Distributions

News and Editorials

JeOS, Mamona, Online Desktops and CBI

This is a look at some very young projects that are not ready for prime time. It is interesting to see what's coming down the road and there are some preview releases for developers to play with.

First up is JeOS, a project recently announced by the Ubuntu team. JeOS, pronounced "juice" stands for Just Enough Operating System. It is intended to be an efficient variant of Ubuntu configured specifically for virtual appliances. The JeOS 7.10 CD image for x86 systems is available for download. The source code is in Launchpad, here. There is an ongoing discussion in Ubuntu forums which starts to get interesting around here.

Next up is Mamona, an embedded Linux distribution for ARM EABI. The main goal of the Mamona Project, according to this announcement, is to offer a completely open source alternative/experimental SDK package and flash image generation process for the Maemo Platform using only free and open source components. Mamona 0.1 currently runs on the Nokia Internet Tablet (N800 or N810), or it can be used as a SDK in a PC running over qemu.

The GNOME Online Desktop is a concept that moves more of your desktop online, so you can move to different computers and still have your familiar desktop. There is a tour in Red Hat Magazine of the pre-alpha demo release included in Fedora 8. If you travel or find yourself using different machines on a regular basis, the Online Desktop should simplify your life.

Last on this tour is Fedora's announcement the availability of CBI enabled packages for Fedora 8. CBI stands for the Cooperative Bug Isolation Project and it's not a new project, but it's worth a mention anyway. CBI is an ongoing effort to track down software bugs. CBI enabled versions of Evolution, The GIMP, GNOME Panel, Gnumeric, Nautilus, Pidgin, Rhythmbox, and SPIM are available for download for Fedora 8 and earlier versions of Fedora. These special versions of the applications monitor their own behavior while they run and send back information on how things should work (when they work properly) or on how things can go wrong. Privacy is important to CBI. They are looking for patterns in the data and will not collect any data without your permission. The more people who participate the more data they can collect and the more bugs can ultimately be squashed. This snapshot page shows graphs of recent findings.

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New Releases

Fedora Unity releases Fedora 8 Everything Spin

The Fedora Unity Project has released a Fedora 8 "Everything" spin for i386 and x86_64 architectures. "This spin also includes 3 DVD images for each architecture, as well as 2 DVD Dual Layer images for those who are able to use them. Please mind that the second DVD Dual Layer ISO images is actually small enough to be burned onto a normal DVD."

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Distribution News

Debian GNU/Linux

Bits from the DPL: officialising delegations

Debian Project Leader Sam Hocevar presents some delegations. These include Kalle Kivimaa, Debian Auditor; Peter Palfrader, Debian System Administrator; Anibal Monsalve Salazar, Debian Maintainer Keyring.

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Debian Maintainers Open Beta

In early August, Debian voted to endorse the concept of "Debian Maintainers" which allows contributors to maintain their own packages in the archive without requiring a sponsor for every upload, and without becoming a Debian Developer. The separate keyring for the DMs has been implemented and tested. "We're now ready to accept limited numbers of applicants, and as such are entering an open beta phase. That means that we think we've got everything in order and it should be working properly, but we've probably missed some things, and until we know what they are and fix them, we'll be relying on DMs to help us make sure the system is running as smoothly as it's meant to."

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Fedora

Fedora Tunisia

The Tunisian Fedora community has a new website with links to downloads, mailing lists, forums, and much more.

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New Distributions

CAELinux

CAELinux is a live DVD distribution for Computer Aided Engineering. It is based on PCLinuxOS 2007 and incorporates the open source CAE applications Salomé and Code_Aster.

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Distribution Newsletters

Fedora Weekly News Issue 110

The Fedora Weekly News for November 12, 2007 is out. "In Announcements, we have "Fedora Unity releases Fedora 8 Everything Spin". In AskFedora, we have "GIMP 2.4.1 and Fedora 7", "Automatic Security Updates". In PlanetFedora, we have "Seam running under IcedTea on Fedora 8", "Fedora 8 on a MacBook (intel)", "Custom Kernel documentation updated" and "First Torrent Movie"."

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PCLinuxOS Magazine - Issue 15

The November 2007 edition of PCLinuxOS Magazine is available. "We hope you enjoy Issue 15! We have a great issue with the final article of the series on KDE, help on the Linux command line, the Linux directory explained and much more."

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Ubuntu Weekly News: Issue #66

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for November 17, 2007 covers the LoCo teams up next for official approval, the welcoming of a new MOTU, some news from the good folks in Ubuntuforums and much more.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 229

The DistroWatch Weekly for November 19, 2007 is out. "Following our review of Fedora 8 last Monday, this week's DistroWatch Weekly offers a few more observations about Red Hat's community distribution - this time from the perspective of your DistroWatch maintainer. While clearly an excellent product, it nevertheless suffers from a few annoyances and dubious design decisions. In the news section, Red Hat Magazine introduces GNOME Online Desktop, Ubuntu releases a specialist distribution for virtual appliances, Oracle's Larry Ellison fires more ugly shots at Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Kurumin's Carlos Morimoto considers the future of the popular Brazilian community project. Finally, for those interested in Computer Aided Engineering, don't miss the new release from CAELinux."

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Distribution meetings

Red Hat Announces Fourth-Annual Red Hat Summit

Red Hat has announced the fourth-annual Red Hat Summit to take place June 18-20, 2008 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, Mass. There should be a FUDCon happening as well.

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MiniDebConf Venezuela 2007

Debian Venezuela has announced the Second Venezuelan MiniDebConf, held with the 5th World Forum on Free Knowledge, November 21 - 23, 2007 in the city of Puerto Ordaz (Bolivar) in Venezuela. "Everyone is invited to participate in the round table to be held on the morning of Friday 23rd., at the Community Room (Room 4) in Hotel Intercontinental, where the team will address questions from the public regarding Debian, how to be involved with the Project as well as common issues such as legal status, infrastructure and projects for 2008."

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Newsletters and articles of interest

Debian Administration publishes article on FOSS VPN technology

LinuxForce has announced that Debian Administration has published a technical article submitted by LinuxForce on how to simplify VPN (Virtual Private Network) authentication management with FOSS.

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Interviews

Developer interview with Dan Walsh

Dan Walsh is a Red Hat engineer and the principal developer of SELinux in Fedora. In this interview Dan talks about what SELinux does and how it's improved in Fedora 8. There are also some screenshots which show-off the new policy creation GUI. "We have made major enhancements to system-config-selinux including the addition of the selinux-polgengui, This tool allows you to generate a SELinux policy framework. It attempts to generate the most common policy for your particular domain. It is a wizard that will ask you a series of questions, and generate you the files necessary to build policy as well as a script to compile, build and relabel the application you are trying to confine. Once you have written your policy template, you can run tests to generate AVC messages, then you can use the enhanced version of audit2allow to generate additional policy rules. This enhanced audit2allow takes AVC messages and searches through the reference policy interfaces for a better match. This makes for better policy and simplifies the process."

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Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
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