From Open for Business:

This past week a number of exciting developments toward the popularization of Open Source desktops occurred. Novell heralded the arrival of Mono 1.0. Mandrakesoft announced the acquisition of a French IT services firm, further indicating its return to financial health. Real Networks inked deals to bundle Helix and Real Players on major GNU/Linux desktops. Out of the noise and clammer, nevertheless, there are two announcements that I believe are the best tickets to moving the GNU/Linux desktop forward, and they both had a name other than Red Hat, Novell or Mandrakesoft attached to them. They both involved Apple.

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June 30. 2004 (Karlsruhe, Germany). The tenth annual LinuxTag proved to be a very successful event for the forty-plus KDE developers who presented their award-winning desktop environment to more than 16,000 enthusiastic visitors at "Europe's largest OpenSource Event". As expected, the upcoming KDE Community World Summit 2004 ("aKademy"), which will be held between 21-29 August, 2004 in Ludwigsburg (Stuttgart Region), Germany, strongly influenced many of the talks and presentations by the KDE team.

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As a part of the new 1.0-6106 driver for Linux, NVidia included their NVidia Settings app (access by typing 'nvidia-settings'). I though I'd whip up some screenshots so you can see what it looks like, and what you have access to. Screenshots can been seen in the Gallery

Mandrakesoft today announces the acquisition of "Edge-IT", a Linux support and services company. The Edge-IT acquisition strengthens our commitment to the corporate market.

Additional details are available at: http://www.mandrakesoft.com/company/press/pr?n=/pr/corporate/2487

Ahead of the guestimated August/September timeframe, NVidia has released new video drivers for both Linux x86 and AMD64. Major changes are support for running 32-bit OpenGL applications on 64-bit AMD64, fixing 32-bit kernel driver from running on certain AMD64 CPUs and support for 4kstack kernels.

You can grab the the x86 drivers here and the AMD64 drivers here.

KBC Securities yesterday initiated Oesearch coverage of Mandrakesoft, with an "Outperform" rating and a target price of 7.00 Euros. The report, entitled "Kill Bill" can be found at the Mandrakesoft Investors Page.

From Linux Planet:

Use of Linux by nonprofit organizations is nothing new. For one thing, the lower costs of Linux fit in well with limited budgets. Now, though, some end users at nonprofit organizations are choosing Linux for a completely different reason--namely, a better desktop experience than they've been getting from Windows.

"Using Windows ME, we've had lots of problems with popups and spyware. There's been none of that with Linux," says Subroto Mukerjea, a site director for the Computer Learning Center in Fairfax County, VA. Mukerjea oversees one of 14 sites within an after school program for children and teens aged six to 16.

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From KDE News:

A Task Force Team of KDE and Knoppix hackers and enthusiasts created "just in time" for LinuxTag 2004 two programs which harvested an overwhelming response from visitors: FreeNX Server and kNX Client. Although not yet officially released, several presentations showed a well working preview of the KDE version for the speed boosting NX Terminal Server technology.

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From Desktop Linux:

Nexedi.org has published an article introducing "umibuilder," an interesting free software tool that can be used to update Linux packages. The tool is perhaps most useful for automating security updates of systems using Mandrake Linux. Because it downloads the latest versions of RPMs from the Internet, Umibuilder can also be used to automate security updates of Mandrake systems, according to the article.

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From KDE News

Chris Dunphy wrote a nice four page KDE 3.2.1 Review in March which we obviously missed and which imo hasn't received the attention it deserves yet. On the other side we were notified by "illogic-al" that he has written a short "What's New, KDE 3.3 Preview" based on KDE 3.3 Alpha. The first KDE 3.3 Beta with more completed features is expected to be released in about one week.

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