News and Editorials
The future of Kubuntu
Mark Shuttleworth has issued an
invitation
for the
Kubuntu and
KDE community to meet at
LinuxTag in Wiesbaden, Germany on
May 6, 2006.
The LinuxTag event is a perfect opportunity for us to engage directly
with the KDE user and developer communities. Germany is in many ways the
heart of the KDE community, so we have been looking for a way to pull
together a summit of leaders, users, developers and translators from that
country and this event is hopefully going to be just that.
During its relatively short existence Kubuntu has been perceived as a
second class citizen, never getting quite as much attention or polish as
its GNOME counterpart. This meeting will, hopefully, be the beginning of a
real change in that status.
There are some lofty goals for this meeting. Developing a partnership with
the KDE project. Nominating a Kubuntu leadership team and forming
additional teams to work on artwork, documentation, quality assurance,
translation, marketing and distribution.
Eventually, if Kubuntu seems sufficiently popular, we may have Kubuntu
releases timed with KDE releases, just as Ubuntu releases are currently
timed with GNOME releases.
Mark doesn't say so, but it sounds like there could be Canonical employment
for a KDE hacker, or two.
Comments (2 posted)
New Releases
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS beta released
The beta release of the distribution now known as "Ubuntu 6.06 LTS" is
available. "LTS" stands for "long-term support," and, presumably, sounds
more professional than "Dapper Drake." Among other things, this release
includes a "desktop CD" which can be used in both live and install modes.
Update: The 6.06 LTS beta is available for Kubuntu and Edubuntu, with additional 6.06 beta versions
for Xubuntu and as ports for UltraSparc, IA64 and HPPA (1.1 and later)
CPUs.
Full Story (comments: 1)
SUSE Linux 10.1 RC2 Release
SUSE Linux 10.1 RC2 has been released (click below for the announcement).
According to this
schedule update RC3
should be out soon.
Full Story (comments: none)
Owl for x86-64; Owl 2.0-stable
Openwall GNU/Linux (Owl) has
made several announcements. First Owl has been ported to the
x86-64 architecture (also known as AMD64 and Intel EM64T). The Owl
2.0-stable branch is now available under /pub/Owl/2.0-stable on the FTP
mirrors. John the Ripper 1.7.0.2 has been released. Click below for
details on these and other announcements.
Full Story (comments: none)
Eagle Linux Releases v2.3.0
Eagle Linux is
an educational, distributed as a how-to manual that walks the user through
the steps necessary to create a customized live CD distribution. It is
also available as an ISO image. Click below for the 2.3 release
announcement.
Full Story (comments: none)
Debian From Scratch 0.99.0
Debian From
Scratch (DFS) is a single, full rescue CD capable of working with all
major filesystems, LVM and software RAID. It also supports compiling a new
kernel. The DFS ISO images contain a small Debian mirror subset that lets
you use cdebootstrap, along with the other utilities on the CD, to perform
a manual, "Gentoo-like" installation. Click below for the 0.99.0 release
announcement.
Full Story (comments: none)
Distro Quickies: Tomahawk, QiLinux, Arabian and Kubuntu (KDE.News)
KDE.News
takes a quick look at
some recent releases from KDE-centric distributions. "
"Tomahawk
Desktop is an advanced multimedia centric KDE desktop". *** QiLinux 2.0rc1
free edition was released with KDE 3.5.2, "QiLinux is a KDE-centric
distribution for desktop and server made completely from scratch". ***
Arabian Linux has released version 0.6, "It's the first Arabic live
distribution using KDE as the default GUI and the first to have the Arabic
language enabled in consoles". *** Finally Kubuntu 6.06 LTS Beta was
announced with the promise of Long Term Support."
Comments (none posted)
Distribution News
Bits from the DPL
Newly elected Debian Project Leader Anthony Towns has sent out his first
"bits from the DPL" posting. Among other things, he is creating a
"second-in-charge" position to which some of the project leader's
responsibilities will be delegated.
Full Story (comments: none)
Fedora Project Board meeting summary
A summary of the recent Fedora board meeting
has been
posted. You can find general information about the board
here. Meeting schedules and
summaries
can be
found here.
Full Story (comments: none)
Gentoo QA Proposal v3
Mark Loeser has made a proposal for a Gentoo quality assurance team, now in
the third version. This team would be responsible for the overall quality of
the distribution which could include removing unmaintained and broken
packages, fixing typos, keeping documentation up-to-date and maintaining a
list of current "QA Standards". Click below for a text version of the
proposal, which has now been converted to GLEP (Gentoo Linux Enhancement
Proposal) format
here.
Full Story (comments: none)
Linspire announces the 'Freespire' edition
Linspire, Inc. has
announced
plans for a no-cost version of their operating system called Freespire.
"
Freespire is venturing into new territory by offering a free
community Linux operating system that includes the option for legally
licensed proprietary software pieces in the core distribution. The
Freespire community project and Web site are now live at
http://www.freespire.org, with the first beta release of the operating
system to be made available for download in August."
Comments (49 posted)
Ubuntu to Participate in Google Summer of Code
Ubuntu is once again participating in the Google Summer of Code, and plans
to make as many projects as possible available for students to work on.
"
It is a great opportunity to expose new students to the wonderful
world of Ubuntu, get some exciting projects off the ground and get good
exposure for the projects, students and organisations alike."
Full Story (comments: none)
Distribution Newsletters
Debian Weekly News
The Debian Weekly News for April 25, 2006 looks at the Debian Live
Initiative, a how-to on using Alioth for packaging, Google Summer of Code
2006, an upgrade conflict, proper closing of old, resolved bug reports,
removing Mozilla, and several other topics.
Full Story (comments: none)
Fedora Weekly News Issue 43
The
Fedora
Weekly News for April 24, 2006 covers Red Hat Magazine | April 2006,
Fedora Project Board meeting summary, Fedora Sponsored Media Program,
Fedora Core 5 CD/DVD Art, FISL: See you next year!, and more.
Comments (none posted)
Gentoo Weekly Newsletter
The
Gentoo
Weekly Newsletter for the week of April 24, 2006 covers OpenLDAP 2.3 on
its way into Portage, call for comments on new subforums and several other
topics.
Comments (none posted)
Mandriva Community Newsletter #119
Here's the latest Mandriva Community Newsletter. Topics include Mandriva
Kiosk Lite in beta testing for Club members, Linux training through
Mandriva Club, Mandriva to take part in major European IT management
project, and more.
Full Story (comments: none)
DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 148
The
DistroWatch
Weekly for April 24, 2006 is out. "
A flurry of distribution
releases and related announcements were the highlights of the past
week. The Ubuntu project has released the complete set of betas of all
their derivatives, including the newly added Xubuntu, and also made an
initial announcement concerning the development of Edgy Eft, the code name
of its next release. Similarly, the Fedora project has announced an
estimated release schedule for the development of Fedora Core 6. Also in
this issue: updates on the status of Mandriva's Cooker repository, new
minor release by Linspire, a comparison of journalled files system on
Debian, and an interesting interview with the lead developer of Elive. In
the First Look series we share our first impressions of CCux Linux
0.9.8. Finally, a little statistical titbit: with the recent addition of
Xubuntu, the DistroWatch database now contains exactly 500
distributions."
Comments (none posted)
Package updates
Fedora updates
Updates for
Fedora Core 5:
gnome-pilot (bug fix),
tzdata (upstream 2006d),
procps (bug fixes),
procinfo (bug fix),
gnome-user-share (patched),
cscope (inverted overflow fix),
foomatic (preparing for CUPS 1.2),
gimp (bug fixes),
gimp-help (update to version 2-0.10),
autofs (bug fixes),
anthy (new upstream release),
setools (bump for FC5),
rhythmbox (update to 0.9.4),
gnome-menus (update to 2.14.0),
file-roller (update to 2.14.2),
gnome-utils (bug fixes),
selinux-policy (bump for FC5),
nut (update to 2.0.3).
Updates for Fedora Core 4: gnome-pilot (bug fix), qt (bug fix), tzdata (upstream 2006d), jwhois (update to 3.2.3), gimp (bug fixes), system-config-date (use pam system-auth), gimp-help (update to version 2-0.10), autofs (bug fixes), nut (bug fixes).
Comments (none posted)
Slackware updates
Slackware changes for this week include upgrades to slocate, udev, mysql,
guile (which may be removed soon), several alsa packages, ImageMagick,
mozilla (which probably won't be included in the next release) and more.
Plus linux-2.6.16.9 kernel packages in testing and some hotplug patching.
Click below for details.
Full Story (comments: none)
Trustix updates
Trustix has issued a bug fix advisory covering various bug fixes in jwhois,
mrtg, perl-dbd-mysql and perl-dbd-pg for TSL 2.2 & 3.0.
Full Story (comments: none)
Distribution reviews
SUSE 10.1 "really cool and solid" (DesktopLinux)
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
looks at SUSE
10.1 RC1. "
This is one really, really cool and solid
distribution. OK, before I go any further I should point out that SUSE 10.1
(code name: Agama Lizard) isn't actually released yet. I've been kicking
the tires of the first SUSE 10.1 "Release Candidate.""
Comments (none posted)
Using OpenBSD on the desktop (NewsForge)
NewsForge
looks
at OpenBSD on the desktop. "
Over the years, OpenBSD has built a
reputation for integrated security and reliability, but most people think
of it as an operating system suitable only for firewalls and servers. The
truth is that OpenBSD also works well as a desktop system; in fact, I use
it on an IBM ThinkPad R50e notebook as my main system."
Comments (none posted)
My desktop OS: FreeBSD 6.0-STABLE (NewsForge)
NewsForge
looks
at FreeBSD on the desktop. "
I recently installed FreeBSD 6 on a
new notebook computer. The installation went quickly; I got a terminal
screen in less than 40 minutes. The only packages I wanted from the
installation disk were Lynx, a Web browser, and cvsup-without-gui, a tool
with which you can upgrade your sources from a FreeBSD mirror. With only
the base system at its disposal, FreeBSD can give you a hands-on experience
from hour zero: it has a compiler (gcc), a download utility (fetch), an
editor (vi), and a bunch of other tools (OpenSSH, SendMail, Revision
Control System) that can help or entertain you during the rest of the
installation."
Comments (none posted)
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
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