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. ⬆