Nuclear Elephant asks: "After a little hacking, Linux has been running great on my Thinkpad T30 for about a year now. I can talk to my cellphone and bluetooth devices, do all kinds of neat hacking on wireless, and just about everything you'd expect to be able to do from a Windows machine, except make the battery last. Even after the standard optimizations (like cpufreq, laptop_mode, brightness, turning off useless processes, etc.) my battery still only lasts about an hour running under Linux as opposed to 2 1/2 hours in Windows. Has anybody come up with some innovative battery conservation ideas for Linux? It seems to be the only thing lacking in this fine operating system." What kernel options might one look into, for saving laptop battery power? Also, what desktop settings (both for Gnome and KDE) would work best, for this situation?

joestar writes "The new 'Mandrake Linux 10.0 Community' release has just been announced. It provides many new features including Linux 2.6.3, MagicDev, KDE 3.2, GNOME 2.4, a new Mandrakeonline service and others. Download ISOs are available through torrent for Club Members and 10.0 developers. A 10.0 DVD is also available at MandrakeStore. This a first step for this new exciting Mandrake, because in May, an Official version will appear, and both versions will officially be supported. Happy downloads!"

Quique writes "The KDE Community is pleased to announce the launch of the Quality Team Project, a community of contributors who will serve as a gateway between developers and users in the KDE Project, and as a new way for people to begin contributing. KDE is a very attractive project, offering high quality software and is freely available. There is a lot of people who feel the urge to give something back, but stop in the middle of the way, frustrated by the steep learning curve. The aim of the project is to reduce these barriers by welcoming these potential contributors, and by offering documentation, support, and even guidance if requested. The objective is to support the new contributors, (programmers, documenters, testers, artists...). Have you ever wished to help KDE in some way, but never knew how? Keep reading!"

Quique writes "Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the release of Gentoo Linux 2004.0 for the x86, AMD64, PowerPC, Sun SPARC, and SGI MIPS architectures. Additionally, the Gentoo Hardened team is announcing the inaugural release of a security-enhanced Gentoo platform for the x86 architecture. Installation stages, LiveCDs, and GRP sets can be found on the mirrors. More information about the Gentoo Hardened project can be found on its project page. For more information, please consult the documentation, mailing lists, user forums and official IRC channels. The new Gentoo Store has also been announced." I've put more of the release notes below - might also be worth checking out the tutorial for LPI certification done by the President/CEO of Gentoo; there's also a note about Gentoo's newest meta-release tool, Catalyst below as well. Looks like it's not out yet - stay tuned for more information.

JigSaw writes "Carlos Leonhard Woelz put together a detailed guide on how to use CVS using KDE's Cervicia application. It is an article useful to newbies and well-described to experience users too."

binner writes "Ars Technica features an article 'Deep inside the K Desktop Environment 3.2' written by Datschge and Henrique Pinto. After introducing KDE and the project's structure the authors present some new applications of KDE 3.2. After that they explain the key KDE technologies KParts, DCOP, KIO, Kiosk and KXMLGUI and give examples for code reusage and an overview of efforts to integrate non-KDE applications. For developers Umbrello, Cervisia and Valgrind with KCachegrind are introduced and of course KDevelop 3.0. An examination of licenses precedes the positive conclusion."

This is an unusual Slashdot Interview, since instead of using email I asked all the questions in person last week either at LinuxAsia2004 or in casual meetings with local LUG members and other techies I met during the conference. Some of your questions were answered quite well by other Slashdot readers in the original post. (Slashdot has many readers both in and from India.) I also inserted a number of personal observations, which I usually don't do in these interviews, because it seemed to be the best way to answer some of the questions. And some questions were nearly unanswerable, as you'll see when you read the rest of this article.

GerritHoll writes "A test release of Fedora Core 2 is now available from Red Hat and at distinguished mirror sites near you, and is also available in the torrent. Fedora Core has expanded in this release to four binary ISO images and four source ISO images. This test release is specifically designed for testing the 2.6 kernel, GNOME 2.5, and KDE 3.2. Please file bugs via Bugzilla, Product Fedora Core, Version test1, Architecture i386 so that they are noticed and appropriately classified. Discuss this test release on fedora-test-list."

saha writes "Thought this article about Apple's Safari contribution back to the open source community may interest some of the readers. KDE adds Safari feel to desktop Linux: The Konqueror Web browser, which shares its basic engine with Apple's Safari, has benefited from Apple's Safari work, KDE said. Konqueror now loads and renders more quickly and has better support for Web standards. One of Apple's major efforts with Safari has been to encourage users to report sites that don't work properly with the browser, in order to improve compatibility."

hkfczrqj writes "Knoppix has two more children. The first, 3.3-2004-02-09, an update with kernel 2.4-24-xfs, KDE 3.1.5, Mozilla 1.6, XFree 3.4. Also, and more important I guess, Knoppix 3.4 c't edition is out (torrent here). It is supposed to have kernel 2.6!" And it does. If you're looking for a way to test your setup with a 2.6 kernel without trashing a current install, this is a good way -- but note that the ct edition Knoppix boots into German (Shift-0 gets you an =, as in "lang=us") and kernel 2.4; you'll need to type "knoppix26" at startup to boot the new kernel. (You may find the excellent forums at knoppix.net helpful, too.) Update: 02/10 01:03 GMT by T : Note that the XFree version is really 4.3, not 3.4.

Anonymous writes "Today I installed KDE 3.2, third major release of the award winning KDE3 desktop platform, on my Fedora box. I have been using KDE 3.2 RC for the past few days and the final version from today. My first impression is 'wow.'"

JigSaw writes "The new version of Qt (to be released Wednesday) features .NET support, full 64-bit support, IPv6 and backend support for two more databases. In light of the release, OSNews features an article with TrollTech's CEO, Haavard Nord. Nord says that he sees Linux strengthen its position in both business computing and embedded systems, while he forsees Qtopia and Linux taking over PDAs and Smartphones in the next few years." It's Wednesday, and Qt 3.3 has been officially released -- read on below for some more info.

Quique writes "KDE 3.2 has just been released. The official announcement is available at the KDE site and the source tarballs are being replicated to the mirrors. There are already binary packages for a few distributions. Besides the usual bugfixes and new features, this release has been highly optimized and runs way faster than previous versions. This is a good opportunity for Windows users to migrate to a free desktop."

kollum writes "Bruce Perens has revealed that UserLinux will now support KDE commercially. It seems there is a demand for a KDE plan afterall."

perbert writes "On January 27th, the KDE Project released KOffice 1.3 for Linux and Unix operating systems. KOffice is a free set of office applications that integrate with the award winning KDE desktop. KOffice is a light-weight yet feature rich office solution and provides a variety of filters to interoperate with other popular office suites such as OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office."

JimLynch writes "When you think of Linux, certain names spring to mind: Red Hat, SuSE--even Libranet. But you almost never hear someone say "Hey, did you download the latest version of Ark Linux?" Well, it's too bad, because Ark Linux might someday be a viable contender for the Linux desktop crown and it surely deserves some recognition as such at this point. Despite being labeled an alpha, Ark Linux is one amazing little distro." In other distro news, lmvaz writes "Conectiva, the biggest Linux distribution of Brazil and South America released yesterday the 'Conectiva Linux 10 - Technology Preview 2,' bringing the kernel 2.6.1, KDE 3.2 rc1, Gnome 2.4, Mozilla 1.5, OpenOffice 1.1, etc. The release notes are available here and the torrents for download are here. The final release is expected by the end of the first semester of this year. It's a nice bundle for people wanting to help getting the 2.6 linux kernel in shape."

danalien writes "Before a early Feb. release of the (stable) KDE 3.2, KDE has today announced the first 'Release Candidate', and hopefully the last pre-release, for its 'Open Source graphical desktop environment for Unix workstations'. Get it from download.kde.org, or use Konstruct if you don't feel like calling configure by yourself."

An anonymous reader writes "The first Open Source Awards 2004 have been announced. These newly created awards aspire to be the Nobel Prizes of the open source world. Congratulations to the developers of Valgrind, VideoLAN, JACK, and Pango."

JigSaw writes "Gnome's Christian Schaller has written an intro/status document on GStreamer, the next generation multimedia development framework for Unix. Christian explains what it is, why it is important, its use in both the desktop and server side, its use on embedded Linux, Gnome and even KDE. He also discusses its current competition and the plans for the future."

dhunley writes "According to TechCentral, a recent story on Novell's plans following the acquisition of both SuSE and Ximian comments that 'SuSE will continue (to operate) as a business unit of its own', according to John Phillips, Novell's corporate technology strategist for the Asia Pacific region. 'We don't expect to make Ximian the default user interface, and for the medium term KDE will remain the default GUI on SuSE Linux'."