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Is Gentoo Ready for Latest Linux Release? (InternetNews.com)

InternetNews.com inquires into the current state of Gentoo. "[Donnie] Berkholz is of the belief that if Gentoo creates a great developer community, they'll build a great distribution, which will naturally draw users. Though there is a caveat. 'I do think there is an upper limit on our user base in Gentoo's current form, because there's only so many people willing to build from source,' Berkholz noted. 'As hardware gets faster, that does increase, but it's still a matter of compiling OpenOffice.org for 3 hours versus installing a binary version of it in 5 minutes.'"

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KDE on KDE 4.0 (Groklaw)

Groklaw has Sebastian Kügler debunk 11 Myths About KDE 4. "Lately a lot has been said (or bemoaned) in the community about KDE 4, the 4.0 release and the KDE developers. In the following article we would like to address some common misconceptions about KDE 4 as we see it. As we firmly believe in KDE 4 and the future of the Free Desktop, we expected the heated discussions about KDE4 and especially the 4.0 release to go away - and we were wrong about that. As blogging about the issues raised didn't seem to reach the audience we intended, we took the opportunity presented by Groklaw for this article with both hands. We sincerely hope it sheds some light on why the KDE community did what it thought it had to do and we hope it shows we do take the criticism seriously."

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Companies

Xandros buys Linspire – What does it mean for Linux? (ITPro)

ITPro writes off Xandros and Linspire in this lengthy article. "Where Xandros is sold in a box, Ubuntu is given away free. Where Ubuntu is seen to donate code back to the community, Xandros and Linspire have developed proprietary extensions. Where Ubuntu asks for manufacturers to free their drivers, Xandros and Linspire have signed patent covenants with Microsoft. Being easy to install and easy to use is not enough. The first lesson of 'open source business' is that your first debt is to your user and developer communities, from which everything else grows. OEMs will look first to the most popular alternative."

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Interviews

Brian Proffitt Joins Linux Foundation as LDN Community Manager (OSTATIC)

Joe Brockmeier talks with Brian Proffitt about his new job with the Linux Foundation. "OStatic: What will your duties be with the Linux Foundation? Brian Proffitt: My title is Community Manager of the Linux Developer Network, and my primary responsibility will be to direct that site to manage its content and overall direction. To do that, I'll be writing some content, figuring out what the overall content will be, and talking to Foundation members, outside vendors, and individual developers to see what kind of documentation and support they need to write apps for Linux. Then making sure they get it."

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Reviews

GNOME 3.0 officially announced... and explained (ars technica)

Here's an ars technica article about the plans for a GNOME 3.0 release. "Although the GNOME development community is still strongly committed to maintaining its incremental development strategy for the desktop, the rules are different for GTK+, the underlying toolkit used to build the platform. Developers have grown increasingly frustrated with the limitations of GTK+ and have started to evaluate proposals for remedying its weaknesses and adding more modern capabilities."

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Motorola Releases Touchscreen Linux Smartphone (InformationWeek)

InformationWeek looks at a new Linux-based Linux smartphone from Motorola. "The Linux-powered handset has a sleek candy-bar form factor, and the 2.2-inch touchscreen with 240 by 320 resolution. The included stylus can be used with the built-in handwriting recognition software. The smartphone will also come preloaded with stock trading and dictionary applications, and it's capable of receiving corporate e-mail. Users will be able to surf the Web on an integrated Opera browser, but this device cannot access 3G networks. Instead, the handset uses EDGE data for browsing and retrieving e-mails, with a top downlink speed of 236.8 Kbps."

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Test drive OpenOffice.org 3.0 (Tectonic)

Tectonic reviews the OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta. "The import extension opens PDF documents in either Impress or in OpenOffice Draw. The PDF is imported and each line of text can be edited as a single entity. Importing PDFs at this point does work but there are variable results in the formatting of documents, particularly those with complex layouts. But standard documents with a linear layout work reasonably well."

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Ubuntu Photo Manager Experiment (Ubuntu Productivity)

Ubuntu Productivity reviews several free and commercial photo editing applications for Linux. "I have a passion for photography and have become heavily entrenched in the tools available on Mac OS X, such as Aperture and Photoshop. This experiment focuses mainly on Aperture and what tools, if any, exist for Ubuntu to replace my Aperture workflow with something cross-platform and open-source that I can use on Mac OS X and Ubuntu."

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Miscellaneous

In memoriam: Linux evangelist and Linux.com editor Joe Barr

Linux.com reports the death of longtime Linux author Joe Barr. "Many knew him as a Linux evangelist; others knew him from his ham radio activities. And those of us who worked with Joe knew him in all of his sometime irascible, often funny moods. Joe was always one of our favorite people, and we are devastated to report that he died at home, unexpectedly, last night."

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