News and Editorials
By Rebecca Sobol
October 22, 2008
The
K12Linux project
builds on the efforts of
K12LTSP, which
started working with the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) on Red Hat Linux before switching to Fedora and
CentOS. The newly named K12Linux project recently
announced the release of K12Linux Release Candidate 1.
The Linux Terminal Server Project
provides software that adds thin-client support to Linux distributions.
The project's documentation
page has pointers to using LTSP with Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora and
Debian, along with instructions for Integrating
LTSP-5 into your favorite Linux distribution. LTSP provides server
and client software for a single server and many thin clients or diskless
terminals. This can be an inexpensive way to provide files and
applications for many users. While often used in schools, LTSP has many
other applications as well.
K12 refers to the USA primary school system, where children start their
education in Kindergarten (from the German) and go through grade 12 before
going on to a university. This brings us back to K12Linux, the new name
for continuing efforts to integrate LTSP with Fedora. Currently these
efforts are focused on LTSP 5 and Fedora 9.
This RC release contains Fedora 9 and all updates as of October 12, 2008,
with LTSP-5.1.26, ldm-2.0.13, ltspfs-0.5.5, many bug fixes and new
K12Linux-themed artwork for the login screen. This release comes as a live
image suitable for a USB key or a DVD; both with the client chroot already
installed and configured. If you are already running Fedora 9 and would
like to try this release you can use the instructions in the install
guide instead of the live media. Either way, if you are looking for an
easy way to get LTSP running, give K12Linux a try.
Comments (none posted)
New Releases
The single CD server install for CentOS 4.7 has been released and is
available from all active mirrors. It is available for
i386 and
x86_64. Click on the desired architecture for
notes, sha1sum and other information.
Comments (1 posted)
Fedora 10 Snapshot 2 is available for testing. "
This time not only
will we have Live images, we'll also have DVD and split CD install images.
Due to the amount of data to sync around, we're going to stagger the
torrent releases, making them available as they finish syncing to the
torrent server."
Full Story (comments: none)
Foresight 2.0.5 featuring GNOME 2.24 has been released. "
Foresight
2.0.5 features the latest GNOME desktop environment, 2.24; OpenOffice.org
3.0, and the latest Xorg release, 1.5.1." Click below for links to
the release notes and download page.
Full Story (comments: none)
The
third OpenSUSE 11.1 beta is now
available. "
We all want openSUSE 11.1 to be the best release yet,
and we need your help to get there. This release is ready for widespread
testing, and we're encouraging everyone to download and test the beta
release." For the curious, the project has also put up
a
set of excuses for why this release was late; it comes down to an
extended power outage in Nuremberg on top of the usual problems.
Comments (6 posted)
RPM 4.6.0 release candidate 1 is available. "
As you may or may not
know, we've been test-driving snapshots of rpm.org HEAD in Fedora
development repository, including F10 alpha and beta releases, since early
July in order to shake out any regressions from all the rather heavy
refactoring and cleanup work that has been done over the last year and
half. And sure, there were some regressions, that was to be expected. Those
have been sorted out as they've come up and no new regressions have been
reported for a while (plenty of ancient bugs have been discovered and fixed
in the meantime though)."
Full Story (comments: 2)
Distribution News
SUSE Linux and openSUSE
The openSUSE project has announced the winners of Hack Week III. The
winners are Best Cross-Pollination Team: Andrew Wafaa, for his videos of
openSUSE Staff and Members, First Penguin Award: Lynn Bendixsen and Jason
Douglas, for their work enabling driver upgrades for installing Windows
para-virtualized drivers, plus winners for best overall projects. Click
below for details.
Full Story (comments: none)
Distribution Newsletters
The
DistroWatch
Weekly for October 20, 2008 is out. "
Mandriva Linux 2009 took
the centre stage during last week as many Linux users had a chance to
install and check out the latest and greatest from the company that
recently celebrated 10 years of existence. The reports varied widely,
ranging from praise for the excellent way KDE 4 was integrated into the
distribution to outright recommendations to skip this release due to a
surprisingly high number of bugs. In other words, it's the story of Linux
distributions - they will work great on one combination of hardware, but
will fail miserably on another. In the news section, Debian presents
updated artwork for "Lenny", Linux Mint releases its first stable 64-bit
edition, the developers of KPackageKit introduce a new universal way of
managing software, and K12LSTP Linux, a Fedora-based distribution for thin
servers and clients, becomes K12Linux. Finally, don't miss the latest
entrant into the world of BSD-based live CDs - BSDanywhere, or OpenBSD with
Enlightenment."
Comments (none posted)
This week the Fedora Weekly News looks at Announcements for The Big ACL
Opening, Fedora Test Day and K12Linux Release Candidate 1 Now Available;
Developments in OpenOffice and go-oo, PackageGurus, SpecMentats or
UeberPackagers?, A Single Torrent?, The Old Sendmail Argument and
Review-o-matic; and much more.
Full Story (comments: none)
This edition of the
openSUSE Weekly
News covers Power Outage of most openSUSE servers, Retiring from the
openSUSE Board, Status openSUSE distribution, Pascal Bleser: Packman:
removing openSUSE 10.0 and 10.1 packages, Bernhard Walle: Automatic reboot
with kexec and more. Click below for links to the German, Russian and
Japanese translations.
Full Story (comments: none)
PCLinuxOS Magazine Issue 26 is available. Some highlights include: Gnome
Users' Guide, The Poets are Back, VirtualBox: Easier Than You Think!, An
Alphabet of Computer Languages: BASIC, KDE Desktop on PCLinuxOS, Linux
Media Players, and more. There is an
HTML version
and a
PDF
version.
Comments (none posted)
The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for October 18, 2008 covers: Ubuntu 7.04 "End
of Life", Intrepid Release Parties, Archive frozen for Intrepid 8.10,
Preparing for Ubuntu Open Week, New Ubuntu Members, New MOTU video, New US
Ubuntu store, Launchpad 2.1.10 released, Launchpod episode #11, Ubuntu-UK
podcast #16, Inspiron Mini 12 on Dell's website, and much more.
Full Story (comments: none)
Newsletters and articles of interest
HowtoForge
covers
one way of setting up Mandriva 2009.0 as "the perfect server".
"
This is a detailed description about how to set up a Mandriva 2009.0
Free server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web
server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS
server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota,
Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of Mandriva
2009.0."
Comments (none posted)
Distribution reviews
A blog site called Greetings from the free side has a
review
of Mandriva 2009.0, as an upgrade from 2008.1. "
Here's how it
went. I tried to remain in the position of a newcomer that has no clue
about what a command line interface is, so even if I used a terminal a
couple of times, it was just to check some stuff, not to fix it. I launched
the mdkonline applet for the purpose of the upgrade (I always disable it
because of it wastes too much memory to my taste)."
Comments (none posted)
TuxMachines.org has
a
review of the first beta of PCLinuxOS 2009. "
To the excitement
of its many loyal users, the PCLinuxOS development team released the first
beta of the highly anticipated 2009 release. It's been a long time coming
but it seems it's finally on its way. There were no big surprizes found in
this release, but lots of updates."
Comments (none posted)
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
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