About a week ago I upgraded Mandrakelinux on one of my computers from 10.1 to 10.2 Beta 2. All went fine except that KDE 3.4 from CVS stopped working correctly. The menu entries were missing and there were no file type associations. After some investigation and help from KDE-Devel mailing list I found out what the problem is and how to correct it. It looks like that in Mandrakelinux 10.2 the folder for menu configuration is not in the default place and so KDE was using the wrong configuration. To solve this I had to set the XDG_CONFIG_DIRS environment variable to $KDEDIRS/etc/xdg/ and export it. Now all is working as it should. Well, almost. Lost & found menu has way too many entries and Home has no icon set. But this is nothing big. I can at least work normally again in KDE 3.4 from CVS.

People at Italian web site Hardware Upgrade are the first to publish benchmarks of the dual core AMD Athlon 64 processor. They used an engineering sample running at 2.4 GHz and with 1 MiB of L2 cache. The system had 512 MiB of memory. Here are the results from the Cinebench (in seconds, lower is better):

What can I say. Very cool for only 2.4 GHz and I can’t wait to see the final hardware in action. I wonder what will be the price for these CPUs…

Although I’m waiting for soon to be released KDE 3.4.0, some of you might be happy to know that GNOME 2.10.0 has been released a few days ago. They have added two popular apps into the package: Sound Juicer for AudioCD ripping and Totem for playing videos. File manager Nautilus is faster and more stable. Mozilla based web browser Epiphany now has an extensions manager. For a list of new things visit this page. There is also a Ubuntu based LiveCD with the new GNOME available for download. Screenshot tour is available here.

A couple of days ago nVidia have released a new version of their graphic drivers for Linux. The new version is 1.0-7167 and these are the release highlights:

• Support for GeForce 6200 with TurboCache™ GPUs
• Improved OpenGL workstation performance
• Added support for XRandR rotation
• Added ExactModeTimingsDVI X config option to give explicit control over the mode timings used on Flat Panels
• Added Xorg dlloader support
• Changed driver behavior such that PAT (Page Attribute Table) is used where possible instead of MTRRs
• Added a workaround for an X server bug with PCI-E GeForce 6800 and GeForce 6600; a fix has been provided to XFree86 and XOrg
• Fixed stability problems on x86_64 PCI-E systems
• Fixed 2D rendering corruption on certain older GPUs
• Improved compatibility with Linux 2.6 kernels
• Fixed compatibility problems with some SWIOTLB em64t systems
• Fixed a bug that triggered error messages of the form:
  “ioctl32(doom.x86:6747): Unknown cmd fd(16) cmd(c0384642){00} arg(ffffc75c) on /dev/nvidiactl”
• Fixed NvAGP incompatibility with recent Linux 2.6 kernels
• Improved interaction with the udev filesystem
• Improved performance of PCI cards on Linux 2.6 systems
• Updated documentation

Download the drivers here:
nVidia Linux drivers 1.0-7167 - 32-bit IA32
nVidia Linux drivers 1.0-7167 - 64-bit AMD64

Back in 2003 Mozilla Foundation announced it will be shifting its development focus away from Mozilla Suite and towards a new generation of applications - web browser Firefox and e-mail client Thunderbird. A couple of days ago they decided to complete the shift and stop any major work on Mozilla Suite. So 1.7 will be the final stable branch. There have been a couple of 1.8 alphas and betas but these were only used to test some back-end changes and there will be no release of stable 1.8 version by Mozilla Foundation. Yet a lot of people still prefer Mozilla Suite (here in Slovenia mostly because Thunderbird is still not translated into our mother language) and some developers would still like to continue working on it. Perhaps we will someday see some form of Mozilla from enhanced sourcecode, but it will probably be branded under a different name. Mozilla Foundation will still provide infrastructure support (CVS access, bugzilla, development tools, etc) for this development. For the most of us the future is in Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Nvu and other separate Mozilla based projects.

Read more here:
Mozilla Application Suite - Transition Plan

Currently AMD is especially well known because of their fast 64-bit Athlon 64 and Opteron processors. These are meant for desktops, workstations and servers. Today they started to offer special low power 64-bit CPUs under the name of AMD Turion 64, which are competing directly against Intel’s Centrino technology. Turion 64 will bring AMD64 performance to thinner and lighter notebook PCs with longer battery life and enhanced security.

With Turion 64 we also get new model numbering, like ML-37 and MT-34. The closer the second letter is to the end of the alphabet the lower is the power consumption and this means longer battery life. The numbers indicate relative performance within the processor class.

Press release is available here:
AMD Ushers In A New Era In 64-Bit Mobile Computing With AMD Turion™ 64 Mobile Technology

Google Desktop Search is a special tool which indexes files, e-mails and web history on your computer and then enables you to easily and quickly search for the desired information. It has been available as a beta for quite some time but now a final version is out. They have added support for Firefox web browser, Thunderbird e-mail client and PDF files. Support for other file formats can be added using plugins and a plugin for OpenOffice.org is already available.

The damage is almost done. Yesterday the Council Presidency has adopted the faulty software patents directive. They have done so despite qualified majority of member states demanding to make the directive a B-item. This is a violation of the procedural rules and the Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) has already asked for Council decision documentation. If things stay as they are now, the directive will go to European Parliament for a second reading. In the worst case we can only hope that then something is done to fix the broken directive. Otherwise bad times are ahead for small and medium companies and open source developers and consequently for all of us.

Read more here:

• Council Presidency Adopts Software Patent Agreement Against Council’s Rules
• EU Council adopts Common Position “for institutional reasons” only, sends minority position to EP for second reading
• Open letter to the EU: Constitution, we have a problem

After a foolish decision by the EU Commission not to restart the writing of a better directive on software patents, it has again become an A-item on agenda for the Competition Council meeting on Monday. This means that the current defective directive would be accepted without discussion and the damage would finally be done.

Luckily, the Danish parliament has took a binding decision (can not be ignored) that the Danish government shall oppose the adoption of the current proposal as an A-item and shall request that the proposal be renegotiated (as a B-item) in the future. This will reopen the software patents discussion that should lead to the rewrite of the directive. It is expected that Sweden and Poland (which has prevented the adoption of current directive before).

Read more here:

• Danish Parliament obliges Minister to renegotiate software patents in Council
• Denmark and Poland Will Deal the Death Blow To the Council’s Current Proposal (Text of 18 May 2004)
• Denmark: SW Patent Directive as B-Item Only on Monday
• Last-gasp attempt to block patent directive

We’ve got another beta release today. This one is for the upcoming opensource office suite OpenOffice.org 2.0. Version 2.0 will come with a lot of new features and improvements. The default format will change to a new standard OASIS OpenDocument. A new databse application is added. You can read more about new features here and here. Download it from this page. ED2K links for eMule, aMule and similar apps are available here.

Netscape is about to release a new browser, which is based on extremely popular Mozilla Firefox. From Firefox you will get the well known speed, security and stability and great support for the newest web standards. Support for RSS feeds is also here. What makes it different from other browsers are some additional features like Site controls and Multi-Bar. Netscape Browser 8.0 also enables you to render pages using Trident engine from Internet Explorer. Off course this is not recommended as this engine is known for being old, slow and has a lot of security problems. But unfortunately sometimes you just don’t have other choice but to use Internet Explorer (for example for Windows Update or some other webpages created by people who know nothing or don’t care about web standards). You can download the beta version from its home page or using eMule, aMule or a similar client from here.

Thanks to selfish, corrupted or simply stupid politicians like Charlie McCreevy and José Manuel Barosso software patents are again an extremely big danger for people, open source developers and small and medium companies. Despite the strong and clear opposition to current form of the directive on software patentability, above mentioned politicians have decided not to listen to all of us, JURI and European Parliament and said no to much needed renewal process for the badly written directive. A very said decision for all of us and an extremely sad day for democracy.

Don’t forget to fight against software patents by blogging about this and telling you friends and coworkers about the danger!

Read more about this here:

• Commission won’t restart patents directive, DG MARKT fears balanced approach
• MEP Alvaro (ALDE): Barroso’s decision an affront to European Parliament
• European Banana Union: EU Commission declines EP’s request for restart