grex writes "The FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) study from the University of Maastricht has published its final report. One of its five parts is the developer survey based basically on developers from the European Union. Results show that Debian is the preferred distribution, GNOME the desktop the majority choose and vi more popular than Emacs. But this survey also handles economic, law-related and motivation aspects among developers that make it very interesting to read."

deego writes: "Here are the plots of GNU/Linux number of users, on a regular scale , and on a log scale . Though projections have no real bearing on what actually turns out to be the numbers, they are fun :). The final projections from the two plots would seem to be a bit different to the naked eye. So, is GNU/Linx usage asymptotically headed towards, say 'all users' (first plot), or 'half a billion users' (second plot)?"

jonadab writes: "Microsoft Typography has for years provided a set of very nice True-Type fonts for free-as-in-without-monetary-cost, including the excellent Andale Mono (the only scalable fixed-width font I really like). They are gone. Here is the Microsoft page where they formerly were, which now tersely explains that they're not available any longer. There is an article about this on extremetech. According to the article, Microsoft says the withdrawal of the fonts at about the same time as the LinuxWorld is coincidence. The article also references a Debian package that has been removed from the distro because of this. If I understand my rumours correctly, it was a package that downloaded the fonts from MS, displayed their EULA, and allowed the user to extract and install the fonts. It was possible to do the same thing using other distros. Guess it's time for the OSS people to make some decent-looking scalable both-screen-and-printer fonts (preferably TrueType). At minimum, we need nice-looking serif proportional (to replace Verdana), a sans proportional (to replace Georgia), and a mostly-sans fixed (to replace Andale Mono), all with good language support. This should have been done a long time ago, since the MS fonts were, albeit $0, not licensed in an open fashion. We always knew we were relying on MS Typography's generosity, and that these could disappear at any time. But now the need is more urgent."

eyez writes "Apparently, the recent decision of OPN(now freenode) to ask for donations has ruffled the feathers of a few debian people. This article on DebianPlanet talks about the current discussion on the debian mailing lists which talks about the possibility of moving #debian (and #debian*) off of OPN altogether."

Grant Gross has an article at NewsForge outlining both changes being proposed by the The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws to its version of UCITA (a model intended for adoption by the various state legislatures), and objections raised to the resulting language by Red Hat lawyer Carol Kunze. Among other things, Kunze points out that Free software projects could be effectively discouraged from releasing software if software producers are required to provide warranties -- imagine trying to provide warranties on all the packages available to Debian users, for instance, or every bit of software included with Mandrake Linux.

darkdepeche asks: "My department is attempting to standardize on a software packaging format for the majority of our clients (which generally use Windows 2000/XP desktops). I've been very impressed with the .deb/apt system that Debian and some other Linux flavours use, I wonder if any other slashdotters use something similar to this on a Windows platform? Using the traditional Installer is a possibility but the tools are cumbersome and quite expensive. We need something that would handle several hundred applications, hotfixes, service packs, and keep history for them all. Has anyone else worked on a project like this?" InstallShield can be more complex than it needs to be and can be very hard to use. Have any of you come across an installer for Windows that is easy to use, can uninstall whatever has been installed, can manage the registry and also (maybe) have versioning controls similar to what is offered by .dpkg/Apt?

solferino writes: "Anthony Towns has posted a fairly detailed 'retrospective' on the release of woody and an 'introspective' on the future release of sarge." This is a long, informative read for anyone interested in how the complicated Debian release process plays out behind the scenes. ("Grep for 'realistic schedule'. Doh.")

emissary47 writes "The Debian Project is pleased to announce the release of Debian GNU/Linux version 3.0. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system, which now supports a total of eleven processor architectures, includes KDE and GNOME desktop environments, features cryptographic software, is compatible with the FHS v2.2 and supports software developed for the LSB. The Release Notes are available here."

Orre writes "This is an interesting article on why we should be interested in this non-commercial linux distribution. Some of the points: No lies, Suit-Free Zone, Apt-get. And by the way, Hewlett-Packard has chosen Debian to be their standard linux distribution."

Figuring you can never get too much Ian Jackson, Trevelyan writes: "Debian Planet has an interview with the long time Debian maintainer, and a former DPL, a current member of the technical committee and the author of dpkg. Also announced Debian GNU/Linux 2.2r7 released. In case some of you thought Debian won't be releasing anything this year =)"

Ethan writes: "A developer on the Yahoo Amiga One mailing list has successfully installed MacOS 9.2 using Mac On Linux. And it seems that adding OS X support is on the to-do horizon for the MOL developers. I think that it will be interesting to see the people at Apple lose some sleep now that a low cost, fast, off the shelf solution exists to run Mac OS, without any Apple hardware. If it doesn't do anything else, at least it will give the people buying the new Amiga One G3 PPC board an existing software base." Mind you, I've never even seen an Amiga One, but it would be a pretty silly thing to make up ;) Update: 07/05 07:03 GMT by T : Mike Bouma piped up with a link to a page featuring the same hardware, in this case running Debian, OpenOffice.org and Mozilla.

An anonymous reader says "Mandrake's lastest community (spam) newsletter contains their explanation as to why they won't join in on UnitedLinux. Besides the obvious geek-fun of rolling their own distro, they claim that the underlying idea of UnitedLinux is based on a flawed comparison to the Unix world of the 80's. " I think the whole UnitedLinux thing is lame- the distros that want to be compatible already are. UL is just the 2nd tier distros trying to get attention and ink away from the "evil forces" in North Carolina. I'll just stick to the best distribution and watch the fun from afar ;)

krez writes: "Lately I've been looking for info on open-source audio recording & processing software. Not an easy task really: Suites like Brahms for KDE, and GLAME for Gnome are a good start, but I've yet to find a program - or a series of programs - that even approach something as comprehensive as Cubase or Cakewalk on those other platforms. Anyway, here's something that might just prove to be a good start. The European Commission is sponsoring a distribution called AGNULA (A GNU/Linux Audio distribution). The distribution will come in two flavours: Debian-based, and RedHat-based. You can read about the project and it's goals at http://www.agnula.org." The Debian side of this project is called DeMuDi, and it's been mentioned here before.

fdsa writes "After a heated debate, and under some pressure by TransGaming, an 'intent to package' WineX from sourceforge CVS for (non-free) Debian has been withdrawn. The message provides a good summary of the recent Wine chaos, and notes how WineX is effectively under a different license than stated. Here's a mail from their CEO Gavriel State on the issue."

Marsala writes "Apparently Red Hat has filed two patent applications for stuff related to the TUX webserver. The patents are for Embedded Protocol Objects and Method and apparatus for atomic file look-up. One has to wonder (if their patents are granted) what their licensing terms will be.... free for open source, or a tool to try and screw other Linux distros?" As reported by Linux Weekly News.

SquadBoy writes "An international team set a new record for Internet performance by transferring the equivalent of an entire compact disc's contents across more than 7608 miles (12,272 km) of network in 13 seconds. The rate of 401 megabits per second achieved in transferring 625 megabytes of data from Fairbanks, Alaska to Amsterdam in the Netherlands is over 8000 times greater than the fastest dial-up modem."

An Anonymous Coward asks: "Here at work for internet connectivity, we share a Cisco 2600 router with the administrative folks in the other half of the building. Our development network is isolated from theirs, safely behind a Debain firewall--we just show up as one IP with _very_ few ports open. The Cisco connects directly into a Linksys DSL router, which is *supposed* to be providing NAT for both of our networks. Instead, it's acting needlessly as an extra hub, with the incoming feed plugged into its port 2 and the outgoing feed in port 3. The feed from port 3 plugs into a 24-port hub, which connects all of the admin workstations and our Debian box. Each workstation, in turn, has a static IP (we have one too). This is due to a variety of reasons--so we've been told--but what it boils down to is the incompetence of the 'Microsoft Certified (w/Internet) Network Engineer,' who's responsible for the routers, the administrative network, and their Windows 2000 corporate webserver." Now, the workplace is left with no firewall and a Network Engineer that is downplaying the problem to the higher-ups. What would be the best way to communicate that there really is a problem?

Cardhore writes: "According to this article, Sun's and Wipro's developers are now working on Metacity, instead of Sawfish. Metacity and Sawfish are two window managers for the GNOME desktop, and Sun has decided to use Metacity over Sawfish for GNOME 2. This decision has been based on issues such as accessibility, maintainability of the code [1], documentation, multi-head support and a general eagerness from the community to commit to Metacity in the future." Here's a brief description of Garret LeSage's experience with Metacity, which is described here as a "boring window manager for the adult in you." Anyone with Metacity screenshots, please post below :)

This set of interview responses from Linux hacker Alan Cox is overtly political, in line with the questions we asked him on May 6th. Alan doesn't just talk about problems here but proposes sensible solutions for them. Very nice. Thanks, Alan.

We put up the original Talk to Sun's 'Open Source Diva' call for questions on January 10, 2002, which makes this the longest lag we've ever had betweeen a set of Slashdot quesions and their answers, a record previously held by the late Douglas Adams, whose question post went up on May 2, 2000, but didn't get his answers to us until June 21, 2000.