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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.""

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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."

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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."

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