At last week's Guadec meeting, Kristian Rietveld delivered the GTK+ "state of the union" report. GTK+ is the multi-platform toolkit behind a number of popular applications and, perhaps most well known, the Gnome Desktop environment for Linux. Read the full report here.

Are you still using a web browser to access your favourite online applications? Why not do things the easy way, and make those applications part of your desktop with Prism. Scott Nesbitt at Freesoftware Magazine tells you what Prism can do to boost you experience of the web on your desktop -and more importantly, how to do it. Read the full story at FSM. Editor's Note: This story looks at Prism from the point of view of a Gnome user on Linux, but Prism can be used on Mac OS and Windows as well. Check out the Prism project page for information on other platforms.

For many, their first experience with Fedora leaves them in awe of the incredible artwork. This is an important part of Fedora's reputation, so if you're a fan of Fedora art, you should definitely check out what the art team has come up with.

"Recently a blog post entitled 'Why Desktop Linux is its own worst enemy' has come across my feed-radar a few times. It's yet another in the long line of 'Linux ain't ready yet' jeremiads and it doesn't really say anything new yet it got on my nerves. Why?" Ryan Cartwright at Freesoftware Magazine is on fine form with this wonderfully splenetic broadside. Read the full tirade at FSM.

Perhaps the weirdest creature to come out of the iPhone 2.0/3G launch paraphernalia is the iPhone Configuration Web Utility. It is a Rails app, downloaded and installed on your local machine. It literally starts a server on port 3000, as a service using WEBrick on Windows and as a launchd job using Mongrel on Mac.

The ability to run both console and graphical programs securely on a remote system using SSH brings you a great deal of freedom. When the communications link to that remote system has high latency, however, running interactive programs such as a text editor on the remote machine can become a real test of your patience. The bcvi project lets you edit files on a remote system using gvim (or another editor) on your local desktop machine to avoid the latency.

A few weeks ago, the OpenSUSE Project announced the release of OpenSUSE 11.0, the "community" edition of SUSE Linux, Novell's commercial Linux distribution. Here it's taken for a test drive.

Neil McAllister raises questions regarding Web development skills in an era of constant innovation. Sure, low barriers to entry give underdog technologies ample opportunity to thrive without the backing of name-brand vendors. But doesn't this fragmentation of the Web development market put undue pressure on developers to specialize? The result is a crisis, McAllister concludes, one in which maintaining a marketable skill set and hiring for a particular Web project gets more difficult as the state of the art changes on an almost daily basis.

Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring Alpha 2 was released today, marking the first public pre-release of the upcoming Mandriva Linux 2009. This alpha introduces several significant changes, most obviously the inclusion of KDE 4 - 4.1 beta 2, specifically - as the default version of KDE, and the latest development version of GNOME, 2.23.4.

Computerworld interviews Stephen C. Johnson, the brains behind YACC Yet Another Compiler Compiler: The compiler was developed some 35 years ago and is still going strong today through various incarnations. Asked what he is proudest of in terms of YACC's development and use, Johnson said: "I think computing is a service profession. I am happiest when the programs that I have written (YACC, Lint, the Portable C Compiler) are useful to others. In this regard, the contribution YACC made to the spread of Unix and C is what I'm proudest of." And would he do anything differently? "I'd try harder to find a notation other than $1, $2, $$, etc. While simple and intuitive, the notation is a source of errors as grammars evolve."

Gadgetzone.com has an interesting artcile on 20 things Windows 7 MUST include (their emphasis, not mine). They begin "Despite its enhanced security, improved CPU scheduler and excellent stability, it's still the flawed gem in many critics' eyes. But can Microsoft win back the XP crowd with its upcoming Windows 7 offering? The fact is, they have to." My Take: Not sure I agree with them all -- do home users really care about WinFS? -- but some, like home user licensing and simpler management of startup items would be really compelling features for upgraders.

The Linux desktop has come a long, long way, but there are still times when I have to use the command line. (I am a hardcore user, after all.) But even though I'm used to typing, spending hours upon hours with my fingers at the keyboard, I still grow tired of typing the same commands over and over. To reduce that tedium, I always add aliases to my .bashrc file.

Wildcards can be very confusing when it comes to generics in the Java language, and one of the most common mistakes is to fail to use one of the two forms of bounded wildcards ("? super T" and "? extends T") when needed. You've made this mistake? Don't feel bad, even the experts have, and this month Brian Goetz shows you how to avoid it.

Do you want to build your Web sites faster and cheaper, but still leverage industrial-strength technology? You can do just that using Grails and Apache Geronimo. In this article, you will see how easy Grails can make Web development and how easy Geronimo can make Grails deployment. Also see how a Grails application can leverage the resources and services provided by Geronimo.