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Welcome to issue # 74 of openSUSE Weekly News In this Week: * Announcing the openSUSE Ambassadors Program * openSUSE Education * Gnome 2.26.2 for openSUSE 11.1 * Ben Kevan : How to find out how long a process has been running * Duncan Mac-Vicar: Facebook on Kopete, take II

Linux Caixa Mágica 14, a Portuguese desktop and server distribution based on Mandriva Linux, has been released. According to the release announcement, Linux Caixa Mágica is the most widely used Linux distribution in Portugal, often deployed in offices and schools around the country. The latest release features: support for proprietary video drivers by ATI and NVIDIA; support for suspend-to-RAM on notebooks; improved support for modern wireless network cards and printers; over 20,000 software packages in the distribution's repositories, installable with APT for RPM or Synaptic package managers. Main components: Linux kernel 2.6.29, X.Org Server 1.6.1, KDE 4.2.2, GNOME 2.26.1, OpenOffice.org 3.0.1, Firefox 3.0.10.

Embedded Alley (EA) announced it is has completed its port of the Linux/Java-based Android platform to the MIPS architecture. The Embedded Alley Development System for Android-based Devices initially targets devices ranging from set-top boxes (STBs) to industrial equipment running the MIPS-based RMI Au1250 processor.

A CentOS newsletter was what I wanted to have for a long time. It finally materialized the past week and was published today.

As expected, there's a flood of Linux netbook announcements at the Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan. What wasn't expected was for one of the top netbook companies, Asus, to turn its back on one of its own netbooks running Android Linux. I'm sorry I'm not in Taipei for the show. It must have been quite the sight.

Conferences are one way that women can be drawn into the free/libre and open source software (F/LOSS) ecosystem. Many different approaches are needed to increase women's participation in F/LOSS, but face-to-face interaction has proven to be a critical part of the way the technology community in Portland, Oregon has thrived. This article describes the successes of this community, and suggests how other communities could benefit from Portland's experience.

Computex starts on June 2 in Taipei and, as every year, sees the world’s PC industry come together to discuss the development of the next generation of notebooks, netbooks and soon-to-be-released products. Canonical has been attending for the last three years and now, if the announcements are any indication, is very much at the centre of things. We will be demonstrating the Moblin v2 version of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR), which is based on the current beta code from Intel. We are also announcing our intention to develop a version based on the full release of Moblin v2, which we expect will be available very shortly.

Xandros today announced it is developing software products based on the recently released Moblin Version 2 project for Intel® Atom™ processor-based platforms. The new version of Moblin will enable Xandros to provide customizations with advanced Internet, media, social networking and graphics capabilities for the ASUS Eee PC. A turnkey Xandros software solution employing new Moblin v2 technologies will be demonstrated for the first time at the Intel booth at Computex, Taipei, Taiwan, June 2-6, 2009.

There seems to be something of a military campaign afoot. One that surely shows signs of desperation and anxiety on behalf of the instigator. First we had Asus telling it’s potential customers that “It’s Better With Winblow$” using phraseology such as:

“Windows helps you easily get online and connect to your devices and services - without dealing with an unfamiliar environment or major compatibility issues.”

And now we hear that PC World (IMHO probably the worst place to buy a PC or get technical advice anywhere in the UK) are dropping Linux netbooks too.

A day after an Asus Eee PC running Google's Android operating system was shown at Computex Taipei, top executives from the company said the project will be put on the backburner.

The Eee PC with Android is not ready yet because the technology is "not mature," said Jonathan Tsang, vice chairman of Asustek, on the sidelines of a press conference at the show Tuesday.

While there are over 60 names on the list of women in open source on the Geek Feminism wiki, there are far more than 60 women making their mark in open source. I work with talented people every day in my role as Vice President of Marketing and Developer Programs at the Linux Foundation, and see first-hand the contributions women make at the technology and business levels.

"Be polite. Be helpful."
-LinuxChix motto

When attending conferences, working with various open source teams, and generally interacting with people in the open source world, we see women as a small representative minority. The disparity leaves us wondering: "How do we better activate 50% of the population?". The question, "How do we include more women?" has been asked many times and answered in many ways. Cathy Malmrose, CEO of ZaReason, a Linux hardware company, stated, "possibly the most immediately effective solution is to showcase women internationally and their contributions. Simply talking about what women are doing all over the world creates an atmosphere of acceptance, encouraging more women to try contributing, no matter where they are located or what their situation is. Our goal is to normalize the experience of having women on open source projects".

On Friday my housemate and I went down to what used to be the Tiger Direct retail store in Raleigh. It turns out that Tiger Direct bought out what was left of CompUSA and has renamed their stores. I guess the CompUSA name is better known as a brick and mortar retail computer store. The main reasons for the visit were for my housemate to upgrade the RAM in her Dell laptop from 1GB to 2GB and for me to buy an SD card to use in my Sylvania netbook. Some of you may have already noticed that I am now writing regularly for DistroWatch Weekly which means I am trying out different Linux distributions on a regular basis. It might be nice (not to mention less risky and somewhat easier) to install to the SD card rather than my hard drive when first checking things out.

In course of the last decade, every once in a while Microsoft has been known to have accused Linux of infringing one of its patents or another. Despite the said multiple claims for years that elements of the open-source operating system violate its patents, Microsoft had restricted itself till 2009 to supporting legal action against Linux (for instance, the infamous alleged funneling of money by Microsoft to SCO so as to fuel the latter’s lawsuits against IBM and other Linux-user companies). Simultaneously with such actions, Microsoft has not restricted either its alliances with the said companies, including its partnerships with Novell and Red Hat.

As open source projects mature, they tend to join or create a foundation to manage the project's financial and software assets, provide a marketing and legal entity, and help to set the direction of the project. As non-profit organizations, foundations have a specific structure defined by the jurisdiction in which they were formed. This structure typically includes a volunteer board of directors and sometimes paid staff such as a secretary or executive director. As Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, I am often asked "what do you do?". This article will introduce the structure of the GNOME project and its Foundation, describe how the Foundation works to support the GNOME project, and discuss the roles of the people within the GNOME Foundation.

SanDisk Corp. today announced the general availability of two new solid state disk (SSD) drives for netbooks that it said increase random read/write rates by as much as nine times over its first generation netbook SSDs.

"Business gets done between people who get along."
-Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems (paraphrased from an interview)

It is easy to focus on the purely technical side of engineering: design, coding, documentation, licensing issues, and the release process. The interpersonal aspects of engineering also have a vital part to play. An important and frequently overlooked part of the successful free/libre and open source (F/LOSS) enterprise are the soft skills of communication, administration, and relationship building.

PDF Christian Einfeldt Microsoft is at the beginning of a major product launch, called Bing, in an attempt to catch up to Google in search, following the collapse of Microsoft's take-over attempt of Yahoo. While Bing is a re-branding of Microsoft's clunky distant third place "Live Search" search service, Bing is also an attempt to add new features to search. Microsoft calls Bing a decision engine, in that it purports to offer more comparisons in its search results, rather than the simple blue links which have characterized search up to the recent arrival of Wolfram Alpha. But rather than a search engine or even a "decision engine", Bing also appears to be a spin engine, in that it provides partisan answers to controversial topics, such as Steve Ballmer's propensity to throw chairs to blow off stress.

There's been quite a bit of hubub about the KDE project ever since the 4.0 release last year. Critics have slammed the 4.0 series repeatedly, citing the mentality of "Well, it's not good enough to be a full release.". Between the poor publicity, the crashes in Plasma, and the still-developing early features, KDE was definitely not having a good time. Developer blogs were plastered with hateful comments, and one of my favorite devs Aaron Seigo had to temporarily shut down his blog. However, for all the bad rap that the 4.0 series received, KDE has grown wonderfully.

The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the development version 1.9.28

• Partitions: Better detection and listing of the partitions for the live mode and the installer. If you encounter any problem since this version of Elive, please report it!.
• Raid: Now the fake-hardware (featured by the motherboard Bios) RAID disks are supported (thanks to the help and tests of watchwolf). A small help about RAID (software mode) is added in the installer describing how to install Elive on raid devices.
• Macbooks: We have switched from Lilo to Grub, in the previous versions of Elive you saw that sometimes the system doesn't boot anymore after running the fine-tune step because of some problems with lilo. This is now solved by using grub.
• Installer: The development is now all concentrated on the installer, with a large number of minor bugfixes and features.