The stable release of Drizzle has generated a lot of interest in migrating previous MySQL web sites to Drizzle. The good news for people attempting such migrations is that this isn't incredibly difficult in many cases; this article will describe what to look out for and how to go about converting a web site or any other database related project.

Read the full thing at http://www.h-online.com/open/features/A-migrator-s-guide-to-Drizzle-1217810.html

The Mageia forums are online!

These are the official portal for the Mageia community: support, distro testing reports, contributions, discussions…. The default language is English but you can join any of the other local Mageia community forums

Read the full thing at http://blog.mageia.org/en/2011/03/29/welcome-in-mageia-forums/

Lennart Poettering has sent out a note warning Fedora users that they will see a new top-level /run directory soon. "In the past weeks key people from the Debian, Suse, Ubuntu and Fedora camps (and others, too) discussed the whole issue forth and back, to find a solution to stop the misuse of /dev before it becomes even more widespread. Various solutions have been suggested, but in the end it all boiled down to the fact that /var/run does not belong beneath /var and what we really want is a top-level directory /run, and that that is the only really clean solution.

Read the full thing at http://lwn.net/Articles/436012/

If you’re like me, you’ve got terrabytes of space full of digitized media extracted from DVDs and audio CDs. If not, disk space is cheap and ripping audio is pretty easy.

Mostly.

Read the full thing at http://wm161.net/2011/03/27/rippit-the-no-nonsense-media-ripper/

Firefox 4′s brand new Sync feature is one of the main attractions of the latest release. It allows you to sync browser data, such as bookmarks, preferences, history, and tabs – but not extensions – across multiple Firefox installations. Here’s how it’s done…

Read the full thing at http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/tutorials/firefox-4-sync-step-by-step/

As outlined in the Mageia roadmap, here comes Primavera, the second alpha release.

Many thanks to all those who worked on this important step towards our first, official release: packagers, translators, developers, admins and testers.

Again, this has been a very busy month: our build system is now running at full capacity and the list of available software has grown to over 6,100 SRPMS, including full integration of LibreOffice and Eclipse, rpm 4.8.1, KDE 4.6.1. Now we need your help to test the distro!

Read the full thing at http://blog.mageia.org/en/2011/03/15/mageia-1-alpha-2-primavera-is-coming/

“Free as in freedom, and free as in no cost, too!”

GNU Free Call is a new project to develop and deploy secure self-organized communication services worldwide for private use and for public administration. We use the open standard SIP protocol and GNU SIP Witch to create secured peer-to-peer mesh calling networks, and we welcome all participation in our effort.

Read the full announcement at http://planet.gnu.org/gnutelephony/?p=14

There seem to be many different articles concerning how Red Hat has chosen to distribute its Kernel Source Code (SRPM) in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Here are a just a few of them

Read the full thing at http://centosnow.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-new-kernel-srpm-distribution.html

Well-known free software activist and GPL expert Bradley Kuhn says Red Hat's recent change of policy with regard to provision of its kernel source appears, on the surface, to be GPL-compliant.
What's your next move?

"The kernel change appears to be primarily a packaging decision that makes things less convenient (likely for companies such as Oracle), but Red Hat's change with kernel packaging appears on its surface to be GPL compliant," Kuhn told iTWire in response to a query.

Read the full thing at http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/45725-gpl-expert-gives-red-hat-the-all-clear

Helsinki, Finland 7.3.2011. Digia Plc. (DIG1V) has signed an agreement with Nokia to acquire the Qt commercial licensing and services business. Through the proposed acquisition, around 3500 desktop and embedded customer companies from various industries are targeted to be transferred to Digia. The transaction is expected to be closed by the end of March 2011. Nokia will continue to invest in future development of Qt for the benefit of all users, both Commercial and LGPL.

Read the full thing at http://www.digia.com/C2256FEF0043E9C1/0/405002251