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DistributionsNews and Editorials openSUSE seeks new design for the YaST Control CenterThe openSUSE project has announced that it is seeking a radical new design for the YaST Control Center. This announcement was followed by a long discussion of ways to completely redesign YaST (Yet another Setup Tool), rather than just the Control Center. Stefan Hundhammer posted a
second try:
The first thread was not meant to be about generic wishes about YaST and
related. It was not about a complete rewrite of everything. It was not about
what could be improved in various individual YaST modules. It was not about
bugs that could be reported with Bugzilla. It was not about dropping the
ncurses text mode (we don't plan to do anything like that).
Rather, it was about The YaST Control Center in particular the Qt version. This is the small, very basic, Qt-only (very little dependencies, in particular not to the entire YaST engine) application that starts YaST modules. Some people call it the YaST shell. Ideas are being collected in this new control center page, which includes the goals for the new design and the perceived problems with the old design. In particular, the old design, seen on this page, is very crowded and not intuitive for a non-geek user. A study was conducted, in which thirty experienced users were asked to sort the modules in the Control Center. A quick glance at the results identified the following issues (in no particular order):
The new control center page has several mockups of what the YaST Control Center might look like. If you are a SUSE user you probably use the Control Center, and may have some good ideas on how to improve it. Now is the time to be heard.
New Releases MontaVista presents Carrier Grade Linux 5.0 (Heise Online)Heise Online has a release announcement for MontaVista Carrier Grade Linux 5.0. "Linux Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) 5.0 uses version 2.6.21 of the kernel and supports Multicore and SMP processors. New features include the Run-Time Application Patcher, which makes it possible to install patches on a live system without rebooting, and the Flight Recorder, which, by analogy to a plane's black box, logs system events to make identification of the cause in the event of a system crash easier and more accurate."
Pie Box Enterprise Linux 4AS U6 now availableUpdate 6 of Pie Box Enterprise Linux 4 has been released. Click below for a list of enhancements included in this release.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10 releasedNovell has announced the availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10, "the only open source, enterprise-class real-time operating system available in the market today." "Enhancements to SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10 include the latest enterprise-hardened open source technologies that reduce system latency or delay and improve predictability, such as CPU shielding, priority inheritance, sleeping spinlocks, interrupt threads, high-resolution timers and the latest OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution for commodity high-speed interconnects, OFED 1.2.5. As a result, customers gain time advantage over competitors to make more money or avoid financial losses."
Launchpad 1.1.11 released!Launchpad, Ubuntu's suite of development tools, has released 1.1.11. Click below for a look at what's new in this version.
Distribution News Debian GNU/Linux Status of GCC 4.3 on SPARC and IA64 (Debian)Martin Michlmayr reports on the status of GCC 4.3 on SPARC. "I recently compiled the entire Debian archive (around 6500 packages that need to be compiled) on SPARC using trunk to identify new issues before GCC 4.3 is released. I compiled the archive twice, once with default optimization levels specified by packages and once with optimization set to -O3. I only found two new ICEs that were not reported already: PR33993, which has since been fixed, and PR34005, for which a patch has been suggested." The IA64 port has also been tested and a few issues found.
Fedora Fedora Astronomy SIGFedora has a new Astronomy Special Interest Group (SIG) for people interested in improving support for astronomers and astrophysicists on Fedora.
Fedora Board ElectionsThe Fedora Board consists of 9 seats, only one is up for election this time around. Nominations are open until December 6th.
Notice of Fedora rawhide doomKDE 4 will be landing in Fedora rawhide the week of December 1 - 7, 2007. Rawhide testers should expect some breakage during this process.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Opens Public Beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon Elastic Compute CloudRed Hat has announced the public beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides resizeable compute capacity in the cloud and changes the economics of computing by allowing customers to pay only for the infrastructure software services and capacity that they actually use. "Subscriptions to the beta are $19 per month, per account for access to support and services. Once subscribed, customers may instantiate small, large or extra-large server instances on the Amazon EC2 cloud computing environment at $0.21, $0.53 and $0.94 per hour respectively. Any bandwidth usage or additional storage will be billed at additional per GB rates."
SUSE Linux and openSUSE openSUSE Testing Updates - Looking for HerosopenSUSE has made its testing repositories open to the public. All new pending updates will first land into one of these test-update repositories before being transferred directly to the standard and official respective update repository. Test updates are available for openSUSE 10.3, openSUSE 10.2, SUSE Linux 10.1 and SUSE Linux 10.0. "Note, however, that these repositories will _always_ be in a highly experimental state, and hence are not for the faint-hearted. The updates contained in these repositories might well be broken at different times."
Ubuntu family Upcoming Hardy Alpha 1The first alpha release of Ubuntu's Hardy Heron is scheduled for a November 29, 2007 release.
Other distributions CentOS on your laptopDag Wieers would like CentOS to be more laptop friendly. The new CentOS on Laptops wiki page is the place to share your experiences with CentOS on the laptop. "This page brings together all information regarding CentOS on Laptops. If you own a laptop and you consider putting CentOS on it, please write down your experience and add it to this list."
Happy birthday siduxsidux, a distribution dedicated to creating a stable desktop from Debian sid (unstable), has announced it's first birthday. "I remember well the time about 15 months ago. We were all working with and for this other distribution and we were all frustrated. Some had already left the project. No release in sight, nobody knew what was going to happen, communication between team and project leader was more or less non existant. We all saw a basically good project going down the drain, for some of us after 3 years of work invested and we could not do much about it."
Distribution Newsletters Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #67The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for November 24, 2007 covers: Macedonia Students Use Ubuntu, New MOTU's, Azureaus Gets Fix, Launchpad News, Ubuntu Forum News, and much more.
DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 230The DistroWatch Weekly for November 26, 2007 is out. "We don't often get a chance to report about the BSD part of our open source world, but last week brought an unusual number of interesting developments: a new beta release of FreeBSD 7.0, new live DVDs from RoFreeSBIE and TrueBSD, and even a promise of a real print BSD magazine! Is this increased activity among the BSD developers a sign of greater acceptance of their preferred operating system? In other news: openSUSE releases new bleeding-edge software packages for beta testing, KDE 4.0 RC1 draws mixed reaction in the developer community, sidux celebrates its first birthday, and Linux Mint branches out to develop user-friendly solutions for Debian GNU/Linux and Fedora. Finally, don't miss our lead story - a first look at the newly released Linux Mint 4.0."
Interviews Fedora 8 and IcedTeaJonathan Roberts interviews Thomas Fitzsimmons, the lead developer of Fedora's IcedTea package. "Java is a popular programming language used both on the desktop and the net. Until recently users who wanted to use just free software have had to struggle with partial support for Java, but now that Sun have begun freeing their Java implementation the way has opened for free software developers to create an entirely free implementation. This free Java, IcedTea, was shipped by default with Fedora 8, and so we talked to Thomas Fitzsimmons, the lead developer behind this feature."
Eric Sandall Interview (Mage Power)Mage Power talks with Eric Sandall, Grimoire Lead at Source Mage GNU/Linux. "Would you please explain what the Grimoire is? A grimoire is a complete container of spells, their sections, and supporting scripts (such as account management) necessary for the spells to function. We have multiple official grimoires: z-rejected for binary-only and non-OSI licenses, games for the majority of games, test is the up-to-date grimoire where packages are first released for wide testing, stable-rc is where we have a snapshot of test to prepare for a new stable release, and the stable grimoire has some testing done to it to verify packages work and is the most bug-free release. There is no one grimoire, but rather multiple grimoires each providing a different selection. A few unofficial grimoires are maintained by various developers with packages they are working on and one hosted on the SMGL servers is xorg-modular, where we're working on integrating the newest X.org release process into our main grimoire."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol |
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