"We have developed a new package-management tool, called Opium, that improves on current tools in two ways: Opium is complete, in that if there is a solution, Opium is guaranteed to find it, and Opium can optimize a user-provided objective function, which could for example state that smaller packages should be preferred over larger ones. We performed a comparative study of our tool against Debian's apt-get on 600 traces of real-world package installations. We show that Opium runs fast enough to be usable, and that its completeness and optimality guarantees provide concrete benefits to end users."

The amount of effort required to get an existing Winforms app running on Mono can vary greatly. Although many small apps will run on Mono unmodified, many apps will require some work on the developer's part to run smoothly on Mono. This guide will attempt to port a non-trivial open source application to document several of the issues a developer may run into while porting their app to Mono.

Not too long ago, we announced that pigs could fly AmigaOS4 had found hardware to run on. In the weeks following the announcement, the specifications of the two different boards (high and low end) were announced, and ACK Controls, the manufacturer, promised to release the first developer boards mid May. It is now June, and there are no developer boards. No photos, nothing. The community also wonders, has any developer received the developer board from ACK? Believers say that the legal troubles in Amiga land are preventing ACK from releasing the boards, but they forget that ACK has actually promised the boards despite the legal troubles. It seems that they can't fly after all. Update: Adam of ACK Controls said in the linked thread on AmigaWorld: "There will only be a total of five developer systems sent to OS4 developers that will be responsible for drivers, HAL ports. When some of the smoke settles, more information will be released."

The Etoile team has published a progress update on the project. They are currently preparing the release of version 0.2 of the Etoile live CD, but on top of that, they are also busy developing new applications. A font manager, an alt+tab application switcher, hot corners, and more. "Étoilé intends to be an innovative GNUstep based user environnement built from the ground up on highly modular and light components with project and document orientation in mind."

"Chung-chieh Shan and have submitted a paper on delimited contexts in operating systems and the zipper OS (which has not been formally published). Systems programmers do use contexts whether they are aware of that or not. The first version of UNIX on PDP-7 already implemented delimited continuations, in the form of co-routines between user programs and the shell. Being aware of delimited continuations may help systems programmers to better implement context switching, signal handling, etc., using the techniques developed in programming language research. It also leads to new insights, for example, that checkpointing a process and snapshotting a file system are essentially the same activity."

The T2 SDE release 7.0-rc named 'Water Falls' features two newly supported CPU architectures AVR32 and Blackfin as well as the brand new GCC 4.2 and GlibC 2.6. Additionally the T2 7.0 series comes with over 400 new packages while most of the existing packages received an update, including KDE 3.5.7, GNOME 2.18.2, X.org 7.3, XFCE 4.4.1, and Enlightenment 17. Many new features were implemented, including architecture and target package overlays.

The FSF today released the fourth and 'last call' draft for version 3 of the GNU GPL. The Foundation will hear comments on the latest draft for 29 days, and expects to officially publish the license on Friday, June 29, 2007. The new draft incorporates the feedback received from the general public and official discussion committees since the release of the previous draft on March 28, 2007. FSF executive director Peter Brown said: "We've made a few very important improvements based on the comments we've heard, most notably with license compatibility. Now that the license is almost finished, we can look forward to distributing the GNU system under GPLv3, and making its additional protections available to the whole community.”

"Last year when AMD announced their acquisition of ATI it led many to wonder how this would impact the quality of their Linux support and driver. Some had even speculated that AMD would be opening the code to at least a subset of their graphics drivers, and while this issue has come up again more recently, we will cover this particular topic in a different article. In this article we will be exposing what truly consists of the ATI/AMD driver development cycle and ultimately what they are really doing to improve their image in the Linux community."

"If you use a traditional desktop like GNOME or KDE, a keyboard-controlled desktop with a minimum of utilities may seem like stepping back 10 or 15 years in the history of interface design. Why bother, when traditional desktops are easy to use and RAM and disk space are so cheap nowadays?" On a related note, there is a new release of xmonad, a tiling window manager for X, written in Haskell. It now has full Xinerama and XRandR support, so you can add, remove, or rotate monitors on the fly.

"Learn the intricacies of the AIX file system framework. Every operating system provides a native kernel framework that kernel developers have to understand and adhere to when developing a piece of a kernel component for that operating system. This article sheds some light on the AIX file system framework. You need to understand the framework in order to develop a new file system, or to port an existing file system to the AIX operating system."

"Nepomuk-KDE is the basis for the semantic technologies we will see in KDE 4. Sebastian Trug, the main developer behind Nepomuk-KDE, provided me with some up to date information about the current state and future plans. The Semantic Desktop describes the idea where users will not only be able to search existing information, but also to search for the meaning and relation of these information. The Nepomuk project creates open standards and APIs around this idea. Nepomuk-KDE is the implementation of these standards for KDE."

Google announced today the availability of a new open-source browser plug-in, Google Gears, that promises developers the ability to create applications that work within a browser - even without Internet connectivity.

"Mark Shuttleworth has flown into space on a Soyuz TM-34 and founded Thawte Consulting that later sold to Verisign for over USD 500 million, but he is now known most for being the founder and leader of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. In addition to Ubuntu he also established HBD Venture Capital and is involved with several other free software projects. Earlier today we had spoke with Mark Shuttleworth to discuss the latest happenings in the Ubuntu world including Dell shipping Ubuntu PCs, getting open-source drivers from hardware vendors, and what is coming down the road for Ubuntu 7.10."

A new release of dwn is available. "dwm is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled and floating layouts. Either layout can be applied dynamically, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task performed. It is the little brother of wmii."