After about two years we decided to do a makeover of the front page of OSNews. This new design focuses more on the original content we host rather than the previous "newsbits"/portal nature of OSNews. Let's just say that we try to have a... mini focus shift.

In the previous installment of this series, Philipp K. Janert, Ph.D. implemented two very simple example programs, which nevertheless demonstrated quite a few of the core concepts of Qt programming. This month, he will take a step back and look at some of the fundamentals of programming with Qt.

The Fall distribution release period of 2003 was not the most interesting, nor the least interesting in recent memory. For the most part all of the distributions got better, but not so much that those running distributions now going on a year in age are really missing anything terribly substantial. OfB.biz did find a few interesting points worth revisiting, however, and those deal with Mandrake Linux 9.2 and Fedora Core 1. Read the whole look back at the last distribution release cycle at OfB.biz.

In response to the article about Free Software and usability, Brad Griffith decided to write up an article about the niceties of GNOME and its future. Mirror here.

Sun Microsystems announced Friday that it has moved to a new phase of legal and technical cooperation with longtime foe Microsoft that will involve a payment of $1.95 billion to Sun, reports News.com. The timing of the Microsoft-Sun agreement could be seen as a smokescreen to mitigate the continued bad financial and layoff news for Sun, says NewsForge.

Joe Barr takes a quick look at the beta of the upcoming of SuSE 9.1 at Linux.com.

This paper written by Andreas Tille is intended to people who are interested in the philosophy of Custom Debian Distributions and the technique which is used to manage those projects. It is explained in detail why these are no forks from Debian but reside completely inside the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and which advantages can be gathered by this approach. The concept of meta-packages and user role based menus is explained. In short: This document describes why Custom Debian Distributions are important to the vitality and quality of Debian.

The F-Script project released a new version of F-Script, which is an open source, interactive and scripting environment built from scratch for Cocoa, the native Mac OS X object model. F-Script allows interactive exploration, testing and use of Cocoa-based objects and frameworks. It can be used stand-alone or embedded into other applications. This new version comes with many new features, including greatly improved graphical tools for manipulating Cocoa objects.

In this episode of the .NET Show Quentin Clark and Anil Nori share some of the architectural concepts of WinFS, and how it changes the way programmers and users will interact with the information they store on their systems. Later Mike Deem walks through some code that shows how to code against this new file system in order to make information easier to work with. Elsewhere, Mike Harsh shows how to use the RegionMaster Controls sample from WindowsForms.net to create non-rectangular applications, like Windows Media Player, using Windows Forms.

This article is meant to be a crash course in Slackware security. It will detail some basic steps that should be taken before you consider Slackware to be fully installed.

Today I stumbled upon a little live distro called PCLinuxOS . I've seen it before mentioned online, but I never really looked at it in depth. When I found it under "alternatives" for Mandrake, I decided to take a look. I was surprized to what I found.

Now available for download, Solaris 9-4/04 has left the nest, SunHelp.org reports.

The SphereXP is a 3D desktop replacement for Microsoft Windows XP (still beta). It offers a new way to organize objects on the desktop. Check the videos and screenshots to get the idea.

New versions of Gtk#, MonoDevelop and MonoDoc have been released.