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Welcome to this year's 23rd issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Amid obvious signs that the long-awaited new Debian stable release is about to be unleashed on the impatient public, the euphoria in the Debian land was spoilt last week by a truly sad news about the death of Libranet's founder and President Jon Danzig. Meanwhile, the Fedora users will have to wait another week before they can put their hands on the distribution's latest release - Fedora Core 4. GoboLinux is our featured distribution of the week and Robert Storey shows you how to configure SpamAssassin to kill off email from online pharmacies and other unscrupulous businesses. Happy reading!

In this era of fast, inexpensive computers, we expect nice-looking 3D graphics in each new animated film, PC game, console game, and even operating system. But when I saw a programming demo of a simplistic yet cool-looking white 3D ball bouncing freely and smoothly on a friend's 1992-vintage Amiga 1200 screen, it amazed me that a machine that old could be so powerful. Alas, most of the operational machines from that era are collecting dust in people's attics, but we can re-enter the realm of Amiga with an open source emulation application.

Every year at OSCON, Tim O’Reilly gives a speech about his latest views on technology, publishing, and whatever else is on his mind. At every speech that I’ve seen, at some point he stops to explain that one thing he wishes everyone at O’Reilly Media would understand is that what the company does, how it creates value, is not primarily by publishing books, but rather by helping communities come together and communicate with each other. Publishing is one way that that happens, so are conferences, so are web sites, creating developer communities, and FOO camps. The point that I have always taken away from Tim’s observation is that it is important to look deeper into organizations to understand what really makes them tick. The essential processes may be obscured by the visible evidence.

In an effort to open up their development process the developers of the Konqueror components KHTML, KJS and KSVG have launched the open Web portal KHTML.info. By providing a central contact point and source of information in form of an open Wiki the developers want to promote their work and embrace users and developers from both Open Source as well as commercial environments.

Cover your back in the worst-case scenario with the techniques in this tutorial. Even new, high-quality hard drives will occasionally fail. Regular system backups are essential, especially for busy developers who make continual improvements to their code. This tutorial shows you how to protect yourself from losing huge amounts of critical data.

Red Hat announcement related to Fedora Foundation, an organization whose purpose will be to develop the distribution that bears its name, is a proof of the company’s vision on patents. In Red Hat’s opinion, in this moment, patenting certain software products is a good method to increase market share and from that point of view, the allusion to Microsoft is obvious.

My experience in the Linux Community has allowed me to see how cooperative software development transcends cultural differences and allows diverse people to become friends. Unlike other communities, Linux has only one agenda and when something gets in the way, the spotlight can result in appropriate exposure.

Often times, people ask me why I cover Open Source topics like Linux & Apache as well as related topics like the IBM/Novell/Redhat verses SCO case and also the issues related to software patents. Most specifically they ask me what these topics have to do with web development. Today I’ve decided to answer that and the truth of the matter is that Open Source software is more important to web developers then any other industry out there. Permit me me now to demonstrate.

Linux is becoming more of a frequent word when it comes to choosing an Operating System. Gone are the days when Windows was THE operating system for the average home user. Linux was then considered to be only for technical ppl or for those that could spend hours on end configuring their system. However the waters are shifting. Linux distributions have become better and more user friendly over the years while retaining their characterising stability. To prove this I have just run a completely new installation of Mandriva Linux 2005 limited edition. Mandriva Linux ( formerley known as Mandrake linux) has always been renowed as one of the most user friendly distributions available. Mandriva Linux is available for several architectures (types) of the cpu family. Mainly it is available for PPC (power PC ) which are machines running Motorola based Processors ( these are mainly Mac computers), i586 is for 32-bit processors both from Intel and AMD. These include the Intel Pentium 4 and The AMD athlon. (this is probably the distribution you need to get ) x86-64 is for processors which are 64-bit compatible such as the AMD64 processor.

Konqueror now joins Safari and iCab in the exclusive "correctly renders the Acid2 test page" club. Interesting side-note, approximately half of the code to do that was dredged from the recent Apple Webcore "code-bomb".

IBM, Nokia and Red Hat count on collaboration to widen the intellectual property available to developers.

In 2003, University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy faced a common problem: clunky hardware, a dependence on Windows, budget limitations, and a need to update. At Newsforge.com, author Kevin Quiggle explains how U of D Jesuit found a budget-friendly solution in Linux, and how well Linux has performed.

"Open source software is a boon to non-profit and charity organisations worldwide," said Cybersource special projects officer Arik Gershoni. "Non-profit organisations are always strapped for cash, and no platform delivers lower acquisition and ownership costs than Linux and open source, so it's a natural fit. What we're hoping to do is extend that realm of usefulness for charities. We want them to not only save money by using open source - we want them to make money from open source too."

A looming deadline following a dispute between two prominent open-source developers has forced database vendor MySQL AB to consider changing how it develops its software, and it will also force scores of other open-source projects to consider a similar move within the month.

The software giant's recent approach to open-source executives shows that open source is a power to be reckoned with, experts say.

Paraglyph Press released the latest book in its "Degunking" series this week, titled Degunking Linux. In this 352-page how-to book, author Roderick W. Smith takes readers through a 12-step process which promises to save "hundreds of hours" of tinkering and tweaking a Linux installation.

Linux adoption may be "hitting a wall," as use of the open-source operating system fell over a nine-month period, a quarterly survey of companies shows. Linux use in computer servers running business applications was reported in 53 percent of the 500 North American companies surveyed by SG Cowen & Co. for its Core Technology Survey, released this week. In addition, 7 percent of the respondents planned to adopt Linux, which was the "most modest" level the New York investment banker had seen in its survey.

Despite reoccurring phpbb problems and a slow start, Lobby4Linux is determined to do what it can to make the Linux Desktop a viable alternative to Windows.

British researchers have built tiny aircraft that use Linux to perform parallel processing operations and can communicate with one another via Bluetooth.

The European Parliament and European Commission are currently at loggerheads about software patents and the definition of "computer-implemented inventions." The open source community is trying desperately to stop any kind of patenting, while large IT corporations such as Microsoft are trying to lobby the parliament into allowing just about any software technique through. In the midst of all this, doomsayers have been predicting the death of Linux and open source software. Open source projects such as MPlayer are now posting huge "The End Is Nigh" notices on their sites. But things aren't as dark as they might seem.