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

The first Alpha of Mageia has been a great success and all teams are working hard now on the next development release planned for the 15th of March.

Read the full thing at http://blog.mageia.org/?p=516

Although you have exchanged public keys with your remote server to avoid that boring bit of entering your super long secure user password everytime you are about to login, you still need to face ssh syntax in order get someting done. Yes, it is just single line command with few words but typing that line 30 times a day can take you at least 10 minutes of problem solving time, bore you and more iportatbly it may even give you a headache.

Read the full thing at http://linuxconfig.org/avoiding-tedious-remote-login-ssh-syntax

The Romanian software developer Bogdan Vatra has announced a first alpha version of his Qt implementation for the Android mobile operating system. The release might be timed just right for many developers, since Nokia has, in the context of its cooperation with Microsoft, announced that it does not intend to develop a Windows Phone variant of the GUI framework. On the other hand, more than a few Qt users are probably interested in developing software for Android devices rather than using Silverlight or the XNA framework to develop software for Microsoft's mobile platform.

Read the full thing at http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Qt-implementation-for-Android-introduced-1194815.html

The Mageia Alpha was released about a week ago. I finally got around to posting some screenshots. This is the x86-64 version. It is plain, but appears fairly stable.

Firewall Builder is a firewall configuration and management GUI that supports configuring a wide range of firewalls from a single application. Supported firewalls include Linux iptables, BSD pf, Cisco ASA/PIX, Cisco router access lists and many more. The complete list of supported platforms along with downloadable binary packages and soure code can be found at http://www.fwbuilder.org.

Read the full thing at http://www.howtoforge.com/using-firewall-builder-to-configure-cisco-asa-and-pix