John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died. He was 82. Backus died Saturday in Ashland, Oregon, according to IBM, where he spent his career. Prior to Fortran, computers had to be meticulously 'hand-coded' - programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine. Fortran was a 'high-level' programming language because it abstracted that work - it let programmers enter commands in a more intuitive system, which the computer would translate into machine code on its own.

The One Laptop Per Child program reported today that after 303 builds, it finally has a satisfactory version of its Red Hat Linux-based Sugar operating system that is considered stable, according to OLPC president for software and content Walter Bender. "After a final few bugs that had hidden in corners were driven into the light, we issued Stable Build 303 along with Q2B76 firmware this week," Bender said in his weekly email report.

"Last summer, when I wrote 'Vicious orchestrated assault on MacBook wireless researchers', it set off a long chain of heated debates and blogs. I had hoped to release the information on who orchestrated the vicious assault, but threats of lawsuits and a spineless company that refused to defend itself meant I couldn't disclose the details. A lot has changed since then: Researcher David Maynor is no longer working for SecureWorks, and he's finally given me permission to publish the details."

"The ReactOS operating system has been in development for over eight years and aims to provide users with a fully functional and Windows-compatible distribution under the GPL license. ReactOS comes with its own Windows 2003-based kernel and system utilities and applications, resulting in an environment identical to Windows, both visually and internally. This talk will introduce the ReactOS project, as well as the various software engineering challenges behind it."

Windows Vista has had something of a troubled birth. Hyped features were pulled, and the project as a whole took far longer to complete than expected, partly due to standing still while MS dropped everything to work on WinXP Service Pack 2, but in part also due to a decision to "reset" and scrap much of the new development. This has led some commentators to dub the project a "train wreck."

The Beryl project has won a lot of press time so far with its impressive tricks -- even more than its slower-evolving daddy, Compiz. There are several lose ends to Beryl's core engine and incompatibilities with existing applications or technologies. However, something that really put off a lot of people when they try Beryl is its dreadful settings manager.

In July 2005, OSNews reviewed the 1.0 version of what was then YellowTAB Zeta. I concluded: "I have a clear-cut impression of what Zeta R1 is: it is by far the best 'distribution' of BeOS currently available. The hardware support is, when compared to r5, significantly better. Stability-wise, Zeta R1 is a huge leap forward when compared to older versions. Some areas still need work; but they are mostly minor things, nothing that will stop you from using this operating system as your full-time, primary system." A lot has changed over the past 15 months; YellowTAB went belly-up, Magnussoft took over the development of Zeta, and to top it off, Zeta went multiuser. Not too long ago, Mangussoft released Zeta 1.5; here is my review.

Red Hat is planning a packaged Linux desktop solution that it hopes will push its Linux desktop offering to a far broader audience than exists for its current client solution. The move is designed in part to compete with Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 platform, which includes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, which were released in July 2006.

"Desktop computing technology has evolved considerably since the first graphical user interface was developed by researchers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in 1973. Microsoft's Aero Glass, Apple's Quartz 2D Extreme, and Sun's Project Looking Glass are all poised to transform the way that users interact with computers. Also at the forefront of innovation, the Linux community has some prodigiously impressive new user interface technologies of its own. Beryl, a new open-source window manager for Linux, features compelling visual enhancements like support for transparent windows and elaborate window animations."

Debian Etch moves ever closer, and Ian Murdock - the project's founder - has been interviewed about Debian's politics, its lack of strong leadership, and Ubuntu's ever-growing fame. He feels that Debian is too enveloped in process and politics, making it impossible for anybody to make big decisions, thereby hindering the pace of development. In addition, on his weblog Murdock has announced he is joining Sun.

The latest ReactOS newsletter is out. "Reactions have varied in regard to 0.3.1, though one response was consistent. The difficulty in getting it to work on real hardware. As mentioned many times, 0.3.1 was branched in the middle of a kernel rewrite."

"Earlier this month I covered Ubuntu's Migration Assistant, which is one of the features that will be found in Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. The migration-assistant is designed to make it very easy for Microsoft Windows converts to jump into the Ubuntu world by automatically transferring files and settings. However, when I originally tried out Ubuntu migration-assistant I had run into a few bugs that ultimately rendered the assistant useless. However, in that post Evan had commented that the two major bugs being recently corrected, so this morning I gave this installation assistant another shot."

"One thing that I've been playing with off and on for some time is a small efficient little solution for handling basic Bluetooth proximity detection, specifically for being able to perform certain actions when a cell phone or other Bluetooth device is in range of my Powerbook." More here.

Python is becoming popular, and using Python within a distribution in every aspects has just become real. Pardus is extensively built on Python, starting from init subsytem through installation, hardware configuration and system management. Read on to see how Pardus developers started with Python and built a mature system using Python APIs.