News

"Puppy 4.00 was a major upgrade from 3.01, with just about everything overhauled and updated. Version 4.1 continues the hectic pace of development, with ground-breaking new applications and under-the-hood architectural improvements over 4.00. Ground-breaking apps include our new Psip VOIP and PPLOG personal blog. Under-the-hood includes faster boot times, much better hardware detection, and new 'pup_event' architecture (including desktop drive icons). The live-CD file is 'puppy-4.1-k2.6.25.16-seamonkey.iso' at 94.1MB and 'puppy-4.1retro-k2.6.21.7-seamonkey.iso' at 94.6MB. The latter is a more conservative kernel that perhaps suits older systems."

"The Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of new ISO Re-Spins of Fedora 9.

These Re-Spin ISOs are based on the officially released Fedora 8 installation media and include all updates released as of October 4th, 2008.

The ISO images are available for i386, x86_64 architectures via Jigdo and Torrent starting Tuesday October 7th, 2008.

Go to http://spins.fedoraunity.org/spins to get the bits!

DVD Media Only

Due to known problems in comps, this is a DVD Only Re-spin. The CD version would have required all 6 to 7 discs to install."

"Mono 2.0 is a portable and open source implementation of the .NET framework for Unix, Windows, MacOS and other operating systems.

Release Date: October 6th, 2008

Major Highlights
Mono 2.0 is a major milestone in the Mono project, and it supports the following features:

Microsoft Compatible APIs
ADO.NET 2.0 API for accessing databases.
ASP.NET 2.0 API for developing Web-based applications.
Windows.Forms 2.0 API to create desktop applications.
System.XML 2.0: An API to manipulate XML documents.
System.Core: Provides support for the Language Integrated Query (LINQ).
System.Xml.Linq: Provides a LINQ provider for XML.
System.Drawing 2.0 API: A portable graphics rendering API.

Mono APIs
Gtk# 2.12: A binding to the Gtk+ 2.12 and GNOME libraries for creating desktop applications on Linux, Windows and MacOS X.
Mono.Cecil: A library to manipulate ECMA CLI files (the native format used for executables and libraries).
Mono.Cairo: A binding to the Cairo Graphics library to produce 2D graphics and render them into a variety of forms (images, windows, postscript and PDF).
Mono's SQLite support: a library to create and consume databases created with SQLite.
Mono.Posix: a library to access Linux and Unix specific functionality from your managed application. With both a low-level interface as well as higher level interfaces.
Third Party APIs bundled with Mono

Extensive support for databases: PostgreSQL, DB2, Oracle, Sybase, SQL server, SQLite and Firebird.
C5 Generics Library: we are bundling the C5 generics collection class library as part of Mono."

"AN interesting new Linux project was released last week. Omega 10 cuts through the old debate about free/proprietary software with a solution I am sure many will find appealing - and just as many will abhor.

But first, some background. The Fedora project is well known for its uncompromising stance on software which is patent-encumbered or proprietary: if it fits either of those definitions, it does not get into Fedora. Neither will the Fedora developers help their users include software which falls into either category.
In some ways this is an admirable, ethical stance but to those who are new to Linux in general and Fedora in particular, it seems baffling and unhelpful.

These are the people who, having taken the bold step to convert from Windows or Mac OS, find themselves unable to do all the things they previously took for granted without having to tangle with multimedia codec installations.

A similar thing happened to me in my early days of using Linux: Why was this distribution thought of so highly when I could not listen to my (legally owned) music nor view half of the things I wished to see on the internet? With Fedora 10 now at beta stage, this thorny issue has been tackled by the Red Hat community engineer behind the Fedora games and Fedora Xfce media spins, Rahul Sundaram."

"Fedora, for those that didn't know, was born out of Red Hat Linux as a way to continue a free community based distribution and keep Red Hat Enterprise for those with deep pockets and data centres. The first release of Fedora was back in 2003 so there's been on average two releases a year since. As I was a Red Hat user back in the day (at University I was using Red Hat 6.0 as a way for me to do my C code at home rather than pulling all nighters on campus) I was happy to continue on with Fedora. Unfortunately the first couple of releases of Fedora weren't to my liking and I parted ways. These days Fedora has matured and is arguably one of the top 5 distributions. It's RPM based (similar to Mandriva and OpenSuse) and has a vocal and passionate community. It's also been ear-marked by me as one of the possible distros to upgrade to, so long as it ticks all the gaming boxes and doesn't play up too much! "