Several months ago Novell started the project named Banter. It’s being called the next generation collaboration client. Think of it as software that combines all of your online “Web 2.0″ services along with chat, video, and voice into your contact management system.

Banter’s focus is on collaboration with people. One method of collaboration is IM. Banter will initially be focused on the big three: Video, Audio, and Text chats. Banter’s user experience will be around people (not buddies from specific services) and all the ways you work with them. Future collaboration methods may include email, blogs, photo sharing, whiteboarding, teaming, web conferencing, etc. Banter’s goal is not to implement all of these services and technologies, but bring them together so the data around the people you collaborate with is all brought together.

The chat window can handle text, audio, and video chat. Text chat is always available so you can send links or information while having and audio or video chat. Audio and Video can be started and stopped at any time during a chat. The project is focused on providing a simple quality experience for the end user.  Banter is built on the telepathy project, and thus is not trying to re-invent the wheel but provide collaborative user experience on existing frameworks.

Banter is available on the openSUSE build service and is currently in alpha, the latest release being 0.1.10 with GTalk support. This project is being done in the open from the very beginning. In fact, if you want to see what we are doing, you can visit the Banter wiki at http://banter-project.org.

Banter in openSUSE 10.3   |    Packages on the build server

Found this video on youtube where user criticizes MS Office’07 and recommending on switching to OOo, version 2.3 in this video. His words go on to say:

“I strongly advise you don’t get Microsoft Office 2007 – any of the editions – you ARE getting ripped off!!” and …. “And if you have a Mac, download NeoOffice, a better version of OpenOffice for Mac users:”
Intel Based Macs: http://gulus.usherbrooke.ca/pub/appl/…
Other based Macs: http://www.planamesa.net/neojava/down…

{ …. but why uninstalled it !!!}

To Download OpenOffice, go to: http://download.openoffice.org/

This week in DistroWatch Weekly:

• Reviews: A grand overview of popular desktop distributions

	Ubuntu	PCLinuxOS	openSUSE	Fedora	Mint	Sabayon	MEPIS	Freespire
Ease of installation
Ease of use
Package management
Speed
Average	8.75	8.5	7.75	6.5	9	6	7.25	8

• News: Ubuntu “Hardy Heron”, openSUSE Weekly News, Mandriva Flash and Linutop,
• Fedora release history, interview with Eric Sandall from Source Mage, Foresight 2.0 plans
• Released last week: CentOS 5.1, Damn Small Linux 4.1
• Upcoming releases: Frugalware Linux 0.8 Pre 1
• Donations: MEPIS receives US$300
• New additions: Vixta.org
• New distributions: Jazz Linux, Pendrive Linux, ZXMameCD
• Reader comments

Read more in this week’s issue of DistroWatch Weekly….

“Really the big basic difference is that Ubuntu is a simplified cookie cutter distribution designed to not overwhelm the new user with choice. openSUSE on the other hand is the polar opposite offering choices for every aspect of Linux computing. openSUSE is very scalable and it can be as easy or advanced as one needs. You could install openSUSE on a dozen machines and none be the same if that was your wish, whereas install Ubuntu on a dozen machines and it would be exactly alike except some might not be able to connect to the internet.”

“There really isn’t much of a comparison between these two distros as they are so vastly different in target audience, capabilities, and philosophies. If you are a brand new Linux user perhaps you should get your feet wet with Ubuntu as openSUSE might seem a bit overwhelming. After a coupla weeks and you begin to feel claustrophobic, then branch out to try openSUSE. If you have any Linux or advanced Windows experience, then you might prefer the functionality found in openSUSE.”

Xfce 4.4.2 is now available. It’s the second maintenance release in the 4.4 stable series, focusing on fixing bugs and updating translations.

Xfce 4.4.2 Changes include:

Window Manager (xfwm4):

Be more relax with transients, allow transients to be sticky independently of their parent window (Bug #3296).
Fix xfwm4 hanging with gtk+-2.11.x (Bug #3346).
Plug a leak in mouse button grab when changing theme.
Fix dialogs and modals without parents not being automatically centered like before (Bug #3278).
Fix modifier mask not working with all keymaps (Bug #3194).
Fix wrong count of key shortcuts causing switch to last workspace on modifier key press if no window is focused (Bug #3191).
Fix spec file missing from the tar ball causing ‘make dist’ to fail.
Fix strict bound checking causing wrong window to be focused in focus follow mouse (Bug #2781).
Transients for group shouldn’t apply to other transients, or it breaks stacking for some apps, noticeably mozilla “save as” dialog…
Fix typo breaking compilation on systems without XShape 1.1 support.

Full Changelog  |   Downloads  |   Full Annoucement

The first thing to address: Are these two devices truly competitors? The answer is yes – but only to consumers who don’t know what they REALLY want. You see – Both are extremely portable 800×480 Internet centric Linux devices in the $400-$470 street price range. However, both have clear cut advantages in certain areas that would only be of benefit to people who knew those advantages beforehand and used them as a basis for a purchasing decision.

More Here

Latest nightly build of Firefox 3 sports the  much improved location bar autocomplete, that unlike Firefox 2 which only looked for web addresses in my history, this one looks on visited and bookmarked page titles and tags along with web addresses.

The autocomplete list now shows page titles and addresses in two different lines and colors. The top line has the website’s icon, title name and a star (if the site is bookmarked by you). The second line is much smaller and has the URL of the website. As you type the matching portions of the title and URL are highlighted and underlined so that you can easily tell what matches.

Personally, I really liked the multi-line approach to the Location Bar, and if I am not mistaken it is the first browser to have this (maybe Opera has it).

The KDE Release Team has decided to release KDE 4.0 this coming January. The release was originally planned for mid-December. The KDE developers want to solve a couple of essential issues before releasing. Having solved some of those issues, among which were glitches in the visual appearance, and in Konqueror, the KDE community hopes to have a KDE 4.0 that will live up to the high expectations for it. Read on for more details.
Meanwhile, the progress towards KDE 4.0 is astonishing. Most parts, such as the KDE Development Platform and a lot of applications are considered stable and well-usable.

Some parts of the desktop experience do not yet meet the KDE community’s quality standards and expectations for a stable release. There are also some issues which need to be addressed upstream, for example a bug in certain codecs of xine that cut off audio fragments prematurely. The developers are confident to be able to release a more polished and better working KDE 4.0 desktop in January. The changed plans involve releasing on January 11th, 2008.

At the same time, the release team’s call for participation is repeated. To make KDE 4.0 a success, your effort is needed. An overview of current showstoppers can be found on Techbase, KDE’s knowledge platform.

This is also a call to the wider Free Software community, and also to companies working with KDE. If you have the resources to contribute, assistance in fixing the remaining bugs is most welcome. -dot.kde.news

Related: KDE 4: some reasons for design decisions (very interesting article, especially to those who wonder what will be the vital differences between KDE 3 and 4)

Also check out a page on TechBase to track the porting status of Qt/KDE applications, which are not part of the KDE 4.0 release, with the applications that distributions tend to have in their default installation as a start.

The video follows from KDE Commit-Digest, Issue 85, reviewing the Containments in Plasma, and other status updates.

 Is your next brand new system going to run Phenom X4 … or X2 …. or X3?