When it comes to Linux, most U.S. headlines involve Canonical, Novell or Red Hat. But another Linux distribution — from Mandriva S.A. of Paris, France — is making a name for itself in the global IT channel. Consider this: More than 2,000 IT partners have lined up to back Mandriva, up from about 1,200 in 2007.

Read the full thing at http://www.thevarguy.com/2008/12/16/mandriva-linux-attracts-2000-partners/

We are pleased to announce you the launch, by January ‘09, of a world wide Mandriva Community Steering Committee whose main targets will be to:

• unify and leverage the Mandriva Community and Ecosystem, thus aligning joint efforts towards clear goals,
• provide a better visibility on products releases,
• and last but not least, establishing a key milestone on the road to success.

Mandriva's CEO should rehire Adam Williamson. He has been the PR and backbone of the mandriva's community and losing him will be a great loss to us all.

We are aware of the financial situation of Mandriva S.A., but the decision of firing Mr. Williamson will only cause the loss of one of the most precious assets Mandriva has. The continuous flow of news and information, which is necessary to give popularity and visibility to the distro was mainly in Adam’s hands during the last years. He wrote news, commented reviews, helped users in trouble and explained the Mandriva choices to all the community, bridging the gap between the company and the users. Not only, he did all these things with passion and kindness, always respecting different opinions and hearing users suggestions.

Read and sign the petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/qws589/petition.html

Back in September we looked at the Intel Atom performance on a few Linux distributions using the ASUS Eee PC 901, but now with new stable releases of some of the most popular distributions out in the wild, we've decided to re-conduct these tests. We are using a slightly different Atom-based system this time and we are comparing the performance on Ubuntu 8.10, Fedora 10, Mandriva 2008, and OpenSuSE 11.1.

Read the full thing at http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_atom_four&num=1

From Linux Canuck’s Weblog

There is no doubt that people are leaving Windows, many going to the Mac and some are turning to Linux. This is partly due in part to dissatisfaction with Vista. The reason isn’t important4 What is happening to the Linux community is.

I am active on several help forums. I see lots of requests for help. Many of them come from befuddled Windows users. Their numbers and the way they approach Linux are having an impact. Nobody has done a precise count, but we know that Linux adoption is growing. Since most new users have a Windows background, then they bring with them Windows habits and experience. This does not always translate well in moving from one Windows platform to another, say, from XP to Vista. Moving from XP to Linux is a shock for many of them.

Read the full thing at http://linuxcanuck.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/how-windows-users-are-changing-linux-and-what-we-should-do-about-it/

The KDE team invites interested testers and reviewers to give KDE 4.2.0-Beta1 a go. The release announcement lists some significant improvements. The purpose of this release is to get feedback from the community, preferably in the form of bugreports on the new bugs.kde.org bugtracker. Beta1 offers critical features like the Eyes applet (an XEyes clone), but also a more streamlined user experience all over the workspace and applications. With the KDE team being in bug fixing frenzy after the recent hard feature freeze, now is the time to help us smoothing the release for your pleasure starting in January.

Read the full thing at http://dot.kde.org/1227714704/

In the real estate world, the mantra is location, location, location. In the network and server administration world, the mantra is visibility, visibility, visibility. If you don't know what your network and servers are doing at every second of the day, you're flying blind. Sooner or later, you're going to meet with disaster.

Read the full thing at http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9121340

Plasma always had this really cute concept of "formfactor": in brief different areas where plasmoids can reside have different behaviours, for instance a desktop is planar, i.e. the applets can grow anywhere they want.

The panel on the other hand can have a vertical or horizontal form factor, it means the applets in it can grow only in the vertical or horizontal direction, so an applet with a high quantity of content can't display everything it would want...

Read the full thing at http://www.notmart.org/index.php/Software/A_FormFactorized_Plasma_Quake

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install VMware Server 2 on a Mandriva 2009.0 desktop system. With VMware Server you can create and run guest operating systems ("virtual machines") such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. under a host operating system. This has the benefit that you can run multiple operating systems on the same hardware which saves a lot of money, and you can move virtual machines from one VMware Server to the next one (or to a system that has the VMware Player which is also free).

Read the full thing at http://www.howtoforge!com/how-to-install-vmware-server-2-on-a-mandriva-2009.0-desktop

From /.:

Finally, the day has come. Adobe has released a pre-release version of the 64-bit Flash player. It is available at the Adobe Labs Flash Player 10 download site immediately. Where are the Windows and Mac versions? "Release of this alpha version of 64-bit Flash Player on Linux is the first step in delivering upon Adobes commitment to make Flash Player native 64-bit across platforms.

Read the full thing at httd://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/17/168212