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Welcome to another of Free Software Magazine’s fortnightly newsletters. Our newsletters aim to let you know what’s happening on our site and with the magazine. Through these newsletters we’ll keep you up-to-date with new content, competitions, new features and more. Please note: we have lots of exciting developments coming up in the near future, so take a little time to catch up with us. And as always enjoy!

In a research note, Jefferies analyst Katherine Egbert says that she has heard Oracle will probably be entering the Linux market “soon,” with a “software stack” featuring Ubuntu Linux. “We have heard that Ubuntu is currently working to certify its recently introduced server OS to all [of] Oracle’s major products, including databases and middleware. The relationship between Oracle and Ubuntu seems to have come together rather quickly, and is perhaps the fallout from an attempt by Red Hat and Oracle to work more closely together. Red Hat management offered yesterday that they would continue to work closely with Oracle should such an event occur, while at the same time continuing to develop complementary technologies.”

LXer Feature: 16-Oct-2006

There's yet another "feature" missing in Linux -- it doesn't look for hardware changes and shut itself off, only to be reactivated once the owner has phoned someone to beg to use the software they already have the rights to use. Paul Ferris discusses yet another benefit of using Free Software; You don't have to worry about the product getting crippled or removed just because you simply added new hardware or switched to a new PC.

Welcome to this year's 42nd issue of DistroWatch Weekly! As we brace up for the brand new Fedora Core 6 later this week, the focus of this issue of DistroWatch Weekly is on the 3D accelerated Linux desktop. How usable is it? And does it bring anything more than eye candy? Find out in a blog-style report about our experiences with Xgl- and AIGLX-enabled desktops on Mandriva Linux 2007 and SabayonLinux 3.1. Also in this issue: iXsystems acquires a popular FreeBSD-based operating system for desktops, Debian developers vote to resolve controversial issues, and Fedora Core maintainers look for ways to count their user base. Finally, in the new distributions section, we introduce Lintrack, a new Arch-based project designed to run on network routers. Happy reading!

cURL is a handy command-line network tool whose name stands for "client for URLs," but think of it as a "copy for URLs" -- it can copy to or from a given URL in any of nine different protocols.

IBM's Brad McCredie, who works for the Systems and Technology Group as the chief architect of the future Power6 processor, gave his presentation at the forum last week, and divulged a lot of the inner workings of the device. There's a lot of stuff in this chip, which is what you would expect from a device with around 750 million transistors.

System tray items can now be reordered by the user. Support for action sounds in okular. Work begins on Dynamic Brush architecture and canvas improvements in Krita, with layer handling improvements in Karbon. Krita switches library dependencies from ImageMagick to GraphicsMagick. Memory usage optimisations in the KHTML web rendering engine and Amarok.

Not exactly great - but I managed to get a few photos of the conference. It was a great time, and special thanks goes out to Steve Dickinson for all of his help and to Tom Rhodes over at the FreeBSD Project. Steve and Tom both manned the booth during those important times when I really needed a break (lunch :) and they both answered a volley of BSD and Linux related questions. Also - a special thank you to Beth for making sure I actually showed up

Over the next two or three entries I'm going to provide summaries of activity represented on some of the mail-lists most relevant to the development and use of audio software for Linux (and other platforms). I'm subscribed to a variety of such lists, and it occurred to me that a summary of their traffic would be a good indicator of the breadth and depth of our corner of the larger Linux world. I'll proceed through my lists in loose alphabetical order, starting with news from theArdour camp.

If you've never studied JavaScript before, don't buy this book...yet! Christian Wenz's JavaScript Phrasebook is not written for the "drop dead newbie" to JavaScript. You might learn a few things from this book if it's your first introduction to JavaScript but more than likely, you'll also end up confused.

There is one huge difference between the free and non-free software that has some very practical implications in the way we use it. One of those implications are the dependencies between single software packages in the free software model. What do they have to do with the free software philosophy and why should not you be afraid of them? Read on to find this out.

Puppy Linux has been updated to version 2.11: "Puppy version 2.11 is out. Puppy 2.10 was the first Puppy to use LZMA compression for the 'pup_210.sfs' Squashfs file (the file that has all of the applications). We found however that it doubled the start-up time for each application, not very noticeable on a modern fast CPU, however very much a problem on older hardware. Thus, for 2.11 we have gone back to the standard GZIP compression. Version 2.11 is basically an improved 2.10. Apart from reverting to GZIP compression, this release has various bug fixes. There is also an 'xorgdrvrs' ISO that includes the extra X.Org basic video drivers."

The first version of the Debian Live Initiative's make-live software is now available - see the website live.debian.net. Debian Live aims to make software to produce official Debian Live CDs, rather like Knoppix. The first version uses the Casper technology created by Ubuntu.

BrandZ is a framework that extends the Solaris Zones infrastructure to create Branded Zones, which are zones that contain non-native operating environments. The term "non-native" is intentionally vague, as the infrastructure allows for the creation of a wide range of operating environments. Each operating environment is provided by a brand that plugs into the BrandZ framework. A brand may be as simple as an environment with the standard Solaris utilities replaced by their GNU equivalents, or as complex as a complete Linux userspace.

As the project celebrates its 10th anniversary, we can all reflect on the enormous success achieved when people and organisations with a vast variety of different backgrounds and skills join forces. For people and organisations who wish to contribute to KDE by providing financial support in an ongoing manner, the KDE e.V. now offers the new Supporting Members scheme. KDE e.V. is both excited and proud to announce Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, as our first Patron of KDE.

The OpenVZ project announced today that its OS-level server virtualization software technology has been ported to -- and is now available for -- systems based on 64-bit Power processors.

Ext3 has become one of the most popular Linux filesystems. However, with hard drives sneaking up on a terabyte, concerns exist that ext3 won't be able to handle 21st-century storage requirements. With this in mind, the Linux kernel developers have just released the first real-world test version of ext4.

The European Commission is to create a portal for European public sector bodies to store and share open source application code and exchange open source knowledge. The Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) will be developed and managed by a consortium led by Unisys.

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Mandriva 2007 Free Edition based server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters (Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server (with SMTP-AUTH and TLS), DNS server, FTP server, MySQL server, POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc.).

So whats the big deal anyway? I argue over on GPLMedicine.org that developing proprietary versions of VistA is both unethical and foolish. I would love to hear anyresponses.