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An antidote to through-the-roof pricing. A tiny open source company is lining up to become the latest roadblock to database vendors happily charging enterprises fat software licenses.

Since its inception, the Xfce desktop environment has aimed to provide high functionality with only modest demands on system resources, with the overarching goal of leaving more facilities for the user to run applications. One of the significant changes in recent releases of Xfce 4 is the Thunar file manager, which replaces the original xffm. Thunar does a good deal to advance the goals of its parent project: it's fast and lean, especially by today's standards of hardware, yet it offers rich functionality. Like its namesake, Thunor, the Saxon god of thunder, Thunar is much smaller than "giants" like Konqueror and Nautilus, yet powerful in its own right. If you want some of the functionality afforded by the GUI file managers of the larger desktop environments, but with less overhead, Thunar may fit your needs.

South African Linux service provider Synaq says open source and Linux email messaging is a rapidly growing trend that businesses need to consider.

Programmers have begun serious work to cut consumption, extending PC Linux battery life and easing server costs.

Posting a series of three patches, Nick Piggin announced that he was working on a rewrite of the buffer layer which he calls fsblock, "the name is fsblock because it basically ties the fs layer to the block layer." As to just what the buffer layer is, Nick explained, "the buffer layer is a layer between the pagecache and the block device for block based filesystems. It keeps a translation between logical offset and physical block number, as well as meta information such as locks, dirtyness, and IO status of each block. This information is tracked via the buffer_head structure."

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Introductions of a Dictionary, Photoframe, and Facebook Plasmoids, and a Weather and Solid DataEngine in Plasma. Usability improvements and optimisations in KListView, used for icon views in Konqueror and Dolphin. The start of a shared, common location for vocabulary files across KDE-Edu applications, with initial implementation in Kanagram...

The June edition of The GNOME Journal was released on the 24th of June. Articles: GStreamer audio effects, an interview with Ken VanDine, an introduction to Accerciser and a summary of GNOME.conf.au 2007.

The Amarok team released version 1.4.6 of their player. The newest release includes a new icon set, faster SQLite and many bugfixes. Release notes can be found at on the Amarok website and packages are available for download for Kubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, Gentoo and others. Their website announces that "next week the annual KDE conference, Akademy, in Glasgow is starting, keep an eye on the developer blogs to follow the happenings there. Thanks to your continued donations and support from KDE e.V, 7 Amarok developers will be present They are looking forward to a very productive week hacking on exciting new Amarok features."

Following a recent patch that translated Documentation/HOWTO into Japanese, a new patch offered a translation of the same document into Chinese. Li Yang noted, "currently Chinese involvement in Linux kernel is very low, especially compared to China's large population base. Language could be the main obstacle. Hopefully this document will help more Chinese to contribute to Linux kernel."

LXer Feature: 24-Jun-2007

The big stories this week include Bolivarian Computers made in Venezuela, an illuminating comparison of ODF and OOXML, Mandriva's CEO says publicly that they will not sign a cross licensing deal with Microsoft, Miguel de Icaza shows off Microsoft's Flash replacement and an "expert" on Innovation vacillates on his own definition in reference to Open Source software. All these stories and more for your reading enlightenment.

There's a very interesting paper published by Goldman Sachs and posted by Hewlett Packard, Fear the Penguin [PDF]. You will recall that both companies sent representatives to join Steve Ballmer and Ron Hovsepian on the stage and to speak about how wonderful it all was on the day Microsoft and Novell announced their deal. According to the paper, Linux is going to take over the corporate data center.

[The report is a few months old, it will be interesting to see how accurate its predictions turn out to be. - Scott]

For many years, the term "open source" has been subject to abuse. Despite efforts by the OSI (Open Source Initiative) to trademark the phrase, the USPTO (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office) claimed the phrase was too generic to be trademarked, thereby weakening efforts to guard against its improper usage, according to Danese Cooper, secretary and treasurer of the OSI board.

TimeSys has published a second podcast on achieving rapid boots on Linux devices. "Fast boots -- the sequel" discusses the relationship of footprint and boot time, post-2.6.15 kernels' CONFIG_EMBEDDED option, application pre-linking and profiling, filesystem selection, execute-in-place (XIP), and initramfs, among other interesting techniques.

The trade press reported a lot of rumors this past week about the chances for a patent protection pact between Red Hat and Microsoft similar to the agreements Microsoft negotiated with Novell, Xandros, and Linspire. Red Hat doesn't appear to be interested in the least. Here's why.

A start-up located in the French Alps near Grenoble is readying a tiny ARM-based Linux single-board computer (SBC) in a USB key form-factor. Calao, based in Sant Martin le Vinoux, is also readying a tiny Linux SBC designed to plug into QIL (quad in-line) IC sockets.

Quick -- name an open source product that's innovative. If you said "Linux," you failed the test. Linux -- the darling of counter-culture programmers, for its "free software" advocacy and for providing an alternative to Microsoft Windows -- is not an innovation. It's essentially a copy of another operating system, called Unix, that has been around since the 1970s. Making a copy of existing product? No one that I know would call that "innovation."

[Contradictions abound in this article. - Scott]

Mandriva this week announced the general availability of Mandriva Corporate Desktop 4.0, the latest version of its enterprise-dedicated, KDE-based Linux work station. The new desktop features a 2.6.17 kernel and can be installed in under 15 minutes and extensively customized, thanks to a new post-installation tool, the company said.

This article is a step-by-step guide to using two passwords with EncFS. The primary password is required and may be used to secure all data; the secondary password is optional and may be stored on USB stick or other removable media and used to secure more sensitive data. EncFS can also be combined with block [...]

What does Xandros get out of its recent deal with Microsoft? Well, for one thing, the well-known Linux desktop distributor will get Open XML/ODF translators for OpenOffice. These translators are being developed through the SourceForge-hosted Open XML/ODF Translator project. This is the same translation project that Novell and Microsoft have been working on for some time now.

Since piloting this video series, we’ve received lots of questions about the XO’s mesh network. How can these laptops “talk” to each other even without widespread internet access? How is the network they create different from the network at your home or office? Episode 03 explains it all.