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The landmark event of the KDE calendar, the KDE World Conference, continues to surprise even its most excitable fans with the emergence of six audio interviews recorded at aKademy 2006, in Dublin, Ireland. The interviews all feature prominent current contributors, and cover a diverse and interesting mix of topics relevant to the present and future of the KDE project.

New Breed Software on Monday released a new version of Tux Paint, its popular open source drawing program for young children. Along with source code, downloads of Tux Paint v0.9.16 are now available for users of Fedora Core Linux, Red Hat Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Apple Mac OS X.

A Canadian open source group focused on the public sector is bypassing this week's GTEC conference in favour of a direct marketing approach to members of parliament.

The Spanish KDE developers together with HispaLinux and ZaragozaWireless are organising a KDE Conference in Zaragoza, Spain on 4th and 5th of November. It is oriented towards people with good computer knowledge who want to get started with KDE programming and for users that want to know the present and future of graphical environments. The talks will include Antonio Larrosa talking about the KDE project and how to get involved, Isaac Clerencia about KDE Ruby & KDE 4 and Albert Astals about KPDF/Okular and "the life and death of a bug".

Acrosser Technology is shipping a 3.5-inch SBC (single-board computer) powered by a two-chip Via chipset. The AR-B1652 is available with 533MHz or 800MHz "Mark" Corefusion processors, and runs a 2.4 Linux kernel. It targets low-power, low-noise applications, including kiosks, automation, and POS (point-of-sales/service).

Trolltech has issued new patch releases of all current versions of Qt. Versions 3.3.7, 4.1.5 and 4.2.1 fix a security flaw which can be triggered by transforming specially-prepared pixmaps. It is a recommended update, although no real-world security issues exploiting these flaws have been recorded so far. Distributions are also releasing updated packages, note that distributions may release security-patched updates without changing the Qt version number.

Yet another company is moving toward an enterprise/open source split. Last week MySQL AB announced that it would offer two distinct versions of MySQL: the MySQL Enterprise release for paying customers, and MySQL Community Server for open source users. What does that mean for the open source community?

To help spur the creation of a lot more applications for Linux, the Free Standards Group and technical publishing firm O'Reilly Media have launched the Linux Standard Base Developer Network (LDN), a developer's network loosely modeled after the Microsoft Developer Network.

Foreword: This insightful guest editorial anticipates the emergence of embedded Linux as a key margins driver for the automotive industry, due to its ability to run "driver-assist" applications perceived as "high-value" by consumers. It was written by Wind River's chief marketing officer, John Bruggeman.

A new and free software period, which brings the utilization of Linux-based operating systems with open source codes instead of Microsoft's operating systems in computers, will begin in Turkish public organizations.

A vernacular search engine on India --Bhramara -- offering web search interfaces in Kannada and Hindi besides English, has been launched here. Named after the bee that collects nectar from flowers, Bhramara endeavours to capture this metaphor in Internet search with a search engine that collects and sorts selected English and vernacular sites on India.

Greg Dean, a communications student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, has a new twist on open source business models. For more than a year, Dean has been working with his friends Devon Girard and Charles Latimer, as well as an unnamed lawyer, to find a way to merge the concepts of a co-operative with that of a corporation to create an open source company that he currently calls the Information and Communications Technology/ Open Source Co-op (ICT/OS). Recently, he spoke to the Vancouver PHP Users' Group about the structure that he is starting to implement.

Gumstix has juiced up the tiny Linux PC based on its gumstick-sized SBCs (single-board computers). The newly shipping 400xm-cf model boasts a 400MHz PXA255 processor, and comes preinstalled with Linux 2.6.17.

Welcome to this year's 43rd issue of DistroWatch Weekly! On the eve of several major new releases, such as Firefox 2.0, Fedora Core 6 and Ubuntu 6.10, this week's DistroWatch Weekly takes a brief look at some of the new products, comments on the new Fedora 6 release, and asks whether Firefox has lost some of its former glory.

South Africa-developed laboratory information system, Bika Lims 1.2, has been released. The new release is also ready for ISO 17025 accreditation and at least one accreditation using the software has been achieved.

Open source software is a software license that allows the user to take a look under the hood, make any tweaks and adjustments that they might like to see, and then freely redistribute that same software to anyone they wish.

Now we’re thinking of having a “user and business” conference, aimed at bringing together the people who deploy and manage Ubuntu in the real world (well, in the USA in particular, but let’s think globally) with those who help to produce it. The big question is - who would want to come? In order to run such an event we would need about 500 people to attend. It would be a 2-day conference (with additional days of workshops and tutorials separately, probably) and would likely be run in close proximity to another big event.

Messing up your hard disk's partition table doesn't take much effort, especially when you're preparing a dual-boot machine. Even a mistimed fdisk /mbr can spell disaster, erasing the master boot record (MBR) and making the disk unusable. But victims of damaged MBRs rejoice -- gpart can save your day. This utility scans a hard disk and prepares a partition table of areas that resemble a partition, which you can use to make the disk bootable again.

Much less Linux viruses exist when one compares the numbers to ones on the ubiquitous Windows, but with compatibility libraries like WINE to run windows software on Linux, and and "windows-on-Linux" virtualisation products like Win4Lin an antivirus on Linux is essential.

The talk lately has centred about Vista's security APIs, but Linux certainly needs improvements in this area, because AV vendors still rely on an external kernel module to implement "real time" file scanning.