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Woof! Woof! Guess what time it is, folks? It’s time for a review of Puppy Linux 5. Puppy Linux, in case you aren’t already familiar with it, is a lightweight version of Linux that is designed for portability. The .iso file of Puppy Linux 5.0 weighs in at an incredibly petite 128 MB. It’s much, much smaller than all of the usual desktop heavyweight distros. But don’t let its small size fool you, Puppy Linux 5.0 is anything but an also-ran in terms of functionality and usability.

On Sunday a new version of the Linux kernel rocked up, with two new filesystems loaded into the distro. Laidback Linux founder Linus Torvalds characteristically understated the relevance of the latest 2.6.34 release in a post about the final release candidate. “Nothing very interesting here, which is just how I like it. Various random fixes all over, nothing really stands out. Pretty much all of it is one- or few-liners, I think the biggest patch in the last week was fixing some semantics for the new SR-IOV VF netlink interface. And even that wasn't a _big_ patch by any means,” he languidly noted

This is the 362 issue of the World Wine News publication. Its main goal is to bring an update on GSoC status and the introduction of the Games Spotlight segment. It also serves to inform you of whats going on around Wine.

The Puppy Linux developers have announced the availability of version 5.0 of their independent Linux distribution, code named "Lupu". Puppy Linux is a popular small release that is around 100 MB in size, focuses on ease of use and can run entirely from RAM. Puppy Linux 5.0 is the first release to be based on Ubuntu and includes several changes over the previous 4.3.x branch.

In the embedded space, there's been a lot of talk about whether Android is fragmented, and if that fragmentation will ultimately hurt Android, because developers won't know what version to code for and users won't know which one to use.

Reports of the popular Linux distro ditching Firefox get clarified. Amidst reports that Ubuntu would ditch longtime default browser Firefox for Google's Chrome browser were put to rest with a resounding "sort of." A recent blog post by Ubuntu Community team member Jorge Castro explained that while Canonical has considered a Firefox alternative, it isn't Google Chrome, but rather Chromium, the open source version of the Chrome browser.

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 2.6.34, which is notable for adding two filesystems: Ceph for distributed and cloud-based applications, and LogFS, which is optimized for flash-memory based devices. Other new features include a faster KVM virtualization driver based on Vhost.net technology, says LinuxPlanet.com.

A fast-booting, cloud-oriented, "Peppermint OS" Ubuntu variant has been downloaded 25,000 times in its first week. Meanwhile, Red Hat clone CentOS has been released in version 5.5, adding features including enhanced KVM virtualization and improved WiFi support, and pioneering Linux distro-maker Mandriva is up for sale.

While the release schedules for Ubuntu Linux aren't exactly a close secret -- new releases generally coming in April and October with the version scheme being YY.MM such as Ubuntu 11.04 for the April 2011 release -- Canonical's Robbie Williamson has laid out tentative release schedules for Ubuntu 11.04, Ubuntu 11.10, and even Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

A amazing new style for Avant Window Navigator called "Lucido Style" was posted @ AWN forums. The code is already available in a BZR branch but it has not been merged into AWN yet. If you want to try it already, I've built Ubuntu .deb packages for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and 10.04 Lucid Lynx which you can download below.

Subversion is a free/open-source version control system. That is, Subversion manages files and directories, and the changes made to them, over time. This allows you to recover older versions of your data, or examine the history of how your data changed. In this regard, many people think of a version control system as a sort of "time machine". This guide will help you set up the subversion system, and integrate it with your existing ISPConfig3 installation allowing you control over disk usage, quota and other factors in a very familiar way.

The 5 things I hope Google unveils in Android 2.2. The folks at Apple have made an art form out of annual conferences with big announcements. In recent years we’ve seen the iPhone, MacBook Air, and more recently the iPad unveiled to much fanfare. Not to be outdone by Apple, Google has been making some Waves as well with their annual spring conference dubbed Google I/O.

Library of Congress CIO George Marchand sat uneasily in the witness chair of the hearing room. On a raised platform in front of him stretched a semicircular table, dotted with microphones. Behind those microphones sat all but one of the members of the Inquisition also known as the Congressional Subcommittee on Cybersecurity. 

Samsung likes to play the tart when it comes to a mobile OS, but the Bada Developer Challenge for its in-house environment shows where its affections really lie, with a top prize of $300,000. That compares with the £2,000 that Samsung was prepared to give to the best Android application while promoting its Galaxy handset. The two grand is just for the idea and is UK only, but the comparison still shows how much more important Bada is and how much Samsung is prepared to spend ensuring it succeeds.

Zend, one of the lead commercial PHP vendors, today announced that they have received another $9 million in venture capital funding, led by Greylock Partners. So my question is - if Zend is already successful, both in terms of technology and customers why does it still need additional venture funding? At this point, shouldn't revenue and cash flow from operations be enough to keep the company going?

It's doubtful that anyone really likes having to upgrade, but at some point it has to be done. For those particularly adverse to the upgrade — like enterprise users, with good reason — there are extra-long windows, but eventually even those windows close. Last week, Red Hat announced that the oldest of its supported platforms has officially entered the homestretch.

eXo has announced the release of eXo Social 1.0, an enterprise social networking package which supports OpenSocial, under an AGPL licence. eXo Social is bundled with eXo's GateIn 3.0 and Tomcat 6.0 to allow users to configure a social network "out of the box". eXo Social is aimed at enterprises who want to integrate social networking concepts into their existing infrastructure.

LXer Feature: 17-May-2010

In this week's LXWR we have Jim Zemlin commenting on Linux fragmentation, making the Linux desktop look better, Chrome usage rises and copiers have hard drives? Enjoy!

With Valve's Steam client and Source Engine coming to Linux in the coming months, we decided to check with Epic Games to see how Unreal Tournament 3 for Linux is coming along. After all, the game was released in November of 2007 and nearly three years later the client is still missing with few words having come from Epic Games or Ryan Gordon (a.k.a. "Icculus"), the well known Linux game porter that was contracted to port UT3 to Linux and has done previous Unreal Engine projects.

Automatic driver installations, better mobile broadband and the end of PowerPC support can be expected from Fedora 13. Fedora Linux, the community release of Red Hat, is putting the final touches to its latest release, Fedora 13. Codenamed "Goddard", Fedora 13 has a number of features that will please end users as well as systems administrators. Fedora 13 also ends the relationship with PowerPC processors and now backs the KVM virtualisation system.