Our sister site NewMobileComputing (NMC) features today an interview with professional photographer Joe Decker (gallery), discussing digital photography, essential software and much more.

Kerneltrap covers recent progress with the Kqueue code in FreeBSD-current. Kqueue testing is a major focus area for the release of 5.3 and it looks like freebsd dev is making steady progress in knocking out major showstoppers. The code would also benefit from testing.

Well-known tech journalist Nicholas Petreley tried Gnome 2.6 but he got baffled by the default Nautilus 2.6 behavior to open each folder on a new window and also from the inability to change colors on a GTK+ theme through a UI. On a positive note, Gnome's Tim Ney informed us about the Guadec 5 event.

Arvan Reese wrote a guide for beginners explaining all about source-based Linux distros.

Before we begin, here's what XFce's website has to say about itself: XFce is a lightweight desktop environment for unix-like operating systems. It aims to be fast and lightweight, while still being visually appealing and easy to use. It's based on the GTK+ toolkit version 2.

"The conclusion is obvious by the "Total Time For All Benchmarks Test." The best journaling file system to choose based upon these results would be: JFS, ReiserFS or XFS depending on your needs and what types of files you are dealing with. I was quite surprised how slow ext3 was overall, as many distributions use this file system as their default file system. Overall, one should choose the best file system based upon the properties of the files they are dealing with for the best performance possible!" Read the whole article at the LinuxGazette.

Replicants are classes unarchived from an add-on. They live in the address space of the application which is hosting the replicant, and would therefore only have the translation strings available to the host application by default. Read the article here. Update: OpenBeOS also published their newsletter with another article about replicants.

Distributors must solve setup and licensing issues for Linux to be a success on the desktop. For Linux to become a real competitor to Windows on the desktop, Linux distributors must refine their software installation and management systems. There are some loose ends that need to be tied up and some tricky legal knots to unravel, says eWeek.

Buried in recently published financial documents is the news that Lindows, Inc., has been engaged in a lawsuit with rival and one-time partner Xandros, Inc. since the middle of December 2002. Lindows claims that Xandros failed to repay a $750,000 loan, and that the company and other defendants engaged in fraud & criminal misrepresentation during the negotiations leading up to Lindows' investment in Xandros.

MandrakeSoft S.A. and Novell Inc.'s SuSE Linux division, recently shipped new versions of their respective mainstream Linux distributions, both based on the new Linux 2.6 kernel. eWEEK Labs tested Mandrakelinux 10 PowerPack+ and SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional—which each began shipping last month—and we were impressed with their ease of use and with the broadness of their capabilities.

Driver On demand is a driver management system designed for Linux, designed to automatically install drivers by using a httpd server. Its other intention is to create a universal driver standard for Linux, allowing drivers to be installed easier.

This article shows how to grid enable applications using the first two of the six strategies so the applications can run as single or multiple instance batch jobs that are location independent. It explains the characteristics of applications using these strategies and details what the application developer must, should, and can optionally do to implement these strategies. A major objective when using Strategy 1 and Strategy 2 is to ensure that the application is as flexible as possible regarding middleware products.

Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.6 stable kernel. A number of notable additions found their way into the mainline 2.6 kernel during this development cycle, including Jens Axboe's laptop mode and the completely fair queueing (CFQ) I/O scheduler, support for a non-executable stack on a number of architectures, several patches laying the groundwork for object-based reverse mapping, and 4KB kernel stacks for the i386 architecture reducing the kernel's per process overhead, KernelTrap reports.

Microsoft plans to announce on Monday that its Media Center OS is moving into new countries, even as the software maker works to make the entertainment software more ready for prime time.