"Joel Spolsky in his article 'Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering' compares Microsoft and Apple ways of text rendering and explains why windows people don't like Safari. Text in Safari looks too blurry and that must be why. I want to go further and sum up my experience and observations about it. I'm not an expert in digital typography, but I 'have something to say'. At least, some ideas may be useful for the GNU/Linux community."

Linus has announced the release of the 2.6.22 kernel. Much has happened in this development cycle, including the addition of the mac80211 (formerly 'Devicescape') wireless networking stack, the eventfd system calls, some new TCP congestion control algorithms, a rewritten CFQ I/O scheduler, a new IEEE1934 (Firewire) stack, support for the Blackfin architecture, the long-awaited IVTV TV tuner driver, and much more. See the KernelNewbies 2.6.22 page for vast amounts of detail, the long-format changelog for even more detail, or the short-form changelog for a (relatively) concise listing of patches in this release.

Version 5.0.2 of Yellow Dog Linux was recently released. It includes kernel 2.6.22rc4, SDK v2.0 for Cell BE, more than 70 bug fixes and updates, continued support for both 32- and 64-bit systems and has beta IBM 'System p' support.

The third release candidate for Ion3 has been released. "This third 'rc' release again simply fixes some minor problems in the previous release." Get it from the download page. Ion is a tiling tabbed window manager designed with keyboard users in mind.

"Two years ago, the number of developers writing applications for the Microsoft Windows platform fell, while the opposite was true for Linux - this has now become a trend. Instead of the Web stealing away Windows Users, as people have predicted for years, it's Linux and handheld devices. According to analysts at the Evans Data Corporation research house, 64.8 percent of North American developers are writing software for Windows, down from 74 percent only a year ago. The decline in popularity of the world's most prevalent operating systems appears to coincide with the rise of Linux, as the number of developers targeting the open-source environment has gone up by three percentage points from 8.8 percent to 11.8 percent in the same year."

"In Red Hat's case, support plays a central role in the company's business model and in its high ranking with customers. Brent Fox plays a central role in Red Hat's organization, helping to ensure the continued happiness of some of Red Hat's biggest customers. It's one of those jobs that doesn't get the attention it deserves... Until something goes wrong. The Open Road caught up with Brent to discover how support at Red Hat supports its customers, and how its model differs from that of other vendors."

10ZenMonkeys has interviewed Steve Wozniak. When asked about Bill Gates, he replied: "I've only spoken with him briefly a couple of times. I admire him, he admires me. Good lord, I'd never written a computer language when he had written a BASIC in the early days of hobby computers. And I thought, 'Oh my gosh - a computer with BASIC finally makes a computer that people can use for things'."

"Back in January we added the ability to report usage of different features and preferences so we could learn more about how the browser is used in general. First we invited you, our weekly users to help us and in 9.2 we started asking one in 100 users if they want to participate. We would like to share some of our findings with you."

Microsoft cleared the air July 5 on its obligations to GNU General Public License Version 3 support, declaring it will not provide support or updates for GPLv3 under the deal it penned in November with Novell to administer certificates for the Linux distribution. Microsoft also said July 5 that its agreement with Novell, as well as those with Linux rivals Xandros and Linspire, were unaffected by the release June 29 of GPLv3 by the Free Software Foundation.

Elive, the distribution dedicated to E16 and E17, has reached the magical 1.0 barrier. "This version is ready for the end-users and not just hard core testers. It is a more intuitive easy to use and more efficient system. It has better integration of the file-manager and the mime-types, a nice kernel especially for multimedia and big processes loads, a light weight foot print, much better compatibility with your (possible) Windows system/software, more hardware supported, better graphical recognition, and many more things that you can find in the complete changelog."

The article 'Understanding the Common User' points that "everything should be as simple as it is... Or even simpler" and warns that converting a common user to Linux without giving him enough protection leads to a imminent failure. A rebuttal, 'Get Real or How Not To Convert Your Grandma to Linux' stresses that dumbing down is not the key to success, understanding is.

Fedora 7 is a first class distro that demonstrates solid progress in improving the user experience, easing the move to virtualization and enabling the user to create their own custom spins with open source build tools, says this review. The same site had the opportunity to sit down face-to-face with Max Spevack, chairman of the Fedora project, at the Red Hat Summit in San Diego to talk about all things Fedora - the merger of Fedora Core and Extras, Fedora 7, and the road ahead.

A new release of the 64bit version of MenuetOS has been released, MenuetOS 0.64. "MenuetOS is an operating system in development for the PC written entirely in 32/64 bit assembly language, and released under this license. It supports 32/64 bit x86 assembly programming for smaller, faster and less resource hungry applications."

After interviewing Axel Dorfler yesterday, in this second installment of Five Questions, we interview Robert Szeleney, the main driving force behind SkyOS. SkyOS has been in development since the late '90s, but for the past few years, it has seen rapid development. Read on for Robert's answers to the Five Questions.