Why Linux isn't yet ready for synchronized release cycles, May 21, 2008

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has again called for the developers of major open-source software programs and Linux distributions to synchronize their development and release cycles.

The open source Maemo platform, which is used on Nokia's Internet Tablet devices, will soon support Trolltech's Qt development toolkit.

At the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Bill Gates gave his thoughts on where the pharmaceutical industry was going, and where it should be going. However, he also slipped up a bit and criticized the GNU General Public License (GPL).

In the beginning...

One of the most significant moments in the history of the modern software industry took place in 1998 when Netscape announced plans to release the source code of its browser under a license that would freely permit modification and redistribution. That pivotal event represents the point at which software freedom extended its reach beyond the enthusiast community and began its ascent into the mainstream.

Shuttle announced today that its upcoming $199 KPC will ship with the open source Foresight Linux distribution. In addition to a price that squarely targets the budget market, the KPC features a small form factor and high energy efficiency. Shuttle has teamed up with Foresight and says that the Linux distribution's intuitive interface, user-focused design, and robust selection of included applications make it a win for average consumers.

The official 1.0 release of Adobe AIR last month attracted the attention of many software developers. The AIR platform is designed to facilitate rapid development of rich Internet applications (RIA) and provide programmers and designers with a simple glidepath between web applications and the desktop. We tested the Adobe AIR SDK to see if it lives up to the hype.

The open-source WebKit HTML rendering engine is rapidly gaining ground on the Linux platform where it is increasingly being adopted by conventional desktop applications for content display. Ongoing efforts to facilitate tighter WebKit integration are opening the door for developing rich Internet applications on Linux with the open-source GTK and Qt development toolkits.

In a message posted on the Ubuntu mailing list this morning, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu 8.10, which is tentatively scheduled for release in October, will be called Intrepid Ibex.

Google software engineer Dan Kegel posted a message to the Wine mailing list last week describing some of the improvements to Wine that Google has sponsored in the past year. These improvements, says Kegel, have substantially improved the Linux compatibility of several popular commercial software applications, including Adobe Photoshop and Dragon Naturally Speaking.

[lead Enlightenment developer Carsten Haitzler] sees a big future for Linux in the mobile and embedded space and notes that Enlightenment, with its small memory footprint, is ideal for deployment on such devices.

The Ubuntu Linux distribution now includes the Parallels virtualization software in the partner repository, marking the first time that Ubuntu has offered access to commercial software through the package management system.

The KDE development community announced today the first major KDE 4 maintenance and bugfix release, KDE 4.0.1. When KDE 4.0 was officially released last month, we noted that it had a lot of very rough edges. This first bugfix release smooths out some of those rough edges and delivers a few notable improvements to the KDE user experience.

The developers at Fluendo have been working on an open-source, cross-platform media center application called Elisa. Version 0.3.3, which was released last week, includes a complete user interface overhaul that dramatically improves usability.

The open-source KDE desktop environment is making the jump across platforms with broad support for Windows and Mac OS X. The core KDE desktop programs, the KOffice suite, and the Amarok music player are actively being ported.

Trolltech CEO Haavard Nord announced today at the KDE release event that the company's cross-platform open-source Qt application development toolkit will be released under the GPL 3.

Although there is evidence of counterproductive groupthink in the open-source community, that doesn't really invalidate the viability of the community-driven development model.

Norway has established a new policy mandating government adoption of open standards. Starting in 2009, all documents published on state-operated web sites will have to use HTML, PDF, or ODF formats.

The Ubuntu development community has officially announced the release of Ubuntu 8.04 alpha 2. Ubuntu 8.04—scheduled for release in April 2008—is a long-term support (LTS) release, which means that it will be supported on the desktop for three years and on the server for five years.

The GTK port of the WebKit HTML rendering engine has gained support for the HTML5 video element. The media backend, which uses GStreamer, was implemented by Pierre-Luc Beaudoin of Collabora. Developer Alp Toker integrated the backend with GTk/WebKit's Cairo graphics pipeline, making it possible for the video content to be embedded in SVG and manipulated with CSS and JavaScript.

GNOME theme engine designer Andrea Cimitan has implemented support for transparent widgets in the Murrine GTK theme engine, bringing Vista-like translucent glass effects to the GNOME desktop.