Tectonic

Fedora fans are no doubt eagerly looking forward to Fedora 9, scheduled for release tomorrow. Six months after Fedora 8 was released, Fedora 9 will be available in a variety of “spins” (custom boot images for everything from desktop installs to USB devices) with improved networking and eyecandy. Fedora 9 will include the recently-released Gnome 2.22 desktop which itself packs a few decent applications including the new Cheese ....

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With the release of Ubuntu Hardy Heron now behind us most eyes are turned to October when Intrepid Ibex, or Ubuntu Linux 8.10, will make its debut. While Hardy Heron was designed to be stable enough to be a long-term support release, Intrepid Ibex promises to be packed with more exciting features, something that Ubuntu fans always enjoy. Among those changes are likely to be a number of ....

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With unique readers growing by 190 percent over the past year, Engineering News has been named by Nielson Online as South Africa’s fastest growing website. The publication’s sister sites, Mining Weekly and Polity, occupied the second and fourth places respectively. All three of the sites were moved onto an open source software platform a year ago. Engineering News, published by Creamer Media, grew its readership from 23 455 ....

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The OpenOffice.org community has announced a public beta release of OpenOffice.org 3.0. The most immediately visible change to OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the new “Start Centre”, new fresh-looking icons, and a new zoom control in the status bar. A closer look shows that 3.0 has a myriad of new features. Notable Calc improvements include a new solver component; support for spreadsheet collaboration through workbook sharing; and an increase to ....

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Throwing some of its not-inconsiderable weight behind open source software, Google has joined oCert, or the open source computer emergency response team. oCert is a volunteer organisation of security professionals that aims to co-ordinate responses to security threats in the open source software world, much like the national Cert bodies such as US-Cert. One of the problems facing open source security is that the OSS developer community is ....

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The KDE Community today released KDE 4.0.4. This is the fourth bugfix and maintenance release. Better desktop pixmap usage and optimised caching will give KDE 4.0.4 a healthy speed boost. The KDE development team releases updates every month and will continue releasing updates every month until July when KDE 4.1 will be released. KDE 4.0.4 stabilises the desktop further and users of previous KDE 4.0 versions are encouraged to ....

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Real geeks use text editors. Even when they should be using a proper word processor. But not all geeks use the same text editor. We’re partial to Gedit for serious writing and Vim for short scripts. Tell us what makes your words work. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll. ....

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