New community Hardware Compatibility List in testing
One of the things Mandriva community members have asked us for the most is a new Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) system. The HCL is a vital tool for prospective users and existing users wanting to install Mandriva on a new system or buy a new peripheral for their existing system, but our old system relied on the company exclusively to acquire, test and certify hardware. There's simply too much hardware out there for one small company to test, so we needed a new approach. This month, our new, collaborative system has gone into testing. This system relies on you, our community members, to help build the hardware database. Anyone running a fully-updated release of Mandrakelinux 10.1, Mandriva Linux 2005 or Mandriva Linux 2006 can add their system hardware to the database and use the simple web page to let us know how well their hardware works. Thanks to the power of the community, this system will allow us to cover far more hardware, giving new users more confidence that Mandriva will work on their machines, and making it easier for existing users to choose new hardware. The new system is already fully functional, but we are testing its capacity to handle heavy loads and we are also still tweaking the interface and the features. Please help us by adding your hardware to the system and letting us know how you think the site could be improved. There are instructions on the site to tell you how to upload your hardware and how to rate it. Please send feedback to the Mandriva Club forums, where we will read it and pass on the suggestions to the developers working on the new system.

David Barth appointed new worldwide VP Engineering
This month, we announced the appointment of David Barth as our new worldwide Vice President of Engineering. David will oversee the engineering teams in both France and Brazil. David has a strong background in both the technology business and the open source world, which makes him ideal for the position. Most recently, David was CTO at IdealX, a leading European system integrator specializing in customized solutions for large corporations and government agencies. He first started using Linux in the early 1990s with version 0.99pl8 and then was involving in the writing of the early window manager fvwm95 and the mgadvd kernel driver for Matrox's hardware MPEG-2 decoder, so his open source credentials are assured! You can read more about David's appointment here.

Mandriva and HP to ship Linux PCs in Latin America
A widely-covered story this month was our announcement that we are extending our partnership with HP to cover Latin America. HP has named Mandriva its "Preferred Linux Partner for Latin America" and Mandriva Linux 2006 has been tested and certified on the machines HP ships to 37 countries in the region, including Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. The first machines to be released under the program - one aimed at consumers and one at businesses - are already shipping in Brazil. Mandriva and HP will work together on sales and technical support for the new systems. You can read more about the partnership in the press release.

Mandriva at Solutions Linux 2006 in Paris
As we first announced in the last issue, Mandriva will have a large presence at the Solutions Linux 2006 expo in Paris from January 31st to February 2nd. Mandriva will have its own booth along with five of our commercial partners: Intel, HP, Audaxis, Integrale Vision, and Marratech. The displays and staff at the booth will cover both our enterprise and our personal product ranges. Mandriva staff will also be involved in three conferences at the event. If you are in Paris during the time of the show, make sure to come and meet some of the Mandriva team! You can read more about the event and Mandriva's presence here.

NASA uses Mandriva
SearchOpenSource.com reported this month that Mandriva is among several versions of Linux in regular use at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA runs Solaris on its servers by policy, but those who work at the JPL are free to choose their own desktop operating system, and Mandriva is a popular choice. In fact, the real-time systems group at JPL makes up one of the largest Mandriva deployments in the world. You can read the full story here.

keychain
This issue's Application Of The Unspecified Time Period is keychain. keychain is a manager for ssh-agent and gpg-agent, which in turn are managers for your ssh and GPG keys. In practical terms, keychain asks for the passphrases to your ssh and gpg keys once, at initial login, and then remembers them so you don't have to enter them again every time you want to use them, for instance to log in to another machine with ssh's public key authentication method. This way you can have secure access to other machines on your network without having to type a password or passphrase! Of course, anyone with physical access to the machine can do this too, so you should take care to take precautions when using keychain on a machine other people may be able to access. keychain is packaged in main on Mandriva 2006.0: all you need to do to enable it is to install it with either urpmi or rpmdrake, then the next time you log in to your machine, it will ask you for the passphrases for any ssh or GPG keys you have created.

Eat your greens and do your updates!
To finish this issue of the newsletter, we remind you as always to update all your Mandriva systems regularly. Remember, updating doesn't just keep your systems secure, it fixes bugs and updates your software too. Since the last issue of the newsletter was released, security updates have been released for important packages including kdegraphics and wine, but we have also released an update to the final version of X.org 6.9 for Mandriva Linux 2006 (which shipped with a pre-release version), a bugfix update for OpenOffice.org, and an update which fixes uploading hardware information to the new Hardware Compatibility List system under Mandrakelinux 10.1 and Mandriva Linux 2005. And of course, if running MandrivaUpdate regularly is getting to be too much work for you, remember Mandriva Online, our automated update notification and installation system!