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Welcome to this year's 33rd issue of DistroWatch Weekly. We shall start with a quick look at the first alpha release of the Gentoo Installer project - the first Gentoo live CD which boots into a full GNOME desktop and which can be installed to a hard disk with -- believe it or not -- a mouse! Then we'll talk briefly about the first beta release of SUSE Linux 10.0 and introduce two web sites specialising in bringing you news and information about the many live CD projects available today. Our featured distributions of the week is BLAG Linux And GNU, a single CD Fedora-based distribution with a home entertainment bias. Happy reading!

Are you looking for a reliable scheduler to help you automate your processes? You may not realize it, but you have a useful command-line tool for scheduling jobs at your fingertips -- at.

In his book Inside Relational Databases, Mark Whitehorn writes, "One golden rule of design is not to ask the question of what information do I want to put into the table, but rather what information do I want to get out of the table." An equally important question is how to get information out of the table. Some database management systems include tools for creating queries and reports, while others, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite, require that you use third-party tools. One such tool that receives high marks is Agata Report.

IBM is donating DHTML accessibility technology currently wending its way through the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) standards process. Big Blue is also contributing code that makes it possible for Web pages to be automatically narrated or magnified as well as navigated by keystrokes rather than mouse clicks.

Apple Computer may be forced to pay royalties to Microsoft for every iPod it sells after it emerged that Bill Gates's software giant beat Steve Jobs' firm in the race to file a crucial patent on technology used in the popular portable music players. The total bill could run into hundreds of millions of dollars. Although Apple introduced the iPod in November 2001, it did not file a provisional patent application until July 2002, and a full application was filed only in October that year. In the meantime, Microsoft submitted an application in May 2002 to patent some key elements of music players, including song menu software. Editor's Note: What were you saying about the fairness of patents?

August 14, 2005 - (HOSTSEARCH.COM) - Linux management firm Levanta, today announced that the Levanta Intrepid M Linux management appliance has been chosen as the "Most Innovative Hardware Solution" in LinuxWorld's Product Excellence Awards. "The industry has been waiting a long time for more sophisticated Linux management tools," said Matt Mosman, CEO of Levanta. "Attendees here at LinuxWorld have been amazed by how much the new Intrepid M appliance simplifies Linux management."

he DCC Alliance plans to assemble a common, standards-based Debian core for Debian-based Linux distributions, accelerate worldwide commercial adoption of Debian, promote compatibility among the growing community of Debian derivatives, and work with Debian on features important to commercial adoption such as a predictable release cycle and Linux Standard Base (LSB) compliance. Founding members of the Alliance include credativ, KNOPPIX, LinEx, Linspire, MEPIS, Progeny, Sun Wah, UserLinux, and Xandros. The initial release of the Debian Common Core, expected in the September time frame, will be based on Debian 3.1 (“Sarge”) and certified to LSB. The common core will be the basis for future releases of each member's Linux products, and the DCC Alliance will serve as a single point of contact for software and hardware vendors who want to ensure that their products will work with Debian.

Sun Wah Linux (Sun Wah), a China-based Linux solution provider today announced the immediate availability of RAYS ES, claimed to be the first Debian-based commercial Linux server platform in Asia. The launch of RAYS ES is expected to give network administrators a reliable, stable and secure platform that is more cost effective than its competitors. RAYS ES is a server operating system that reportedly provides both reliable performance and advanced security. RAYS ES can function as a web server, FTP server, e-mail server, DNS server, SQL database server, remote login server, web proxy server, corporate firewall or any combination of the above, the company noted.

O'Reilly's dominance is centered around the Open Source community. Linux kernel development is at the heart of this same community. Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition continues the trend set by their previous editions of the book by explaining how to write functional kernel modules. The new edition covers the changes made from 2.4 to 2.6. LinuxForumsDOTorg's lakerdonald has read the book and written a complete and comprehensive review. Read it here.

The Debian project adds security support for the stable amd64 distribution. This port is not yet part of the Debian archive, but it will be included in unstable/testing soon and users already benefit from security updates distributed via security.debian.org. A special advisory will be released soon by the security team to cover newly built amd64 packages for all security updates since the release of sarge. These packages will replace already existing files in the proposed-updates directory in the amd64 archive.

The Debian project is pleased to announce that it is funded by the LinuxFund with $500 per month for an entire year. The Linux-oriented credit card organisation will be disbursing $6,000 in total.

Evans Data Corporation released a study which predicts fast growth for Asia-Pac open source. The survey, in which more than 400 developers throughout the region weighed in, indicates that 47 percent of the respondents plan on increasing their use of open source in the next year.

The KMyMoney development team is proud to announce the availability of the newest stable release of KMyMoney, version 0.8. A lot of progress has been made since version 0.6 was released. Existing features have been improved and many new features have been added. (Editor's Note: Suggested Reading)

Veritas - er, Symantec rather - has upgraded its server and storage management products to put versions of the software meant for Linux on equal footing with Unix code. Version 4.1 of Storage Foundation, Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC, Storage Foundation Cluster File System, Storage Foundation for Databases, Volume Replicator and Cluster Server will all now work with the latest versions of Red Hat and SuSE's server operating systems. In addition, the Veritas software packages now work with Intel's Itanium and Xeon 64-bit chips and AMD's Opteron processor. All in all, these products - long popular with Sun Microsystems' Solaris OS and versions of Unix from IBM and HP - are tuned to work with the latest and greatest technology in the x86 Linux realm.

I hope those of you who wonder if a patent commons is useful or who don't see the point of other legal strategies friends of FOSS have been coming up with to try to deal with the SCO's and Microsofts of this world will note that he reports from attending Daniel Egger's speech that Microsoft has apparently been telling people that they have patents being infringed by the LAMP stack, Wine and Samba

At this year's LinuxWorld, the .Org Pavilion was a special section of the Conference reserved for not-for-profit organizations developing cutting-edge projects. The .Org Pavilion participants included X.org, Gnome Foundation, Fedora, and Debian, among others. But the news wasn't who was there, but who wasn't--the OpenOffice.org folks.

A growing number of Linux-powered desktops and laptops are finding their way into the retail market -- driven by a more receptive system builder channel that includes the likes of Mustek, Rectron, Pinnacle and Esquire. "We are very enthusiastic about the sales through the OEMs as they are growing on a month-by-month basis, though obviously off of a low base," says Hodgson. "The biggest deal we have done to date was the deal with Rectron for 2000 units ... and those units are also apparently selling well through their channel.

Progeny, which is aiming to commercialize the Debian version of Linux, is looking to "accelerate our growth," co-founder says.

In the complex world of wireless LAN security protocols, two major open-source development projects are serving as "standards cops": xsupplicant and wpa_supplicant. I first met Chris Hessing, the lead developer of xsupplicant, at Interop in 2003. Since then, he has continued to develop xsupplicant in his spare time away from his day job as the wireless network architect at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. I recently had a chance to talk with Chris by phone about xsupplicant, his views on wireless security protocols and what he's trying to do on the one of the largest decentralized secure wireless networks in existence.

After writing code for booting dozens of different hardware platforms on numerous embedded operating systems (including VxWorks, Nucleus, pSOS, uC/OS, among others), Ed Sutter decided to develop a common boot platform for embedded devices. In 2000, his employer (Lucent) granted him permission to post "Micromonitor" (aka "uMon") on Lucent's Software Distibution Website for free public download under the Lucent Public License. Sutter has continued to enhance Micromonitor over the past five years, and has just issued the 1.0 milestone release. In this whitepaper Sutter discusses uMon's features, capabilities, typical uses, and APIs, before listing new features in version 1.0.