FOSDEM team writes "The FOSDEM guys have just released the speakers list for FOSDEM 2005. Great names like Jimbo Wales (Wikipedia), Marty Roesch (Snort IDS), Alan Cox and many others. You can submit questions for the interviews to be published later on their site. As it was for previous years, there will also be developers' rooms holding conferences on Mozilla, Gnome, KDE, etc."

linuxbeta writes "The latest major release of Mandrakelinux, 10.1 Official, is now available for public download! Empower yourself with all the new and stable 10.1 features. Mandrakelinux 10.1 comes with a great selection of software which we have covered at OSDir in our wide selection of screenshots of this distribution. Our screenshots include Installation, Desktop, Taskbars, Menus, and Configuration on the default KDE. We've also grabbed some shots of the GNOME, WindowMaker, and IceWM desktops for your viewing pleasure. The Mandrakelinux Move 2.0 Live CD was also recently released and we grabbed some shots of it for you."

PaaChhaa writes "The GNOME Foundation membership and elections committee has announced the preliminary results of this year's elections for the board of directors. There are a few new faces this year, and Miguel de Icaza, whose candidacy was rejected last year due to late submission, is back. The run up to this year's election saw a threat of boycott, which ultimately resulted in the online publication of the foundation's financial records. Also, a heated discussion followed the posting of the list of ten questions, and the opinions of the candidates and other foundation members on these issues can be found in the foundation-list archives for the months of November and December. A notable exclusion from this year's board is GNOME's release manager Jeff Waugh. who didn't run at all."

El Cubano writes "A recent posting to the debian-devel-announce mailing list announces that Sarge will release with GNOME 2.8. From the announcement: 'After requests and a detailed proposal from the GNOME team, we accepted an upload of GNOME 2.8 into sid, and, via the usual mechanisms, into sarge. We should mention that the release team was running out of objections to GNOME 2.8 in unstable that the GNOME team hasn't satisfactorily addressed; this, and the fact that they have demonstrated good reaction times of late are the main reasons why we're approving it despite the timing.'"

Lalakis writes "The GIMP 2.2 Splash Contest is now officially open! Competition entries should be attached to the live.gnome.org wiki before midnight next Sunday. Submit your work and get the glory (there may be a small prize sponsored, too)."

ks writes "Novell hacker Jan Holesovsky has released a build of OOo 1.1.3 that integrates with either KDE or GNOME depending on the environment it's running in. The build features KDE/GNOME look and feel, KDE/GNOME file dialogs and the Crystal icons. If you're running NLD, you have this already." Update: 11/27 18:13 GMT by T : Also on the OpenOffice.org front, the OO.o front page links to this interview with Debian ARM developer Peter Naulls, who has ported the suite to ARM processors. Hint: they're everywhere.

Chris writes "Progeny Linux does Debian one step better. If you like Ubuntu you'll love Progeny. A slick GNOME desktop, a solid Debian core, and the Anaconda installer have made Progeny my new desktop of choice. Progeny has also recently become part of the Linux Core Consortium (LCC) to implement Linux Standard Base (LSB) 2.0. Watch your back Ubuntu for Progeny's new 'Progeny Debian 2.0 Developer Edition RC1' release. At OSDir we just had to install this distro, and take some screenshots. Our screenshot tour will take you from boot, through the installation, to the desktop. Then we'll have a look at the taskbar, menus, system configuration, and a few of the newly added features of this great distro."

trustedserf writes "This year I am including a bootable Live Linux CD in many of my Christmas cards. As I'll be making the copies myself I may even change the default desktop background to something personal, or Christmasy before running it off on cheap CD-Rs. The objective is to show people the easiest possible route to using a linux desktop so that they will be: A) Aware and B) Pleasantly surprised. About Christmas they may also have more time to try it out too. Naturally, I'm thinking of Gnoppix, but there are other options.. I use KDE, so I have to decide between it and Gnome. Bearing in mind my objectives, what distro would you choose. Also, importantly, is it possible any of them will damage their hardware (monitors with incorrect refresh etc.) I would be *very* unhappy if that happened. How many of them would fail to boot, leaving a bad impression? Which way would you go about it for maximum "WOW"."

linguae writes "I'm running a FreeBSD desktop on a PC that has a 475MHz K6-2 processor with 64MB RAM. I use lightweight programs on my desktop such as Window Maker, AbiWord, and Firefox. I have been looking for a decent yet lightweight (and preferably Open Source) spreadsheet that is compatible with Excel, and also doesn't rely on dependencies such as GNOME or Java. I'm not an Excel power user, but sometimes I do have to share spreadsheets every now and then. I wonder if there is a spreadsheet equivalent of Abiword?"

Chris writes "With new features such as SELinux, GNOME 2.8, KDE 3.3, Evolution 2.0, Remote Desktop, Helix Player, and of course Firefox, it may be worth your while to make the switch. At OSDir our screenshot tour of Fedora Core 3 takes you through boot, installation, desktop, taskbar, menus, configuration, and the new features of this new release. Our Core 3 screenshot tours have taken you through Test 1, 2, 3, and now the final release. Check it out."

anyweb writes "Fedora Core Release 3 is out now, Heidelberg, 2.6.9-1.667 kernel, Firefox included ! Gnome 2.8 and more. Here are some screenshots" New release includes Gnome 2.8, KDE 3.3, Kernel 2.6.9, Firefox PR1, Thunderbird 0.8, Ximian Evolution 2.0 and more. Here is a Mirror List and Bit Torrent

An anonymous reader writes "After reading this article, I was pretty excited about trying an Ubuntu live CD on my Mac, because I've heard a lot about the distro. But it turns out the only live CD is for x86. Looking around for PPC live CD's that support modern hardware (like a G5) and demo modern versions of KDE and Gnome has proven fruitless so far. Does Slashdot know of any current projects that have released or are working on releasing a nice PPC live CD?"

InnerPhalanx writes "Today, SuSE 9.2 Professional Edition has been released. SuSE writes: 'It combines a fast, secure operating system and more than 1,000 popular open source applications. It is the first complete Linux package to harness both the improved Linux kernel 2.6 and the recently enhanced GNOME 2.6 and KDE 3.3 user desktop environments. Ideal for Linux enthusiasts and developers, SUSE LINUX Professional 9.2 improves support for mobile users and delivers a host of essential tools.' More information at the SuSE website. The price is $89.95. The update version is $59.95. A live DVD image is also available on the SuSE website, for use by DVD. Have fun, SuSE Pro users!" Reader tannhaus submits an early review.

Jeff writes "Ubuntu is just sweet. For Mac users it is even sweeter, as you can read in this review: it supports hardware like a charm ad now with a live CD out everyone can taste ... sorry, test it." And Chris writes "Gnoppix 0.8.1 now appears to be Ubuntu Linux based. At OSDir, we've got over 50 screenshots of the Gnoppix 0.8.1 release, including the controversial Ubuntu desktop background images." (See this earlier story; the default background images have been changed in Ubuntu proper, so the "controversy" need not keep you up nights.) The Gnoppix version is a very nice Gnome-based live CD, with fewer apps but more polish than most live CDs I've tried. (Note that this is not the same as the official Ubuntu CD, and that the PPC version is not a live CD.)

BEI01 writes "From windowmaker.org: After years without a release, we are glad to announce that Window Maker 0.90.0 is out! Highlights are NetWM support (thanks to Peter). This means wmaker should work fine with GNOME 2.x and KDE 3.x. UTF-8 support, antialiased text support via Xft2, Xinerama support, enhanced Alt-Tab window switching, Font configuration in WPrefs, and many fixes."

Mark Shuttleworth writes "Ubuntu 4.10, 'The Warty Warthog Release,' hit the wire today, with Gnome 2.8, Kernel 2.6 and the very best of Debian in a slick, quick, single-CD install." Read on below for the full announcement, including a link to order shrinkwrapped versions (for X86, AMD64 or PowerPC) free of charge. I'm still waiting on mine to try this out. (Note that Ubuntu is also one of the distros with a screen-by-screen walkthrough available through OSdir's screenshot-tour site.)

Chris writes "Did you know that OSDir now does frequently updated screenshots of open source apps, including Evolution 2.0, KDE 3.3, Gnome 2.8, Enlightenment DR 16.7.1, Thunderbird 0.8, and YaST? Have a look!" These screenshot tours are a great way to see how polished (or not) a particular piece of software is getting, especially when you absolutely have to know what every menu item holds.

Raymond Lodato writes "For a number of years now, I've been playing with Linux at my company. My laptop is dual-boot, and I've been trying to steer away from Windows as much as I possibly can. Most of the books I've read have been geared either to running Linux as a server, or as a personal workstation. The gap has been filled. Moving to the Linux Business Desktop, by Marcel Gagné, covers what you need to know to successful run Linux as a business workstation." Read on for the rest.

Chris writes "To give you a feel for what to expect in Core 3, we've done 120 screenshots of a full installation of Fedora Core 3 Test 3. Our screenshots include Gnome, KDE, and XPce interfaces. This is the last planned test release before the final release, scheduled for November 1."

An anonymous reader writes "After Hewlett Packard, who jumped off of supporting GNOME, Red Hat has followed by splitting their Desktop Linux out to Fedora which is community driven, and now distributions like Slackware have started to drop GNOME entirely in favor of KDE. Read more about their decision here. It looks like companies as well as distributions start focusing towards one solution." Patrick Volderking's quoted message doesn't announce a final decision to drop GNOME from Slackware, however -- and as the followups in that thread note, it could be interpreted as an endorsement of the good job done by Dropline in packaging GNOME for Slack.