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A call for participation was announced this week for "Ubuntu Live," billed by organizers as the first "official" conference dedicated to Ubuntu Linux. The event, set for July 22-24 in Portland, Ore., aims to give participants the knowledge needed to use Ubuntu to best advantage, organizers said.

Defensive programming constructs have prevented many a defect, but the constructs themselves tend to litter code with repetitive logic. Learn how to avoid the clutter.

ANSI/INCiTS has completed their review of Ecma 376, and is ready to cast their ISO/IEC Contradiction Review Phase Fast Track Ballot in favor of Ecma 376 being rammed through ISO. As Sam Hiser points out in his PlexNex blog, there is an avalanche of contradictions, inconsistencies, and proprietary dependencies in Ecma 376. The findings continue to pour into public view. Still, there's not much an American can do about it. Our standards champions at ANSI/INCiTS have determined that no contradictions exist."

With the stage set and the players in, the show has just got underway in New Delhi. LinuxAsia 2007 has been kicked off in style at the India Habitat Centre in the city. With a lot of 'Open' action in store, the three-day event, scheduled from 31 January to 2 February 2007, is where you are going to find the biggest of the names in the industry deliberating on the future course of action for the open source movement.

PARIS (Solutions Linux 2007)—30 Jan 2007—PSA Peugeot Citroën, the second-largest automobile manufacturer in Europe, and Novell just signed a multiyear contract allowing the deployment of up to 20,000 Linux* desktops plus 2,500 Linux servers from Novell.

Since not all of the development for KDE 4 is in base technologies, this week features two of applications from the KDE-Edu team: Kalzium, a feature-filled chemistry reference tool, and KmPlot, a powerful equation graphing and visualization program. Read on for the details. These educational tools have received a lot of work for KDE 4. In particular, Kalzium and KmPlot developments are happening at an amazing rate.

The CSIR's Meraka institute is expected to become the new South African Linux Professional Institute affiliate now that the Shuttleworth Foundation has ended its relationship with the LPI.

The domain name system (DNS) maps human-understandable Web site addresses into numeric IP addresses. Launched in July 2006, OpenDNS adds a few free services on top of the traditional DNS to block phishing Web sites and auto-correct common misspelled URLs. And thanks to some clever traffic routing and load-balancing technology, OpenDNS can also deliver Web pages faster.

Linux Format and Novell have set up Make it with Mono, a website where Linux users submit ideas and descriptions of their most-wanted programs. On the 2nd of April, the voting booths will open, and the program idea that gets the most votes will be written in Mono (and released under the GPL). All ideas welcome, providing they're feasible -- ie not whopping great office suites!

Project maintainer Ken VanDine on Jan. 28 announced the release of Foresight Linux 1.0, the first stable release of the rPath-based desktop Linux distribution after nearly two years of development. It sports a new 2.6.19.2 kernel and the GNOME desktop environment.

The X Window System is, in some sense, the kernel of our graphical desktop systems; it controls access to the hardware and ensures that applications play well together. So the capabilities provided by X matter, and that importance can only increase as free software developers work toward the creation of more complete and compelling desktop experiences. Keith Packard gave a couple of talks at linux.conf.au in Sydney on where X is going; your editor had no choice but to be there and listen.

Matt Asay just posted an excellent note connecting Open source and William James. James noted: "True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we can not. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas." Matt argues that that is why he likes open source -- because it works. I can't agree more.

At the Paris Solutions Linux show on Jan. 30, PSA Peugeot Citroen, Europe's second-largest automobile manufacturer, and Novell announced the signing of a multiyear contract for the deployment of up to 20,000 Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop installations plus 2,500 copies of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

The Season of Usability, run by the OpenUsability project has kicked off with two KDE applications in the focus: BasKet Note Pads and the KDE 4 universal document viewer Okular. Usability, as one of the important focus points of the upcoming fourth major version of KDE, is also an active part of the KDE project. The Season of Usability manifests KDE's close involvement with OpenUsability.

Matthew Szulik talks about GPLv3, DRM, media content, and the future of Linux kernel development model. From the article: "I think people like Alan Cox and Ingo Molnar and a variety of contributors around the world have clearly communicated that the open source model in the kernel development methodologies along with the tools and other components will live long after the current maintainers move on to do other interesting things."

LXer Feature: 31-Jan-2007

With KDE porting their applications to Mac and Windows the potential number of people using free software is unlimited. Imagine millions of people using Open Source Software for the first time..and getting hooked on it.

Last week, Motorola and five other cell phone manufacturers announced the official launch of the LiMo Foundation, a "global mobile Linux initiative." The foundation will work off mobile Linux in a private collaborative development environment that has its roots in open source, but isn't quite.

Mandriva, which introduced Mandriva One 2007 last October, has just released a live CD version of it, complete with a 3D desktop environment. Mandriva 2007, based on a 2.6.17 Linux kernel, uses KDE as a default desktop but also supports both the GNOME and Xfce environments.

Microsoft is applying for a patent for an operating system that starts out crippled. You must pay to do things like take the throttle off network speed, disk access, install drivers, install software, and more. Trust me, I rarely even visit Groklaw, even if this is my second consecutive blog entry with a link to a Groklaw article. MyVarLinux.org readers posted the article,A Brave New Modular World, and I had to share it.

Set to launch in June, Jazz aims to modernize development tools for programming teams that are geographically spread out.