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People Behind KDE releases the fourth and final interview in its series of interviews with students who are working on KDE as part of the Google Summer of Code 2007 - meet Marijn Kruisselbrink, Alexandr Goncearenco, Emanuele Tamponi and Vladimir Kuznetsov!

LXer Feature: 07-Oct-2007

Some of the big articles this week include Mono becomes a trap, are computers sold with no OS profitable?, an editorial by Carla Schroder, Swedish police save 400 cars by using MySQL, Is Ubuntu losing its crown to PCLinuxOS?, The Next Leap for Linux and a tribute to Ken Starks. All this and more in the LXer Weekly Roundup.

Last week I spent the day at eMDs talking with Dr. Winn and the excellent eMDs team. Sadly, I cannot talk about eMDs Open Source plans yet, but I can say that they will soon be making a big splash. I had some pretty cool pictures from my visit, including one with Robby the Robot, so post also servers to announce that I have migrated FredTrotter.com to wordpress, in order to be able to post pictures with my blog posts.

Uruguay's government this week announced the results of a study indicating that XO computers from the One Laptop Per Child project were a better value for the nation's schoolchildren than Intel's similar offering, the Classmate PC. The next step is likely to be a purchase agreement between OLPC and Uruguay for at least 100,000 laptops. Though nothing has been finalized yet, when asked what needs to happen for formal agreement to occur, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte simply says, "business closure."

If there's a better system repair kit than the Gentoo-based SystemRescueCD Linux distribution, we haven't seen it yet. The new 0.4 version of SystemRescueCd was released on Oct. 4. This new edition focuses on disk partitioning, Vista support, and data rescue tasks. In the past, we've found SystemRescueCD to be the best of the best when it comes to repairing troubled systems. We see every reason to believe that this version will be even better.

So, how are you liking FreeBSD? Do you believe it's something you work with, live with day after day? If you find you've gotten used to it, maybe the time has come to get more acquainted with one of the best features of FreeBSD: It's relatively painless to update the entire system by rebuilding it from code. The emphasis is not so much slavishly chasing the cutting edge of BSD technology. Instead, our focus will be on security updates and optimization.

Has it been a while since you used FTP from the command line? While there are decent GUI-based FTP clients (such as gFTP), you can automate operations with the command-line version and handle file transfers with no user interaction at all.

It is Roktober time again at the Amarok Project and they are giving away an iAudio7 mobile music player to encourage donations. Roktober is the time to review the events of the past 12 months, start planning and do the fundraising for the next year. If you do not have the time to actively help with the project this is your call, for each €10 donated you will be given an entry into the prize draw. Amarok funds are spent on the webserver, travel & accommodation for developer meetings and event staff expenses. It has never been easier to help keep Amarok rockin'.

The Linux-based eX2 in-flight entertainment system (IFE) from Panasonic Avionics was the big winner at this year's Avion Awards, sponsored by an IFE trade group. The Best Overall IFE awards went to Emirates, Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific Airways, all running variants of eX2. This Red Hat-based system also is installed on Qantas Airways and on Boeing 777s operated by Delta and Continental. eX2, the newest version of Panasonic's in-flight entertainment systems, offers not the canned radio stations of yesteryear, but rather audio and video on demand, games, and even online books, depending on the carrier.

Will democratizing sustainable housing be enough to change Canada? It’s too early to tell, but there’s a start. Open source can make sustainable designs available. Nobody owns it, everybody can use it, and anybody can improve it. The Now House is one sustainable housing design project created by one small team. What would happen if one hundred teams created projects like this?

Michael D. Setzer II, the leader of the project once known as Ghost for Linux (G4L), recently received a cease and desist email message from a lawyer representing Symantec. The company is demanding that the project change its name because the use of "Ghost" violates a trademark held by Symantec for its Norton Ghost disk imaging software.

Some lawsuits begin quietly, others are launched with great fanfare. The Software Freedom Law Center and two BusyBox developers have recently decided to take the latter approach to address a GPL compliance problem.

Accessing your home server safely can be problematic, especially if you don't have a fixed IP address, but with Linux, DynDNS, PAM, and NX Free you can create a safe remote access path to your machine. A few months ago, I had to travel from my hometown of Montevideo, Uruguay, to New York. As I would be staying abroad a few weeks, I had to make sure I could access my home server safely. Despite Linux's stability, I had to allow for my family having problems back home, and I couldn't depend on giving instructions over the phone or by messaging.

Prowling the x86 server warpath, Sun today revealed its roadmap of products set to bring the company fully into the virtualization brouhaha. The server maker's new xVM virtualization platform will span across its server, storage, and networking product lines. The first offering will be comprised of a hypervisor and management software set to be released next year. Sun laid down the roadmap basics at a press meeting in San Francisco.

The heated battle between paper companies and proprietary EHR companies for market share is always fascinating to watch. Linux Medical News labs weights in on the subject by doing a rigorous, side-by-side comparison of Paper company products vs. Proprietary Electronic Health Record software company products. The results may surprise you.

Microsoft has announced (NY Times Article) Health Vault. What should have followed here is a review of the service by my actually trying it. I was in the process of registering when I began reading the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy and I had to stop right there with my review when I read it. In addition to the contract being lengthy, it specifically states: "In using the Service, you may not:..

On Oct. 4, Novell released openSUSE 10.3, the newest version of its popular community Linux distribution. This version of openSUSE includes a flexible Linux-Windows dual-boot configuration, improved user interface, Microsoft Office file compatibility with the latest OpenOffice.org office productivity suite and enhanced multimedia support.

Although the National Health Council recommends you to keep a personal health record and take it with you to your doctor,it’s one thing to document your medical information…It’s another to know when and how to use it. Open MedicDrive,a collaborative open architecture based application has launched the educational Wiki for advancing and educating users about the role of Healthcare Information Technology in Personal Health Record Management.

You've been ripping CDs for years, but what about those dusty cassette tapes in your attic and all that bargain-basement vinyl at used book sales? With Audacity, you can capture those vintage tunes, clean up their sound, and carry them around on your MP3 player. Audacity is a powerful free cross-platform audio editor. It includes tools such as noise removal filters and automatic track splitting that can speed up the process of turning your antique audio into shiny new MP3s or Oggs.

Kino is a video editor that allows you to produce your own video masterpieces using only free and open source software. With it, you can capture and edit clips from your video camera, add titles, insert still images, create transitions between scenes, and output the result in a number of formats. Best of all, it's easy to learn to use. But don't rely on the version in your distro -- grab the 1.1.1 release from SourceForge.net and build it yourself.