The author is one of the top Linux developers around, and a long-time UNIX champion. Fellow Linux developers will benefit from the useful, common-practice shell scripting techniques that the author and his Codemonks Consulting partners employ on a daily basis in their Linux development and applications services work.

I decided to review the Libranet Distribution because there just aren't many reviews available on it, and I am sure that there are plenty of people who would like to know what Libranet is and how it works.

SGI recently announced a contest. The coder of the OpenGL API demo judged best by a panel of judges will receive a $40,000 Onyx4 UltimateVision visualization machine, running IRIX. The contest is open to US and Canadian residents.

"Mike Benoit recently posted a link to results from his new and improved file system shootout, using better hardware and running more tests. Using two benchmarks that are designed to measure hard drive and file system performance, Bonnie++ and IOZone, he's compared a number journaling filesystems found in the 2.6 kernel." Read the report at KernelTrap and the actual benchmarks here.

NeoLinkComputers features a review of Libranet 2.8.1.

Longhorn PDC 4051 (6.0.4051.0) is expected to be given to PDC's attendees on Monday, but FlexBeta has some screenshots already.

The PDF-based Beyond Magazine issue 2 is out, an interesting weekend reading. It includes articles about the *BSD, Rebol, Amiga, Games and old platforms, multimedia, an interview with Scot Hacker (author of "BeOS Bible", today an OSX user), Linux, OpenBeOS, a review of BeOS Max Edition 3.0 and more. Additionally, the German Technoids issue #3 is out too.

All Apple Stores nationwide last night re-opened their doors at 8 PM for their queued Apple fans to enter. OSNews was present, so check inside for a write up of the event and some pictures.

The Slackware-based VectorLinux receives a review from MadPenguin. Read it here.

Fink 0.6.0 was released yesterday and is compatible with Panther. This is a source-only release; binaries will follow in a few days. Changes include: 10.2 with gcc 3.1 is officially no longer supported. 10.2-gcc3.3 and 10.3 are officially supported now, even though not all packages are in the 10.3 or 10.2-gcc3.3 tree yet. The mirror code has been updated to support the mirrors finkmirrors.net will introduce. Additionally, Fink now has a new logo.

DirectX has been providing game developers with a great platform for rich and fast-paced games on Windows for many years. As these platform technologies advance to embrace the concepts of "Managed" programming, DirectX rises to meet the challenge head on.

Today, Ian Murdock described his recent work on APT to the Debian community. This announcement has far-ranging implications for the future of Fedora and Debian projects. Ars Technica has the details.

Qt 3.2.2 is a bugfix release and was released a few days ago. It maintains both forward and backward compatibility (source and binary) with Qt 3.2.1.

The first stop in GTK+'s roadmap to GTK 2.4 is the unstable release of GTK+, Glib 2.3.0 and Pango 1.3.0. It includes a work-in-progress of the new File Selector (screenshot).