LWN’s latest edition is up and ready for consumption.

– By Dan Berkes–

Head on over the KDE home page, and scroll down a bit until you see the “Family” heading in the left-side menubar. At first glance, it doesn’t appear to be anything out of the ordinary: games.kde.org, bugs.kde.org, lists.kde.org. Then there’s the eye-catcher: women.kde.org.Women may be in the minority when it comes to the fields of programming and software development, but they’re not such a small portion of that group as to be invisible. With one or two notable exceptions such as linuxchix.org and now KDE-Women, they’re severely under-represented online.

Start with three friends, add a little beer, a dash of nice music, and a healthy portion of animated conversation, and you have the starter recipe for KDE-Women. Ralf Nolden, Torsten Rahn and Eva Brucherseifer met up for a night of relaxation after a hectic day at the Systems 2000 conference in Munich, and the next thing they knew, the latest addition to the KDE project had been concieved.

To quote the project’s Web site: “And then everything happened very fast.”

The first incarnation of KDE-Women was that cornerstore of Open Source projects, the mailing list. After a while, participants decided that the best supplement to the mailing list was a real-time discussion forum, which fostered creation of a hangout spot on KDE’s Internet Relay Chat server. All things eventually lead to the Web, and on March 19, the group announced its new site to the world.

Brucherseifer, who serves as the project’s webmaster, says the goal is to get more women involved in the creation of KDE. “Up to now there was only a low percentage of women in the KDE team and no female core developer. And not only the ‘usual female’ jobs like designers, documentation writers, journalists, but into every part of KDE.”

KDE-Women is much more than just an online forum. The group has already hosted two European meetings, and three more meetings are already scheduled — two in Germany and one in the United Kingdom — to coincide with Linux trade shows taking place this summer.

The Web site is a work in progress, she stressed. Current offerings are sparse, but KDE-Women hope to have a variety of tutorials and information available as the site and the organization it supports grows. “Some possible topics are graphics, themes, user howtos.”

The intent of KDE-Women is to promote cooperation, not competition. Brucherseifer is quick to point out that, although KDE-Women is run by women, and offers Open Source advice from that perspective, everyone is welcome to join.

“Personally, I have the opinion that men and women tend to do things in different ways,” says Brucherseifer. “That is why there easily can arise conflicts and women often think they are not able to do things, because they would do them different and don’t understand the ‘male way.’

“KDE wants to be a desktop for everyone and I think it can only gain from female input.”

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page.

Securtity Focus warns of a security bug in the popular editor ‘vim’, which allows a malicious user to run arbitrary commands from statuslines in text files opened by other users.

Info World reports that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body responsible for overseeing the Internet’s naming records is advising strongly against anyone using prergistration services on domains to be introduced later this year. No company has been authorised to preregister domains and people who do have no guarantee they’ll get the domain they signed up for.

Kelly McNeill writes “Internet mail will win the market for the server appliance. Internet usage and the changing enterprise space has Linux poised to take the whole market. Is anything stopping it? You mean besides the Linux distribution companies?
…
Linux distribution companies lack marketing and product development skill. They depend on Linux alone to build their business for them. That’s not sufficient.”

Australian IT reports that the Australian Government is looking into the movie industry’s practice of encoding DVDs by region as being anticompetitive and illegal.

In his last column for LinuxWorld, editor Joe Barr hosts a discussion with Red Hat chairman Bob Young and “Jim Allmouth,” big dog at an un-named technology titan. Mr. Mouth, got to the point quickly, asking Young: “With a name like Red Hat Linux, how can you protect the company from becoming un-American? Especially when so many Linux hackers are not American. Can you deny that neither Linus Torvalds nor Alan Cox is American?”

IT-Director comments on the new Linux ad campaign from Big Blue: “As we understand it, IBM’s Linux promotion policy comes direct from Lou Gerstner and IBM intends to play this card for all it is worth. IBM is going to try to convince the corporates from the top down that Linux is ready for prime time. It scales, it’s robust and it’s versatile. Peace, love and Linux.”

The Duke of URL reviews the latest SuSE Linux distribution: “With their latest release, SuSE moves to the front of the pack. SuSE Version 7.1 has emerged, incorporating features that users have been clamoring for over the last few months. Not the least of which are kernel 2.4, XFree86 4.02 and KDE 2.01, three of the largest and most popular upgrades for Linux users that have appeared this year. In addition SuSE also maintains backwards compatibility for users who are more conservative by including kernel 2.2.18 and KDE 1.1.2.”

“Today, SuSE Linux, the international technology leader and provider of Open Source solutions, announced the upcoming release of SuSE Linux 7.1 PowerPC Edition in early April. SuSE supplies the latest Linux operating system and more than 1,000 assorted applications for Mac users on 6 CDs. With SuSE’s optimized Kernel 2.4.2 SuSE Linux 7.1 PowerPC Edition boasts a greatly enhanced USB support. SuSE Linux 7.1 PowerPC Edition also features the support for the sound system ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) for PowerMacs.” Read the press release at LinuxPR.