"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."

"KWin, KDE's window manager, has been around since KDE 2.0 (replacing KWM in KDE 1.x) and has grown to be a mature and stable window manager over the years. For KDE 4, however, there were a few people rumbling about visual effects, and perhaps KWin was feeling a little envious of its younger cousins Compiz and Beryl. While these new effects have created a lot of buzz around Linux and UNIX, long-term KDE users have wished they can enjoy the effects of Compiz/Beryl while still having the tried and tested window manager that is KWin. As a result, for KDE 4, KWin has received a huge graphical upgrade, with composite and GL support."

Trolltech has released version 4.3.0 of its cross-platform development toolkit Qt, and the embedded platform Qtopia, with the same API. New features include enhanced Windows Vista support, a new ECMAscript-standard scripting module (QtScript), SSL support, improved OpenGL support, a more flexible main window architecture, SVG generation and rendering, and (in Qtopia) a new font system and OpenGL ES support. More on the new features, and a full changelog. Open-source downloads of Qt (including Windows binary) here and Qtopia here.

"Recently I wrote about locking down the GNOME desktop environment with Pessulus. In this article, I'll show you how to do the same for KDE, using Kiosktool, a front end for changing the KDE configuration files in users' home folders and the /etc/kde* folders."

Microsoft executive Ty Carlson spoke about the future of Windows recently during a panel discussion at the Future in Review 2007 conference held in San Diego, California. Carlson said that future versions of Windows would have to be 'fundamentally different' in order to take full advantage of future CPUs that will contain many processing cores. "You're going to see in excess of eight, 16, 64 and beyond processors on your client computer," said Carlson, whose job title is director of technical strategy at Microsoft. Windows Vista, he said, was "designed to run on one, two, maybe four processors."