Kalak writes "Fedora Core 2 Test 2, part of the project's goal to 'work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software', has just been released - this test release 'is specifically designed for SELinux testing, as well as testing the 2.6 kernel, GNOME 2.5, and KDE 3.2.1.' Get a copy from one of the mirrors or grab a copy via BitTorrent. You probably want the binary only Torrent."

Balinares writes "NewsForge reports that Novell has settled for Qt as its Linux desktop development environment, casting more light on their strategy to unify KDE and GNOME. This ought to be interesting. The prospect of using Mono to code against Qt makes me drool in advance. Maybe programming will suck no longer!" Update: 03/30 00:01 GMT by T : Sounds like that story doesn't quite hold water; Nat Friedman writes in this Slashdot comment that "We have not decided that we are standardizing on Qt for the desktop. ... We support development with a variety of toolkits, and our internal development is done using the right tool for the right problem. This includes Qt, Gtk, VCL, XUL and others, depending on the application."

Kethinov writes "I just read this article reviewing GNOME 2.6 via the 2.5 development version. Many screenshots, plus extensive discussion on the new direction Nautilus is taking among other things. Worth a read. (A mirror would be nice ;)" Sorry - I duped this. Mea culpa.

A user writes "Christian Schaller has written an interesting article on SVG's current and possible uses on the GNU/Linux desktop. Though the article concentrates mostly on GNOME, it does mention the excellent work the KDE developers have been doing with KSVG, and refers to the upcoming SVG support in Mozilla too."

An anonymous reader writes "Looks like the GNOME site (both web and FTP) is back up and running again (from a replacement system). The restoration work is still going on, and dynamic content does not work yet. Bugzilla should be up by tomorrow (it is already in testing mode). More details are available in this announcement. Kudos to the GNOME sysadmin team for such a rapid recovery." However, blurzero writes "GNOME 2.6 was scheduled to be released sometime today, however after evidence of possible intrusion on the web server, the release has been delayed by one week, until March 31st." Update: 03/24 14:08 GMT by T : An anonymous reader points to this story on the delay at ZD Net Australia.

HangingChad writes "eWeek is reporting about Novell's plan to combine elements of both into a unified desktop. Apparently the work has already started. Chris Schlager, vice president of research and development for SUSE, thinks the differences between KDE and Gnome developers have been overstated. Apparently he's not a regular /. reader."

Garden GNOME writes "The GNOME sysadmin team has just announced that the main GNOME web server has probably been intruded into, leading to the shutdown of the GNOME website, (including bugzilla.gnome.org, art.gnome.org and developer.gnome.org). The GNOME mailing lists, and CVS servers seem to be up, though the FTP server was immediately taken down as a precautionary measure (released sources are believed to be intact). This is bad, because GNOME 2.6 was supposed to be released tomorrow. Let's hope it is a false alarm."

ravydavygravy writes "Novell today released details of the next incarnation of its linux products, Suse 9.1, based on the 2.6 kernel. It will come in both 32 and 64-bit versions, and includes a LiveCD version, to help people convince their Windows-loving friends to make the switch. It'll ship with Gnome 2.4.2 and KDE 3.2.1, as well as demo versions of the text processing application Textmaker and the spreadsheet application Planmaker (from Softmaker - but do we really need another office suite?). Samba 3 will also feature in the default setup."

Bhondai writes "The latest release of the popular GNOME based iTunes clone, Rhythmbox has, amongst new features, initial support for the iPod. Things are still a little unpolished at this moment (requiring manual mounting of the iPod to /mnt/ipod), but this does look promising. A list of changes and new features in Rhythmbox 0.7.1 is available at Footnotes."

the.jedi writes "With the release of GTK+ 2.4, and Gnome 2.6 due out some time next week, it seems of some the Gnome developers are looking at how they'll be coding Gnome and the rest of the Linux desktop. Havoc Pennington of Planet Gnome has written a short blog pondering and analyzing the available options as coders move towards high-level languages like java and C#. He gives a good overview and assessment of technologies like mono, OO.org's UNO framework, as well as other ways of tying new languages to the existing code base. An extremely interesting read for desktop linux hackers everywhere." Update: 03/17 14:44 GMT by T : Speaking of the future of Gnome, aeneas writes with a list of Gnome 2.6 release parties around the world (linked from gnome.org/start/2.5).

d3vi1 writes "Pango, Glib & GTK 2.4.0 have been released to the public. See gtk.org in general, or specifically: the announcements for pango, glib and gtk."

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?

A user writes "GNOME 2.6 is just around the corner, and I figured out that many GNOME users would like to know what's in store. So I installed GNOME 2.5 (development version for 2.6) in my box, and came up with a list of the new stuff that are coming up. (and just in case, copies of the article are also available here and here)."

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 "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.

Karma Sucks writes "LinuxToday is featuring a intriguing article on why Sun should open source Java, as a stronger followup to the recent ESR saga that was reported here. The writer notes: 'Sun needs to do some radical things to improve its chances of survival, and all of them involve Open Source in some form or the other.' One thing the article fails to mention is the threat of Mono, which should be of special interest to Sun, with its vested interest in GNOME."

Jody Goldberg writes "A recent study of analytic quality, and responsiveness to problems strongly preferred Gnumeric in place of MS Excel. With new problems popping up in Office XP the case for spreadsheet users to migrate is only getting stronger. In some related Gnumeric quickies, a new stable version 1.2.6 was released, and Open has done an interview with the Maintainer."

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.

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxWorld has published a nice interview with Jeff Waugh, one of the core members of the GNOME community. In the interview Waugh talks about the upcoming GNOME 2.6, his views on software patents and on the involvement of the big vendors in the GNOME development process. Waugh is the current chair of the GNOME release team."

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."