A final release of Gideon Designer for GTK+ 2.8 is available. Gideon is a modern professional RAD tool for GTK+. Most notable features include a tree-based property explorer, advanced support for multiple selections, and a flexible GuiXml resource format.

"The third annual Software Freedom Day will take place worldwide on September 16. Project organizers say the event, designed to raise awareness about the benefits of using free software, is drawing more interest this year than ever before, with participation from 150 countries."

Apple announced that they are using the LLVM optimizer and JIT within their Mac OS 10.5 'Leopard' OpenGL stack. LLVM will help in delivering better performance of the GL stack.

Some tutorials geared towards the three most popular distros: Ubuntu, SuSE and Fedora Core (1, 2, 3).

Transitive, a start-up specialising in software that translates software for one chip so it can run on another, plans to release software this quarter so programs for Sun Microsystems' Sparc chips can be used on Intel Xeon chips.

Virtualisation start-up XenSource next week will begin selling its first product, XenEnterprise, chief executive Peter Levine said on Thursday in the US.

Telephia released some very interesting research numbers on mobile web browsing in USA (both on feature phones and smartphones). Openwave (free simulator) leads with 27% and together with Motorola they make over 50% of the US mobile browsing market. Apparently, Americans mostly care about Mail, Weather and Sports when it comes to mobile browsing. Opera Mini is pretty popular lately, but it seems that Telephia only counted the pre-installed browsers in their survey. When we are talking worldwide numbers and only about smartphones though, Nokia's S60/80/90 phones are beating everyone else with over 64% of the smartphone worldwide market share (please note though that smartphones make up only about ~10% of the overall phone market but their numbers are growing fast).

Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens has escalated to new heights the debate over whether the open-source Xen virtualization technology is ready for prime time, saying Novell was being irresponsible and risked damaging enterprises' first experiences with Xen. My Take: So "irresponsible" is synonymous to "being truthful"?

"GNOME 2.16 Beta has been in Edgy Eft (Ubuntu 6.10) for the past few days . It is functioning extremely well. I’ve seen some occasional crashes with Epiphany and Nautilus but I hope that it will be fixed soon. Other than that, there are lots of new things in GNOME 2.16", read the pictorial review here.

Apple released version 1.1 beta of its Boot Camp software that allows Apple users to run MacOS X side by side with Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac. The 202 MB download adds support for newly released Intel-Macs, simplified partitioning, the ability to install Windows XP on any internal disk, support for the Isight camera and built-in microphones, as well as improved Apple keyboard support. Apple says that users should create a new Macintosh Drivers for Windows CD and install the updated software it contains on Windows XP. According to Apple, this will not require the user having to reinstall Windows XP or Mac OS X. Elsewhere, Apple is preparing for the new Xserver cluster node.

Check inside for our photo review of this year's LinuxWorld. In short, Novell rocked the show, while Red Hat and Sun were missing completely! We think that there were fewer people visiting this year... However, we got to see the new PalmSource ALP OS, we chatted with Motorola about their Linux SDK's state of affairs and more!

It is a common belief that Ubuntu provides newer software than Debian. This is of course true when Ubuntu is compared to Debian stable. This is also true for specific software packages, like Gnome. But how does it compare in general? Also, the Debian Installer team has released the third beta of its installer for Etch, the next version of Debian. According to the announcement, there is now an optional graphical installer for the i386 and amd64 platforms, and you can now set up encrypted partitions during installation. Not all features are present yet in this beta release and those that are may not be stable.

If you are a security conscious or have to spend some time on less reputable web sites a great option is to use either Linux or OS X. Because the high majority of security threats which we are exposed to are designed to compromise Windows, by moving to a non-Windows operating system those threats no longer matter. This is not true all the time, especially for spam and phishing, but the possibility of a virus or spyware is greatly decreased. The problem is, of course, that people are reluctant to move to a new operating system, even a free one. A solution to this is virtualization, or basically running one of these non-Windows operating systems from within Windows.

For Mac geeks of a certain persuasion, the first mention of a soon-to-be-revealed feature of Leopard during the WWDC keynote set off a mental chain-reaction. That feature was Time Machine, and the name alone was enough to cause one particular phrase to hammer in the mind of many people, including me: "New file system in Leopard!" It was even a bingo square. In fact, it was my personal favorite bingo square, and the one that I most looked forward to marking.