From Open:

It's been more than a week since we last posted. For good reason. The lights have been burning at all indecent hours at openBench Labs to bring you an arboretum of facts and observations as you plow your way through storage networking to figure out what designs cost least in money and trauma. In the first of a series of reviews we pose the question: Is it time for SMBs to move to a SAN fabric? Read what openBench Labs discovers as we examine 2GB SAN infrastructure using nStor storage system and storage management software, and products from Brocade and Emulex.

I've posted some screenshots of Mandrake 10.0 Community. Screenshots include the new Mandrake Control Center, KDE 3.2 Control Center, Konqueror and Kontact - an app that wraps KMail, KNode, Korganizer and some other apps into one interface.

You can view the screenshots here

MozillaQuest Magazine's (mozillaquest.com) has some very nice and comprehensive coverage of GIMP 2.0. In addition to the GIMP 2.0 source code release story, MozillaQuest Magazine has a recent overview and three tutorials based on GIMP 1.3, which is the development version of GIMP 2.0 and therefore is a very good preview of GIMP 2.0. Altogether, lots of nice screen shots of GIMP 2.0.

Release notes

- Features based on Mandrakelinux 10.0 Community for IA32.
- Improved Serial ATA support, including Promise, Silicon Image and VIA chipsets.
- Experimental support for 32-bit GL acceleration for XFree86 supported cards.

Read more here

Looking for a Linux compatible camera for less that $100? MozillaQuest Magazine (mozillaquest.com) reports: The photographic quality of the Microtek Take-It S1/D1 is impressive for an under $100 digital camera. In addition to taking digital photographs, you can use the S1/D1 to make video clips and record sound -- or use it as a Web cam. Moreover, you can upload your S1 digital photographs, video clips, and sound clips to your PC or show and play them on your TV.

All in all, at its $99 list price the Microtek Take-It S1 Digital Camera is a very good bang for the bucks. Moreover, other than the Web cam function, the S1 works with all three major consumer/desktop operating systems, Linux, Apple Mac, and MS Windows.

From the Cooker AMD64 Mailing List:

Current technotes available at this beta time. If you know/need others please do not hesitate to tell me so. Comments welcome. Thanks.

Mandrake Linux/AMD64 10.0 Release Notes
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The contents of this CD-ROM are Copyright (C) 2004 MandrakeSoft S.A. and others. Please see the individual copyright notices in each source package for distribution terms. The distribution terms of the tools copyrighted by MandrakeSoft and Red Hat Software are as noted in the file COPYING. Mandrake and its logo are trademarks of MandrakeSoft S.A. Red Hat, RPM and glint are trademarks of Red Hat Software, Inc.
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1. Hardware

- Serial ATA support

Promise & VIA Serial ATA are supported through the libata based kernel drivers. Only software RAID configurations are supported so far. There is also experimental support for Silicom Image SATA controllers.

Note that only the following chipsets have been tested: Promise PDC20376, VIA 8237.

Mandrakesoft announces the immediate availability of the "Server Essentials Handbook," a comprehensive 360 page guide that contains essential information about the use of Mandrakelinux as a server. The handbook focuses on Mandrakelinux 9.2, but the enclosed information applies to all recent versions of Mandrakelinux.

Perfect for all Linux users who need quality reference material on important server topics, the "Server Essentials Handbook" is available now at Mandrakestore.com.

From Frozen Tux:

My girlfriend recently got a Kodak CX4230 Still image camera, and since I am curious, I couldn't resist trying to connect it to my Linux boxes and see if it would work.

Before I go any further, I would like to note that I am in no way an expert on USB, PTP or Digital cameras. I merely got it to work under a couple of distributions, and would like to share the experience with everyone else.

My first attempts at connecting this camera to the Linux box started by making a lot of searches on the Internet, and not a single search showed up with the Kodak CX series and Linux on the same page. I can only assume that this means not a lot of people has tried that before. Because of this, I decided to write a few lines about how I finally got it all to work, and you are currently reading that short page on how to get it to work.

Read the full thing here

From Linux World:

HP has supposedly been selling MandrakeSoft Linux on the desktop for a while but has been so quiet about it that for all intents and purposes it's been a stealth operation. That's all about to change, with two new Linux desktops ready for rolling out by HP to the North American SMB market, both boxes to be sold with Mandrake Linux.

Read the full thing here

SanDisk's Linux support gets it an Editor's Choice award. MozillaQuest Magazine (mozillaquest.com) reports: Removable memory card readers make using removable memory cards more convenient and extend the usability and range of applications in which you can use removable memory cards. They let you get more and better use out of digital cameras that support them. They let you take more photographs at the highest quality level that your digital camera supports.