Since we’re starting with a new base, a brand new name for the development release in Mageia needed to be found.

This was one of the – many – tasks that needed to be done to get Mageia going (although admittedly one of the fun tasks ). Olivier Thauvin, aka Nanar, accepted to take on this task and things started rolling when he posted a new thread in the mageia-discuss mailing list, with a couple of initially proposed names.

Read the full thing at http://blog.mageia.org/?p=32

On September 9 the news of Broadcom's release of the code for some of its wireless Ethernet chip sets sent shockwaves throughout the Linux community. Broadcom owners, as well as distribution developers have a reason to celebrate.

In the past, Broadcom owners had to resort to NDISwrapper or rely upon the limited reversed engineered drivers. Neither was optimal. The release of the code by Broadcom should eventually mean a much better Wi-Fi experience for owners of systems with Broadcom chip sets. But for those that like to read between the lines there may also be a deeper significance to this move.

Read the full thing at http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/why-broadcoms-release-more-significant-code

An articulate, accurate, and well paced article on KDE 4.5, marred only by a point of view that I cannot seem to reconcile - one that appears to state that Ubuntu is the only relevant distribution, and Gnome is the only desktop anyone has ever seen before.

It is quite possible that I am overreacting, or reading far too much into it, but read it for yourself, and see what you think:

http://apcmag.com/linuxs-new-look-kde.htm

(We'll just pretend that the headline of the article doesn't exist)

The Mandriva Community will be autonomous and governance structures will be created to ensure freedom. The Mandriva enterprise is just an element of this independent community.

A community manager will be hired by Mandriva to help the community to implement these plans.

From a desktop point of view, Mandriva intends to be the BEST KDE DISTRIBUTION IN THE WORLD : easy to use, stable, rich featured and with excellent localization.

Read the full thing at http://blog.mandriva.com/2010/09/20/mandriva-news-by-the-board/

As you may have heard, the future of the Mandriva Linux distribution is unclear.

Most employees working on the distribution were laid off when Edge-IT was liquidated. We do not trust the plans of Mandriva SA anymore and we don't think the company (or any company) is a safe host for such a project.

Many things have happened in the past 12 years. Some were very nice: the Mandriva Linux community is quite large, motivated and experienced, the distribution remains one of the most popular and an award-winning product, easy to use and innovative. Some other events did have some really bad consequences that made people not so confident in the viability of their favourite distribution.

Read the full thing at http://www.mageia.org/

I'm not the least bit surprised that the Wall Street Journal is reporting that VMware will be buying Novell's Linux business. After all, I suggested that VMware could really use Novell's SUSE Linux for its future, and I also knew that Novell was in hot and heavy merger and acquisition talks earlier this week. My own sources have also now confirmed that VMware is Novell's suitor.

Read the full thing at http://blogs.computerworld.com/16978/vmware_is_buying_novell

It would appear that Adobe has released a preview release of x86-64 Linux Flash Player (Square).

You can download it at http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

While at RIT around 2004 or 2005, I discovered that a few important machines at the datacenter allowed all students, faculty, and staff to authenticate against them via ssh. Everyone's shells appear to be set to /bin/false (or some derivative) on said machines, so the only thing you'll see after you authenticate is the login banner and your connection will close. I thought to myself, "Fine, no shell for me. I wonder if port forwarding works?"

Read the full thing at http://www.semicomplete.com/articles/ssh-security/

A few weeks ago, I felt inspired by articles from Jeff Kreeftmeijer and Armin Ronacher. I took some time to configure and fine-tune my Vim environment. A lot of new stuff made it into my .vimrc file and my .vim directory. This blog post is a summary describing what I’ve added and how I use it in my daily work.

Read the full thing at http://nvie.com/posts/how-i-boosted-my-vim/

KDE 4.5 brings to the table plenty of useful, functional, innovative features. One of those very features is the Desktop Activity. Although many scoffed at the idea (even tried to get the feature pulled), those same naysayers are (hopefully) glad their requests were not followed. Why? The KDE Desktop Activities feature is a great new desktop metaphor that takes the Linux desktop to new levels of organization.

Read the full thing at http://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/358560-kde-45-desktop-activities-brings-new-meaning-to-organization