to mis-folding of proteins.

This article shows an efficient way to implement a slightly more relaxed model of immutability, using normal cached fields whose values can still be accessed safely without synchronization.

Carnegie Mellon West has just launched a "Software Management" Masters degree that integrates open source technology throughout the program and includes a more detailed "Introduction to Open Source" elective.

They managed to get seven noteworthy websites to agree to share some details about their infrastructure. None of them seemed willing to part with an administrator password, oddly enough.

The Greenphone comes at a time when there are countless mobile Linux platforms, but not many of them are open for easy development. This little device aims to fill a niche for a community-oriented mobile development platform. How does it perform? Linuxlookup.com reviews the Trolltech Qtopia Greenphone and SDK.

Mirth is shaping up as an 'Open Source HL7 Integration Engine'. After recently downloading the product I was extremely pleased to successfully read an HL7 message from disk, manipulate it and send the output XML to a file. I then repeated the process inserting selected fields into a database table.

With the rise in popularity of open source software, developers don't need to start from scratch when coding new software. Instead, they can use specialized search engines that crawl repositories to find the perfect code snippet. Now, one entrepreneurial open source developer has built a business that expands on the basic code search engine, and in true hacker recursive style, finds his company relying on the very tool it exists to create.

I’ve been asked by various people how I keep up to date with technology news, research, and the latest reports...mainly because I’m never at a loss for words when discussing something (big mouth much?). Of course, many people haven’t heard of RSS at all and don’t know that one can have a program to read multiple sites in a short amount of time. So, I searched for something that was better than those I had used: Pluck, Sage, Owl, Sharpreader, Wiz. I found it. And to my delight, it’s a cross-platform, GPL Licensed, Feed-synchronizing one that delivers unparalleled functionality and options. There’s nothing like it on the planet. If your interest is peaked, you’re in for a real treat.

Dell has acknowledged that 83,000 users have urged it to sell PCs with Linux pre-installed, but it has fallen short of accepting their suggestion.

On Friday, the KDE Project released the third in a series of development previews for the upcoming KDE 4.0 release. Dubbed "Kludge," the 3.80.3 release includes the Sonnet language library, the new Dolphin file manager, and the Solid hardware library.

IBM will send you a DVD packed full of its Linux applications at no cost.

The 2007 road map for the Ubuntu Linux operating system includes continuing its focus on the desktop, paying more attention to the server and garnering additional corporate support. Speaking at Ubuntu user conference UbuCon here at Google's New York complex on Feb. 16, Steve George, director of support and services at Canonical, said, "The view from the Ubuntu side is that Microsoft has too much of the market. We're going to continue rolling out and making Ubuntu easy to use on the desktop and we'll add increased focus on the server this year." Canonical is the sponsor of the Ubuntu project and maintainer of the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

The public spoke and said, "We want a Linux desktop," and Dell listened. On Feb. 23, the company announced that, as a result of "the community's interest in open source solutions like Linux and OpenOffice..., we are working with Novell to certify our corporate client products for Linux..."

Antonio Cangiano posted aRuby Implementation Shootout on his blog last week. While it's an interesting piece (and will likely be more interesting over time), it's still very premature.

On Friday Japan's Turbolinux begins dispatching the first batch of its Wizpy handhelds to people who ordered them from its Web site. The flash-based multimedia player contains a version of Linux, so it can be used to boot a PC into the operating system, allowing users to access their files in their own working environment on almost any PC.

Fedora 7 Test 2 is being pushed out the door this Tuesday (February 27), but thanks to the excellence of Pungi we decided to run our own spin. New in Fedora 7 Test 2 is the artwork along with quite a few other changes that we commented on in our Fedora 7 Preview earlier this year. In this article we have some of the first screenshots from Fedora 7 Test 2. To say the least, Fedora 7 is shaping up extremely well!

Last week, I had the privilege to address the North Texas Linux Users Group. Ralph Green asked me to present information on my upcoming book called"Linux System Administration" by O'Reilly. I only had the cover and the gallies, since production goes to press in early March. So, I showed those.