Linux Foundation Launches Killer Development Tool

Linux 11 Comments
"The Linux Foundation has just released a beta of a new program, Linux Application Checker (AppChecker), that's going to make independent software vendors and other programmers start to love developing for Linux." This program checks your application against different versions of the Linux Standard Base (LSB), and against all the Linux distributions in the LSB Database. After the test is done it will present a report about the compatibility status of your application with the various distributions, and which external libraries and interfaces your application uses.
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ReactOS 0.3.6 released

  Submitted by Michael Z ReactOS 20 Comments
"In a little over a month since version 0.3.5, we are announcing the release ReactOS 0.3.6. This release along with the rest of the 0.3.x series is still considered alpha quality software, so do not set your expectations too high. ReactOS 0.3.6 is the product of the current development focus: bugfixes, compatibility, and stability."
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Resolution Independence Coming to GTK+

  Submitted by jcornuz GTK+ 16 Comments
Red Hat's David Zeuthen blogged today about the huge patch he submitted to GTK+ that will allow the toolkit to achieve resolution independence - widget and font size adapting to your screen's real estate; no more tiny application lost in the corner of your high resolution screen. Although more work is obviously required, Zeuthen's idea is to use RI as the hot-new-feature selling point of the upcoming 3.0 GTK+ release. Discussion is going on in the gtk-devel mailing list and there is an ogg video of the feature in action.
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Qt Port of Mozilla and Firefox 3

  Submitted by Ali Mozilla, Gecko 38 Comments
The Mozilla and Nokia teams have been working hard to port Firefox 3 and the Mozilla Platform to Qt and there are now some solid results available from their efforts. An experimental build of Firefox Qt is available and you can download the sources from Mozilla's mercurial repository. The plan is to merge the Qt branch into the central Mozilla branch to make the port official.
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IBM, Linux and the Microsoft-Free PC

IBM 112 Comments
After 10 years of supporting Linux, IBM continues to challenge Microsoft on multiple fronts and aims to push Linux even further into the enterprise. While IBM has competed and partnered with Microsoft over the last two decades, the Microsoft-free PC effort is perhaps its most direct assault yet. "The idea of Microsoft-free personal computing has been in the air for a while," Inna Kuznetsova, director of Linux at IBM, told InternetNews.com. "We're just partnering with Linux distribution vendors and hardware vendors to make it happen."
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Linus Torvalds On Managing Developers

  Submitted by estherschindler General Development 17 Comments
In an "as told to" article for CIO.com, Linus Torvalds explains how he keeps the Linux people and software on-track. Arguably the most surprising facet of Linus' management style is that he's perfectly willing to flame people when he thinks they're wrong--though he's also happy to be corrected himself. "Part of that, by the way, is not feeling shy about saying impolite things or showing some emotion. So I'd rather flame people for doing stupid things and call them stupid, rather than try to be too polite to the point where people didn't understand how strongly I felt about something." That's particularly interesting in light of several OSCON presenters who believe that the way to grow the open source community is to make projects more welcoming to would-be contributors. Do these attitudes actually contradict one another?
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Syllable Boots from USB CD-ROM

  Submitted by Kaj de Vos Syllable, AtheOS 7 Comments
Kristian Van Der Vliet tracked down and fixed the bug that prevented Syllable from booting off a USB device. The project published a new development build that will boot from a USB CD player. This means Syllable can now be installed in a regular way on machines that don't have an IDE CD player, such as the Asus Eee PC and other small laptops. Installing to a USB device, such as a memory stick, is not possible yet, due to further USB bugs that lock up the installation process. These are being investigated. The new development build also has the new Webster browser included.
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My Year With the iPhone: An Update

Wireless 33 Comments
On August 1 2007, I published an article called "My Month with the iPhone" wherein I examined the iPhone's now well-known advantages and deficiencies and speculated extensively on where Apple was likely to take the phone, development-wise. Now that the new iPhone and the iPhone 2.0 software have been out for a few weeks, and there's been a whole new storm of praise and gripes raging, I thought it would be illuminating for me to re-visit my prognostications and take my lumps.
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Microsoft menaced by Open Source

  Submitted by JCooper Microsoft 58 Comments
Microsoft . . . complained in its annual report that it was facing increasing pressure from open source companies. It claims they are stealing its ideas and benefiting from its intellectual property. "A number of commercial firms compete with us using an open source business model by modifying and then distributing open source software to end users at nominal cost and earning revenue on complementary services and products." Also see analysis at Microsoft Watch.
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Build Your Own Fedora Respin

  Submitted by M-Saunders Fedora Core 2 Comments
Do we need even more Linux distros? That's a contentious topic, but if you'd like to make your own flavour of Fedora, see this guide to using Revisor, Fedora's re-build application. With some intermediate Linux knowledge (and a spare few hours), you can customise Fedora DVDs with your own software selection and updates.
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