Last week the GNOME project released the second edition of their Human Interface Guidelines (HIG 2.0). The HIG is an effort to push a more consistent look and feel on the GNOME desktop, and it's worthwhile reading for other projects as well.

Light on theory and long on practical application, "Mono: A Developer's Notebook" book bypasses the talk and theory, and jumps right into Mono 1.0. Here is a PDF sample chapter of the newly released Mono book (we will have a review in a couple of weeks).

"A couple of years ago I wrote a paper about what I'd do if I were asked to design a window system today. I never published it other than to hand it around to a few friends. So now, it's here," Java's James Gosling writes.

An article written for Geyson Rogério L. Silva was published in the site LinuxIT, showing Installation step by step of Slackware 10.0, Read article.

Nat Friedman posted recently some new screenshots from within his Novell Desktop showing Beagle, the Dashboard evolution. Beagle indexes the file system for intelligent searches similar to Apple's Spotlight solution. It is also capable on searching the internet while integrates well with many Gnome apps like Evolution and Gaim, including file selectors. Notice how the spatial Nautilus opens a new window for each search, containing only the search results.

Although Microsoft recommends that consumers turn on Automatic Update to get the latest version of Windows, the company is offering to let companies temporarily block such upgrades.

Nowadays most kids are introduced to computers at quite a young age and understand that their future careers and lives are going to involve using them substantially. For many of them, computer games are an important part of their learning computer skills and can lead to an interest in finding out more about computers, operating systems, software and so on.

Absoft Corporation has announced immediate availability of its new high performance Pro Fortran tool kit version 9.0 for Macintosh OS X. Absoft’s Pro Fortran Compiler Suite is the most complete Macintosh Fortran tool kit available from any vendor and includes: Fortran 95 and C/C++ compilers, a powerful Integrated Development Environment, the market-leading Fx2™ Debugger, and free graphics libraries.

Microsoft announced Wednesday it would offer a low-cost starter edition of its Windows XP operating system in Asia starting in October, as it strives to hold onto market share facing erosion from the open-source Linux system and software piracy.

Some of the less publicized features of Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" are beginning to emerge as developer sources compile notes from Apple's recent World Wide Developer Conference and preliminary tests of the next-generation operating system. Although the majority of the features are based on additions to less apparent and underlying technologies, the advances will aid developers in producing more feature rich and streamlined applications in shorter periods of time, sources said.

This is an interview of Ben Collins-Sussman (of Subversion fame) conducted by Shlomi Fish. The next major version of Subversion, 1.1.0, is scheduled to be release on September.

Linus Torvalds has been called on to help Australia's peak Linux association in a battle to stop local companies from trying to trademark the word "Linux."

Computers are complex systems but it's a mistake to assume they need to be complex to use. However, usability is not as easy as it may first seem. It is a different discipline from software development lacking the strict logic or having a "right way". There are only differing requirements and differing collections of guidelines. Making things easy is difficult.

The X.Org Foundation announced today that it has begun tagging pre-release builds for the X11R6.8 release of the Xorg server & X Window System and asked for volunteers to start building and testing them. The Release Plan and Status web page lists the new features and changes included in this release, and updates on bugs found in testing so far.