KDE 4 Beta 4 Released!

KDE is an award-winning, independent project of hundreds of developers, translators, artists and other professionals worldwide collaborating over the Internet to create and freely distribute a sophisticated, customizable and stable desktop and office environment employing a flexible, component-based, network-transparent architecture and offering an outstanding development platform.

The KDE Community is happy to release the fourth Beta for KDE 4.0. This Beta aimed at further polishing of the KDE codebase and we would love to start receiving feedback from testers.

With the fourth Beta, the KDE developers hope to collect comments and bug reports from the wider KDE community. With their help, we hope to solve the most pressing problems with the current KDE 4 codebase to ensure the final 4.0 release is usable. We would like to encourage anyone who is willing and able to spend some time on testing to find and report problems to the KDE developers.

This Beta has mostly been focussing on finalizing the design of the libraries in preparation for the release of the KDE Development Platform. Yet, many user-visible changes have gotten in as well. While new features and usability improvements were added, bugs were found and fixed in KDE and the stability of Beta 4 has improved much compared to the previous Betas. In the following sections, we will try to highlight some visible improvements in Beta 4 compared to Beta 3. Since work has been done all over KDE, please note that this is not a complete overview of all changes!

Source : K Desktop Environment – KDE 4.0 Beta 4

Major Linux Distros Shootout..

*Major Linux Distros Shootout..*
Mandriva 08 v/s Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon v/s open SUSE 10.3 v/s Sabayon 3.4

Today with increasing awareness of Linux Operating System and Open Source Software developers around the world are now taking the challenge to the next level. Linux is the operating system which evolve with a great speed. Linux is a Unix based operating system which is known for optimum stability and security even in low end systems.A Linux operating system has a life span of minimum of 6 months though the Operating system is supported through updates and security patches for a fixed period of time. Linux is the only operating system which has shown great development in terms of UI and over all User Experience. While this is not in case of Windows and Mac OSX. Though they has also shown tremendous development but the base remains same. Well today we got lots of option of Operating System in Open Source World. So now I’ll review 4 of the latest and most promising distross namely Ubuntu 7.10[Gusty Gibbon], open SUSE 10.3, Mandriva One 2008 and Sabayon 3.4 Mini Edition . Before we take a view on those let me clarify on what factors a Linux distross is Distinguished.

• Desktop Environment : Desktop Environment is the GUI software which provide better experience for end user.In Linux we get many types of Desktop Environment which are made to suite the System Specification . Like for low end system there is diff. DE and for high end there are other options . There are mainly 4 Desktop Environment namely KDE, Gnome, XFCE, FluxBox .. KDE and Gnome are quite advanced Desktop Environments meant for system with more than 128 Mb of Ram .. While XFCE and Flux box are low end Desktop Environments are for low end systems.
• Package Based : As you must be aware that there are packages in which software comes. There are lots of package manager in Linux .. Like one can notice packages like .rar and .exe and more in Windows same the case with Linux. Manly there are 3 packages in which Distros are based i.e. .deb[ Debian], .rpm [Red hat Package Manager], .tar.gz [ A .rar replacement in Linux].. Most of the distross today comes with .deb and .rpm based pakage manager.
• Distribution Based : Today developers instead of creating whole distros environment create distros based on a Stable and Secure distros. Like in Linux world there are 3 Most stable and old distros.. Debian , Gentoo , Red Hat aka Fedora. Most of the distros out there are based on the platform of these like Ubuntu based on Debain, Sabayon based on Gentoo, Mandriva based on Mandrake. Well some of these distross perform even better on what they are based on !

Ubuntu Hardy Heron Roadmap

Ubuntu is a Linux distribution for your desktop or server, with a fast and easy install, regular releases, a tight selection of excellent packages installed by default, every other package you can imagine available from the network and professional technical support from Canonical Ltd and hundreds of other companies around the world.

The future version, Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. This distribution will be a LTS (Long Term Support) release, and it is scheduled for April 2008.The implementation roadmap, as recommended on Launchpad, has some nice elements which will make many Ubuntu users happy. Here are some of these things that might get on Hardy Heron:

A redesigned restricted-manager code: The original code architecture of this application was very narrow, and focused on non-free kernel drivers in a Gnome application. The new features bolted on the original structure, like the grouping of handlers, the KDE frontend, non-free support packages of drivers which are free by themselves etc. made the code interdependent and very difficult to maintain/repair bugs. The list of new features is reviewed and a new code will be built from scratch.

Labeling and formatting of partitions: A way to format partitions with various file systems, with LUKS encryption support, was proposed. At this moment, no GUI exists for changing the label of a Linux filesystem, and for VFAT partitions.

Dial-up Support: An easy way to configure dial-up and ADSL out of the box was asked for, and Network Manager should be used to at least bring the connections up and down.

The Add/Remove Software application could be changed: As seen on the Roadmap, this could have user-provided descriptions, feature lists, screenshots and ratings for software. The initial page of this application should have top-rated software, newest versions etc.

Improved Ubuntu Server documentation: The server team needs to improve interactions with the documentation team, and the possibility to add micro-manuals for configuring complex applications could be added.

The number of duplicate applications and libraries will be reduced: Extra efforts to get rid of duplications to make maintenance as easy as possible and avoid CD space waste will be made. These things will happen mainly because Hardy Heron will be a Long Term Support release.

Kubuntu Hardy Catchup: The people from Launchpad want the developers to make sure Kubuntu has the same features as Ubuntu.

The CD boot loader for Hardy reviewed:Although the boot loader does its job, it needs a review and polish. There are problems with the progress bar, font handling etc.

Bug Statistics:The bug statistics that will be useful to the Ubuntu team during the cycle to drive quality improvements and assist during release periods will be identified. The process will be automated, by gathering and disseminating the stats.

Ubuntu Studio 7.10: Audiophile OS!

Ubuntu Studio is a multimedia editing/creation flavor of Ubuntu. It’s built for the GNU/Linux audio, video, and graphic enthusiast or professional.

The Ubuntu Studio team is proud to announce its sophomore release: Ubuntu Studio 7.10. With this release, which you can download for DVD in little over 800 MiB, Ubuntu Studio offers a pre-made selection of packages, targeted at audio, video and graphics users. Ubuntu Studio greatly simplifies the creation of Linux based multimedia workstations.

Quite possibly the most requested feature for Ubuntu Studio 7.10 has been delivered, full 64-bit support. This has been made possible thanks to Canonical,Ubuntu’s parent company. They have graciously agreed to assist in building and hosting the the disks. Full 64-bit support brings Ubuntu Studio that much closerto being a fully recognized derivative.

In addition, the Ubuntu Studio team has endeavored to include all of our packages in the standard Ubuntu repositories. From this release on, there will be no need for an external repository, making for a pain-free upgrade path in the future.

Also, a customized Audio/Visual menu has been developed for this release. The new submenus organize the audio and video applications into to their respective places. This addresses another one of Ubuntu Studio’s user-base annoyances, namely that the previous menu was too cluttered.

With Ubuntu Studio 7.10, the real-time (RT) kernel is shipped by default. The real-time kernel drastically lowers latencies, especially important with audio applications such as Ardor.

In this release, Ubuntu Studio has built upon the usability and support of Ubuntu as a foundation. Ubuntu Studio draws upon the firm base of Ubuntu and Debian.This allows Ubuntu Studio to benefit from all the improvements occurring there.

“Our aim is to make it more accessible for new users to get into the tools that GNU/Linux has to offer for multimedia creation/production. We also want to spotlight what’s out there,show users tools they might not have know existed.”

We have certainly fulfilled that aim with our second release with 7.10, and can only continue to improve.

Download : i386 ISO | X64

Compiz 0.6.2: The Daylight!

As Danny Baumann promised on the 0.6.0 announcement of Compiz, here is another Compiz release, version 0.6.2, which fixes a problem that could allow stacking desktop windows over normal windows the moment they are mapped. This could result in normal windows and/or panels not being visible when compiz is launched with the Gnome or KDE session, until the desktop window is restacked once. Among the highlights of this release, we can notice fixes and improvements such as:

• Support for automatically starting one decorator per screen;
• Newly created windows are placed on top of the stack first, which is not desired for some windows that may be denied focus (such as desktop windows);
• glGetString is allowed to return NULL in case an error happened, so avoid crashing in this case and bail out instead;
• Fix handling of ConfigureRequest events with CWStackMode set, but without CWSibling set;
• Correct handling of grab window in case it is destroyed;
• Fix findLowestSiblingBelow function for desktop windows;
• Use client message timestamp rather than window user time when processing focus stealing prevention on _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW messages;
• Update saved window coordinates when the window is resized by some client;
• All coordinates that match the server coordinates from the configure request mask to make sure a synthetic configure notify event is sent whenever needed, were cleared;
• Prevent wobbling when shading maximized windows;
• Fix in-viewport calculation;
• Now uses real screen number rather than 0;
• Get private pointer for the current screen;
• Run external commands with a DISPLAY string adjusted for the screen number that was passed to runCommand;
• putenv doesn’t work properly with dynamically allocated strings that are freed right after the putenv call.

Download : [compiz] [ANNOUNCE] compiz-0.6.2