Andrew Morton calls for more kernel testing, Aug 08, 2007

During the opening keynote at this week's LinuxWorld Expo, kernel developer Andrew Morton called for more assistance in testing the Linux kernel from users, and predicted that virtualization would be the big thing for the next few years of kernel development.

Emacs fans, limber up your fingers -- there's a new GNU in town. Almost six years after the release of the previous version, the Free Software Foundation has announced the release of GNU Emacs 22.

A few weeks ago, MEPIS released SimplyMEPIS 6.5. The latest version of the Ubuntu-based desktop distribution offers a number of interesting new features, including a 64-bit release and Beryl for 3-D desktop effects. After spending a fair amount of time with the release, I found it to be a worthy update to earlier versions of MEPIS.

If you'd like multimedia support with a minty fresh theme, try Linux Mint 2.2, an Ubuntu-based distro that throws in support for Flash 9, Windows Media Format, DVDs, MP3s, and troublesome wireless cards.

Linux.conf.au (LCA) 2007 continued Wednesday with a keynote by Dr. Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a full day of talks and tutorials, and a cameo appearance by Linus Torvalds.

A few weeks ago, Xandros released an update of its Business Desktop OS with a number of new features, including 3-D effects and desktop search. The 3-D effects fell flat in my tests, but I found the distro to be a pretty good OS if you're looking for a Windows replacement.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth's invitation to openSUSE developers last week has generated heat from openSUSE developers and some members of the Ubuntu community. In an effort to set the record straight, Shuttleworth says that it was not his intent to offend openSUSE devs.

On Friday Several kernel developers issued a position paper criticizing the GPLv3 drafts. That prompted Software Freedom Law Center (SLFC) chairman Eben Moglen to issue a "renewed invitation" yesterday to kernel developers to participate in the GPLv3 process. Linus Torvalds responded to Moglen's statement by saying that his position on the license is clear and that he's "fed up" with the FSF.

GNOME's Women's Summer Outreach Program (WSOP) is underway, with twice the number of projects originally scheduled, thanks to Google's generosity. The program has not only brought a few more women into the GNOME fold, but it seems to have jump-started efforts to actively recruit female developers within other open source projects as well.

It's been nearly a year since OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released, so I sat down with Louis Suárez-Potts, chair of OpenOffice.org's community council and community manager, at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Ore., last week to see what's on the OpenOffice.org development roadmap.

The Women's Summer Outreach Program (WSOP) will accept three developers, and pay a stipend of $3,000 to each developer for a project to be completed by September.

Dapper Drake won't debut until June, but the Ubuntu folks are already planning for the next release, dubbed Edgy Eft.

Last November, Linspire issued a press release announcing that Micro Center would be devoting floor space and staff to desktop Linux. I decided to take a trip to my local Micro Center this week to see how that initiative was going. Unfortunately, the answer is not so well.

Last Friday, after the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, I sat in on the fifth Fedora User and Developer Conference (FUDCon) at the Boston University School of Management.

MEPIS, one of the more popular Debian-derived distributions, may be moving in a new direction soon. MEPIS founder Warren Woodford is considering building future MEPIS releases from Ubuntu sources rather than from Debian.

Despite having a strong feature set and excellent performance and stability, PostgreSQL lags significantly behind MySQL in one key area: Many more open source projects support MySQL than PostgreSQL.

Bob Young is, arguably, one of the most influential figures in the development of Linux and open source. By co-founding Red Hat with Mark Ewing in 1993, Young helped turn Linux into a household name. After being involved with Red Hat for more than 12 years, Young recently stepped down from Red Hat's board of directors. We caught up with him to see what his plans are, and what his thoughts are on Red Hat and the future of open source.

Last week, Microsoft announced a set of new Shared Source licenses. Normally, new Microsoft licenses wouldn't be cause for the open source community to pay attention, but the new Shared Source Licenses have gotten praise from open source proponents such as Tim O'Reilly, and even the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has weighed in with positive comments.

A few weeks ago, Trolltech announced that it would be sponsoring the work of KDE developer Aaron Seigo full-time.