Bonum Certa Men Certa

Do-No-Evil Saturday - Part I: OpenSUSE 11 Beta 1 and Linspire's CNR

SUSE in Blue



The past week has been a pleasant one because there were many positive announcements for GNU/Linux, despite the Intel- and Microsoft-imposed OLPC disaster, which was rather predictable anyway (to those tracking the inhumane and systematic abuses).

Looking at OpenSUSE over the past week, here is what we have. From the company which planned to install Ubuntu, then dropped it for Foresight on KPC, now comes OpenSUSE.

PERSONAL computers with Linux pre-installed have been springing up all over the place in recent months. Now Shuttle, the Taiwanese company famous for making small but perfectly formed PCs, have gotten in on the act. I’ve been spending some time in the company of their LinuXPC SD3002Q, which is sold with openSUSE 10.3 Linux pre-installed.


Moving on to the development builds, here comes the announcement of beta 1 of OpenSUSE. The announcement is about a week old by now, but we post these roundups periodically.

KDE 4 and KDE 3.5: The openSUSE 11.0 beta 1 includes KDE 4.0.3, which includes a number of new features, fixes, and optimizations. See the KDE4 page for more info on the KDE4 branch. To help test, see the wiki for info on reporting bugs in KDE. Not quite ready to move to KDE4? No worries, the beta includes an installation option for KDE 3.5 in addition to KDE4.


There is a very nice new post from Zonker, who discusses ways of giving equal and fair chances to GNOME and the two KDEs (KDE4 might not satisfy everyone's needs at this early stage).

Of course, it really matters very little what order the desktop choices are ordered in — the majority of users are going to pick the desktop that they’re familiar with, and it won’t matter if that choice is placed first, second, or third. The users who have no idea which desktop is which are probably going to pick the desktop that has the most appealing (for them) description — not the desktop that happens to be placed first.


Screenshots extracted from the latest beta can be found at GNUMAN.COM. Beineri is the one posting a summary of the news this week

In this week’s issue:

* OpenOffice_org 2.4 available * 11.0 feature by feature: All you ever wanted to know!

[...]


That's about all from OpenSUSE this week, other than the breakdown of projects sponsored by Google's Summer of Code (SoC).

Linspire



'CNR factory', sometimes known as Debian derivative Ubuntu derivative Linspire, has had another CNR press release published. This time it's Google Earth, which is free (gratis) and typically very trivial to install.

Linspire, Inc., developer of CNR.com, the free and easy to use one-click digital software delivery service for desktop Linux software, today announced the immediate availability of Google Earth for Freespire 2.0, Linspire 6.0, Ubuntu 7.04 & 7.10 (32 bit) desktop Linux users.


Just like last week, the only ones to pay attention are at DesktopLinux.com (eWeek).

Ubuntu, Linspire, and Freespire users can now install "Google Earth" with a single click, says Linspire. The desktop Linux distributor has added support for the free mapping application to its CNR ("click-n-run") installer, a user-friendly tool currently beta-testing for a wide variety of desktop Linux distributions.


Nothing from Xandros recently, other than some articles about Asustek's derivative of Xandros. Turbolinux got mentioned a few times in articles about Novell in China. Samsung has meanwhile posted good results despite the corruptions and the departure of the CEO.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Richard Stallman (RMS) Talk in Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress Will be Remote
This past week RMS received lots of accolades online
Links 28/08/2025: Chatbots Distorting/Fabricating History and Also Driving Suicide
Links for the day
 
Slopwatch: Fake Articles About "Linux", Slop Images in VentureBeat, Linux Foundation Spam Made With LLM Slop and Slop Images
The only relief or upside - if any exists - is that the pace of slop was down a bit this week
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, August 28, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, August 28, 2025
Gemini Links 29/08/2025: Poems, Games, and Java 25 Performance
Links for the day
Links 28/08/2025: Greenland 'Interferences' by US and Skinnerboxes to Get Banned in Korean Schools
Links for the day
The Register MS (Run by Microsoft Operatives): Free Software is Putin, Hence Evil and Dangerous
The current editor in chief is an American Microsofter, the previous one went to work for Google (US)
Gemini Links 28/08/2025: Back in Japan and Why "Hacker News" Sucks
Links for the day
A Much-Needed Wake-up Call to Users of Wordpress.com, Blogspot, Substack and All Those Other Outsourced (and Centralised) Platforms
There are several lessons in there
The UEFI 9/11 - Part II - Campaign of Censorship and Defamation Against Critics
In dictatorships, humour serves an important role. It's tragic.
Open Source Initiative (OSI) Resists Software Freedom, Even by Attacking Its Own
The OSI is compromised
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, August 27, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, August 27, 2025
Slopwatch: linuxsecurity.com, Slopfarms in Google News, and More
Some readers of ours end up sending us links that are from slopfarms, not realising those are slopfarms
Gemini Links 27/08/2025: Katrina Memories and Google Versus Software Freedom
Links for the day
Links 27/08/2025: Police Against Media Freedom in the UK, Energy-Hungry Countries Targeted by China
Links for the day
Microsoft Windows Fell to All-Time Lows in Egypt This Summer, Vista 11 Adoption Decreases While GNU/Linux Increases
Vista 11 is going down rather than up
Links 27/08/2025: Microsoft Demoralises Staff With Slop Demands, Leaving Mastodon Explained
Links for the day
12 Hours Ago The Register MS Published a Fake (Paid-for) Article, But This One for a Change Did Not Promote a Ponzi Scheme
There are also Free software alternatives, but they don't pay The Register MS for "synthetic" so-called 'journalism'
More People Need to Call Out and Put a Stop to Serial Sloppers
Unless slopfarms are stopped, people will read and share Microsoft propaganda made by chatbots
Gemini Links 27/08/2025: Headphones and Tartarus
Links for the day
Morale at Microsoft is Terrible (Proprietary Plagiarism Machines Have No Future, LLM Slop is a Bubble)
The slop sceptics/critics are going to have lots of "told you so" moments
GNOME "governance issues, staff reduction, etc." amidst Albanian whistleblowing and women trafficking
Notice the connection to Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) and GNOME
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, August 26, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, August 26, 2025