The release candidate of Ubuntu Linux 5.04 is available.

After two and a half years of work, autopackage 1.0 has finally escaped into the wild. It has a fundamentally new design, and offers an alternative system of software distribution and management on Linux. This article will talk about what this means for the Linux community, and what new directions and possibilities it opens up. It'll talk about problems remaining to be solved, and finally it will propose solutions for them. If you just want to see what autopackage is like, check out the screenshots or the Flash demo, available from the website.

Linux founder Linus Torvalds on Tuesday called for more regular performance tests on the Linux kernel, so that any reduction in efficiency can be highlighted sooner.

Today I thought about how I can make my very own application to only link against those libraries that it really requires and not those it get provided by PKG-CONFIG.

Guest PC 1.2 has a 2x performance boost on G5s plus better support for dual-headed machines. Serial port support added. It became possible to communicate with serial devices such as modems, PDAs and cell phones. USB-to-Serial adapter is supported as well. Extended peripheral devices support. This feature allows to separately select modem and printer for every virtual computer.

FreeRTOS is a portable open source (GPL) real-time operating system for embedded devices. It offers a smaller and easier real-time processing alternative for applications where eCOS and embedded Linux (or Real Time Linux) won't fit, are not appropriate, or are not available. FreeRTOS runs on a bunch of architectures, both 8- and 16-bit. TCP/IP support is provided either from the uIP software TCP/IP stack (live demo server here) or by using the Wiznet hardware TCP/IP co-processor (live demo server here).

John Carmack decides to code a Java game for his new cell phone just for fun and writes about the problems he had with J2ME while doing so.

The code-named Thunar project, which aims to develop a new file manager for Xfce 4, has had a bunch of discussion on the mailing list about a possible new name. Xfce developers decided to share some of their favorites with OSNews readers and solicit some feedback.

BitRock InstallBuilder is a multiplatform installation tool that supports Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris and, soon, OSX. It has free, fully functional licenses for open source projects. This new release adds Linux PPC and FreeBSD 5.x support.

Sun plans to make Java Enterprise System available as an open-source product. "That will define us as a company truly committed to open source," Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief operating officer of Sun, told InformationWeek.

New start-up efforts and maturing commercial and open-source projects promise to make virtualization more powerful and ubiquitous for Linux and the x86 platform. Also, 64 reasons to opt for Linux.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Apple Computer's next-generation operating system, is just about ready to wrap.

Alan Cox chats about life as a Linux kernel hacker, describing the Linux development process as a controlled explosion. He also notes that Linux doesn't need Linus and even names his most likely successor. He also talks about Trusted Computing's affect on Linux and his research in people's desires for desktop Linux.

Learn about binary compatibility as it relates to the different operating environments that run on Linux on POWER. Learn about new technologies that can provide performance enhancements for a Linux on POWER apps, and follow steps to ensure binary compatibility across multiple distributions in the future.