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Welcome to this year's 39th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! With Mandriva Linux 2007 and Slackware Linux 11.0 expected any time now, and Ubuntu 6.10 beta also scheduled for release later this week, the next few days are likely to provide enough excitement to keep all "distro watchers" busy with brand new products. But will Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 "etch" be on time too? A highly controversial way of making that happen has stirred the Debian developer community to the point that some of them are calling for the removal of the project's elected leader! In other news, we report about a new init system for Fedora Core, a graphical Xgl/Compiz configuration tool for openSUSE, and a new distribution designed for those who just can't leave their previous desktop interface behind. A "First Look" section featuring SabayonLinux 3.0 is then followed by several statistical reports indicating that your interest in DistroWatch and open source operating systems have been increasing at a rather phenomenal rate. Happy reading!

If there is one open source Ajax project that is leading the pack these days, it might be Dojo. It's not necessarily better in any particular way than the others, but it is both broad and deep with a big selection of very customizable widgets. These traits may explain why both IBM and Sun have recently signed on to support the Dojo Foundation and its work.

It is my privilege to announce on behalf of the team members of the PCLinuxOS Magazine Project sponsored by MyPCLinuxOS.com, the October 2006 issue is available for download! We've put a lot of effort into producing a quality magazine made for the community, by the community. This is our second issue that has been produced by our project team. The previous September issue can also be downloaded

Contained inside are many articles written for the PCLinuxOS community and a few for those interested but not yet using it. With this issue, we've decided to focus on Children and Linux. Some highlights include:

1. How-To's on multibooting and web page construction
2. Many looks at different distros for Children
3. Two articles written by young PCLinuxOS Users on their experience
4. Trips down memory lane with articles on Old Computers
5. Much, Much more!

Damien Bergamini started a thread on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list in which he summarized Intel's policy toward open-source software being to "make us look like we're open-source friendly by opening a project on sourceforge," and, "give the open-source community the bare minimum so that they can serve as our beta-testers." Damien released a reverse engineered blob-free driver for an Intel wireless chipset earlier this year, but work is slow as Intel does not freely provide documentation to the chipset.

The people in our community who most need OpenOffice.org might not know how to get it and install it. So OpenOffice.org needs be to bundled on all new computers. The time for that to happen is now. Institutional purchasers of computers can make that happen by telling manufacturers to do so.

This tutorial shows how to install and configure the Zenoss network monitoring tool on a Ubuntu 6.06 system. Zenoss is a free open-source tool that allows you to monitor servers, applications, networks, power, etc. regarding their configuration, availability, and performance. It can also alert you by email if it finds inappropriate actions.

If you're a heavy user of the Linux VGA console, you'll like this feature. Recent 2.6 kernels have added support for soft scrollback. This feature enables you to have much bigger scrollback buffer than the standard console has, at the price of slightly slower console output.

The Beryl project, a fork of the Compiz compositing window manager, announced its initial development release, version 0.1.0. The developers hope the new project, born of the community-maintained compiz-quinnstorm branch after months of diverging development, will allow greater community involvement and produce more flexible code.

Two years ago today, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik confirmed the purhase of two prized enterprise products from AOL - Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate Management System. He also noted than Red Hat intended to open source the products within 12 months.Red Hat paid $25 million for the assets. You could say that was pretty good considering that in 1998, AOL paid more than $4 billion for Netscape. Matthew's purchase represented the last divestiture of Netscape's assets by AOL.If you wander on over tothe Fedora Directory Server (FDS) site you can take a look at an enhanced version of the Netscape Directory Server.

The server question used to be about how much you'd pay for your hardware. Now the question is whether your data files, including backup, are worth $8 per day? If so, FileEngine has a deal for you.

In this episode: a look at the Xfce Desktop Environment and alternative file managers to use with Xfce such as Emelfm2, Rox-filer, PCManFM, and the Gentoo file manager; two listener tips; listener feedback.

HostMySite (hostmysite.com), a web hosting company, announced the contribution of dedicated hosting to SpreadFirefox, the online volunteer community organized to spread the news about the Mozilla Firefox Web browser.

The exciting Photoshop alternative from Slovakia that runs on Linux is getting close to being finally released. Does it have the potential to be as good as – or even better than – the rulers of the graphic editing roost?

IBM's DeveloperWorks has published a detailed, technical survey of Hauppage's Linux-based MediaMVP, a minimalistic $99 media extender based on a PowerPC 405 processor and MPEG decoder. The article also looks at the MVP Media Center project to create open source software for the device.

I don’t like self-proclaimed prophets. So, you'll rarely see me quoting them. I guess my aversion originates in so many presentations where the next [insert application or company here]“killer” will emerge if we invest some money. And yes, I admit I sat on the side of the table talking about a couple of those killer apps myself.

But what would a Direct3D presentation be without some eye candy? Stefan showed off screenshots of some games. There was also a small contingent of DirectX folks in attendance with some really high-powered laptops that could show off the games. It's quite impressive to see the latest and greatest games running on Linux. Jon Parshall extensively, um, "tested" World of Warcraft throughout the conference (did you finally make it to level 48, Jon?) Tom Wickline had 3DMark2000, 3DMark2001SE and 3DMark2003 running all of there test. There is still some artifacts in the rendering of a couple of the test, but the DirectX guys knew what was to blame for it. Stefan showed off the Microsoft DirectX logo "proving" DirectX is being properly detected.

Embedded software stack provider EmbWise showcased its CE-ATA stack and driver running on a Linux-based Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 PDA equipped with a Hitachi Microdrive and QuickLogic SDIO-to-CE-ATA adapter, at this week's IDF (Intel Developer Forum).

Tomcat can use the Apache Portable Runtime to provide superior scalability, performance, and better integration with native server technologies. The Apache Portable Runtime is a highly portable library that is at the heart of Apache HTTP Server 2.x. APR has many uses, including access to advanced IO functionality (such as sendfile, epoll and OpenSSL),OS level functionality (random number generation, system status, etc), and native process handling (shared memory, NT pipes and Unix sockets).View for details: http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/apr.html

Live Audio Broadcast from Ohio Linuxfest

There has been a lot of hoo-hah recently regarding the pros and cons of certain aspects of the drafts of Version 3 of the GNU General Public License from the Free Software Foundation. The originator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds himself, is playing a role here. Unfortunately, each side has taken to the ploy of misrepresenting the other’s points. Arguments are getting heated to such an extent that you need to wear an asbestos suit just to look at the issues.