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Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 108 for the week of October 29th.

LXer Announcement: 06-Nov-2007

Sander Marechal has been promoted from Contributing Editor to Editor.

When Pamela Jones, better known as PJ, started Groklaw, a Web site devoted to covering and explaining legal cases of interest to the Free Software and Open Source communities, she preferred to remain anonymous and showed no desire to become well-known. Today, Groklaw and its founder are very famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask).

Hans Reiser, well-known open-source developer, goes on trial Nov. 5 for the murder of his wife, Nina Reiser, in Alameda County Superior Court in California. Reiser is the founder of Namesys and creator and primary developer of the popular ReiserFS Linux file system.

A call for papers for the Sixth Annual So Cal Linux Expo. Registration is now open, speakers and exhibitors are signing up steadily for the February 8th-10th event.

Google has unveiled its phone platform, Android. It's yet another Linux OS, freely licensed, that will appear in devices in the second half of next year. Google has signed up over 30 partners including Qualcomm, Motorola, HTC and operators including Deutsche Telekom for the "Open Handset Alliance".

When you listen to digital music, your software or hardware player usually shows information about the current song, which it gets from MP3 tags or Ogg Vorbis comments. Most ripping software supports acquiring this metadata from the CDDB or FreeDB services based on a CD's disc ID. But you can also can fill in and edit metadata with tools such as EasyTag and Picard.

If you're using TiddlyWiki as your note-taking tool, you ought to give TiddlySnip a try. The idea behind this Firefox extension is simple: it allows you to add the currently viewed Web page or selected text snippet to your TiddlyWiki as a new tiddler. But TiddlySnip adds a few clever twists to this basic idea, which turn the Firefox/TiddlyWiki combo into a powerful and extremely useful tool.

The Angolan government, which is firmly in favour of open source software (OSS) solutions, has implemented an OSS enterprise content management system.

The Federal Open Source Alliance has released the results of a study into the adoption of open source software OSS by the US' various federal departments, the Federal Open Source Referendum. The findings show that both open source uptake and appetite are progressing, with 71 percent of respondents having noted that their agency could benefit from open source.

The OpenDocument Foundation has announced its plans to sever itself from participation in or further advocacy of its namesake office document format in favor of the World Wide Web Consortium's XHTML (Extensible HTML)-based Compound Document Format. Although the OpenDocument Foundation is a fairly small organization, the group sports a certain cachet that stems from the ODF-to-MS Office plug-in that the group announced--but did not release publicly--about a year and a half ago.

"I will be continuing to commit bits and pieces of HAMMER, but note that it will probably not even begin to work for quite some time," Matthew Dillon reported on the new clustering filesystem he's developing for DragonFlyBSD. He noted, "I am still on track for it to make it into the end-of-year release."

LXer Feature: 04-Nov-2007

I have a slew of great articles for you in this week's Roundup starting with a trick most FOSS users already know of, how to crack Windows passwords with Linux. Plus Andy Updegrove sets the Record Straight on (Non)Voting in SC 34, Phoronix reviews ATI: Linux vs. Windows Vista, François Bancilhon of Mandriva writes an open letter to Steve Ballmer, new Asus laptop and Everex desktop offerings, an interview with Pamela Jones of Groklaw, Carla Schroder's Tutorial: Linux Backups For Real People, Part 1 and an Italian Judge Tells HP To Refund Pre-Installed XP.

The recent decision by the Open Document Foundation to substitute the World Wide Web Consortium's Compound Document Format in place of the format it was set up to promote, the Open Document Format, has sparked a contentious debate over what shape the format should take. Open document advocates are debating fundamental questions about whether there should be a single document format or multiple formats that interoperate, and the relative importance of format and applications.

"The problem with swap over network is the generic swap problem: needing memory to free memory. Normally this is solved using mempools, as can be seen in the BIO layer," explained Peter Zijlstra. "Swap over network has the problem that the network subsystem does not use fixed sized allocations, but heavily relies on kmalloc(). This makes mempools unusable."

Twice in recent weeks open source projects have surprised me with their lack of openness. In both cases, developers acted or spoke out in such a way as to intentionally push other developers away from their work.

A few days ago I was going to write up how French Linux distributor Mandriva had signed up a deal to deliver 17,000 Intel-powered Classmate PCs with a customized version of Mandriva Linux 2007, built on Mandriva Flash technology, to Nigerian schoolchildren. It wasn't a big deal, but it was still one more small step forward for Linux desktops.

Sun Microsystems is claiming its first major milestone in Project Indiana, with the release of an OpenSolaris developer preview binary distribution. The OpenSolaris Developer Preview features the core operating system, Gnome desktop and graphical installer contained on a Slim Install Live CD for x86. The SPARC edition is still in the pipeline.

StartCom has updated its multimedia-oriented Linux desktop with new features targeted at audio/video fans. While it can also serve as a general purpose desktop, StartCom MultiMedia Edition version ML-5.0.6 comes preloaded with a variety of tools to hear, view, edit, mix, dub, finish, and share music and video projects, the company says.

KOffice, the office suite built on KDE technology and in the KDE Communtiy has recently gotten a lot of press, but is still often underrepresented. In this interview, some key KOffice developers tell us about the recent progress of KDE's Office suite, about Open Standards and how KOffice plays an active role in bringing Freedom to users. We have talked to Boudewijn Rempt, developer of Krita, core KOffice contributor and KOffice release manager, as well as to David Faure who has been taking part in the OASIS, the organization that is responsible for advancing the OpenDocument (ODF) standard.