In the Free and Open Source communities we are proud of our 'bazaar' model, where anyone can join in by setting up a project and publishing their programs. Users are free to pick and choose whatever software they want... provided they're happy to compile from source, resolve dependencies manually and give up automatic security and feature updates. In this essay, I introduce 'decentralised' installation systems, such as Autopackage and Zero Install, which aim to provide these missing features.

FreeSBIE 2.0-RELEASE has been released. "FreeSBIE 2.0-RELEASE (codename Clint Eastwood) is based on the fresh FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE, both in terms of sources and of packages. It contains more than 450 pieces and 1,3 gigabytes of software, all in a single CD-ROM of 668 megabytes."

"With thousands of packages to maintain, most important part of any distribution is indeed its package management system. PiSi is the package manager of Pardus, written from scratch in Python. By writing another package manager, our purpose was not to reinvent the wheel but to create a new kind of wheel that takes distinctive ideas from existing ones with also easy integration and maintanence in mind."

"This is a step-by-step account of the method I used recently to install and configure a NIS master and slaves on servers running Solaris 8. The steps detailed should work fine on other versions of Solaris, but as I have not explicitly tested other versions (except as clients) you may encounter issues. The clients used with this setup ranged from Solaris 7 to Solaris 10. The installation was in a medium-sized Solaris-only farm (100+ hosts)."

Ian Murdock blogs about the importance of backward compatibility. "Yes, it's hard, particularly in the Linux world, because there are thousands of developers building the components that make up the platform, and it just takes one to break compatibility and make our lives difficult. Even worse, the idea of keeping extraneous stuff around for the long term 'just' for the sake of compatibility is anathema to most engineers. Elegance of design is a much higher calling than the pedestrian task of making sure things don't break. Why is backward compatibility important?"

The iPhone is running an optimised but full version of OS X that weighs in at "considerably less" than half a GB, according to Apple vice president of worldwide iPod marketing Greg Joswiak. Joswiak confirmed that the operating system sits in the flash memory of the device and that Apple will "provide updates to the operating system like we do today."

The shared source licence being drawn up as part of the RISC OS Open project is in the hands of lawyers, it was revealed this week. In a report to be published by Archive magazine, Castle are said to have spent a 'lot of money' on legal bills to make the licence watertight. The company fears loopholes may be found in their complex shared source agreement which could allow royalty free use of the source code for commercial purposes or let people avoid disclosing updates to the RISC OS blueprints.

Vasper has breathed life into his BeOS Max project. "Well, as you might have seen on BeOS News sites, I have posted info on the haikumax.org site on an upcoming version of BeOS Max. It will be Version 4 to be exact. So to answer the major question. Why? Although Zeta is being developed, Magnussoft is not doing its best to keep it alive. I find it quite annoying that I have to return the product I purchased from Yellowtab, to get an upgrade. This for me is a show stopper. I don't want to wait in line at a post office, to send a package back to a company whose products I order from the Internet."

This week's KDE Commit Digest tells about an installer for KDE on Windows and the problems the developers encountered setting up a working environment for KDE to run on. Many screenshots included, showing the first applications (such as Konqueror) running natively.

"PuppyLinux is one of the most popular 'flavors' of Linux, I have used it on several old P-II and P-III machines that I donated and it got them to work when the original OS (95 and 98) would not even so much as boot up. It was just after PuppyLinux's offer to be the OS for the One Laptop Per Child and the new 'Unofficial PuppyLinux Guide' came out that I first contacted Kenneth of PuppyLinux. I wanted to know more about Puppy, the OLPC and what goes into making a guide for a Linux distro, Kenneth was kind enough to share his experinces with me."

The next alpha release of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (Herd 2) is out. The Kubuntu announcement is here. "The Feisty Fawn Herd 2 is the second alpha release of Ubuntu 7.04, and with this new alpha release comes a whole host of excellent new features. The feature list for 7.04 has been slowly growing more exact since Feisty opened late last month." Update: Screenshots for Ubuntu and Kubuntu.

FreeBSD 6.2 has been released to mirrors. The release notes for your specific platform are also available. "FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium and Athlon), amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon64, and EM64T), ARM, IA-64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. Additional platforms are in various stages of development."

Some more information about the Apple iPhone is keep hitting the web: the ARM CPU is apparently made by Samsung, applications will only be developed by third party companies that have a license agreement with Apple and make sure they follow specific guidelines (and possibly the apps will only be available by iTunes) while other sources say that the iPhone indeed runs a modified version of Darwin with a few OSX components (incorrectly reported by Slashdot today that it's not). Desktop OSX apps won't run on the iPhone of course. David Pogue also has two FAQs on the product (1,2).

Last June a spin-off department of Red Hat, lead by desktop guru Havoc Pennington, announced Mugshot. Originally, Mugshot was in the midst of controversy whether it's a social networking application or not. Apparently, it instead is a "social networking aggregator". In order for this to work, access to third party data is a must.