The free Java community reacted positively, but cautiously, to the news that Sun Microsystems has released the code for Sun Java under the GNU General Public License. While community leaders showed appreciation of the news by cooperating in the announcement, developers in the free Java community reacted more tentatively, and at least some projects seem likely to continue development of their own implementations of Java. Read more at Linux.com »

X.org received a lot of attention and discussion at UDS, which is appropriate for such a desktop-focused distro. Binary drivers were a hot topic at the summit. Ubuntu developers also discussed how to provide a more robust configuration system for X.org, and what to do when problems arise with X. Read more at Linux.com »

BlueVoodoo writes "The typical UNIX administrator has a key range of utilities, tricks, and systems he or she uses regularly to aid in the process of administration. Configure your swap space (including adding space in an emergency) to get the most out of your system. In this article, you'll learn how to monitor your system to determine an effective swap space figure as well as examine methods for using swap space for more than just secondary random access memory (RAM)." Read more at ibm.com/developerworks »

The Jepp project, which lets you use Python to access Java objects, has just packaged its 2.0 release, with added javax.script support, a new import feature, and other improvements.

The Free Standards Group (FSG) is scheduled to announce today its answer to the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) -- the Linux Standard Base (LSB) Developer Network. The LSB Developer Network (LDN) will combine community content with original content in one convenient location to provide developers with information on writing portable Linux applications. Read more at Linux.com »

The new C# programming language and the Microsoft .Net framework have been gaining popularity among developers and managers alike. Does this new technology leave open source proponents out in the cold? Not anymore -- with the coming of age of Mono and SharpDevelop, a reliable set of open source tools is now available to allow the development of C# and .Net applications on Windows and on Linux. Read more at ITManagersJournal »

The Open Source Development Labs and freedesktop.org announced the 1.0 release of the Portland common desktop interfaces today, less than a year after work started on the project. Portland was conceived last year at the first Desktop Architects Meeting in Portland, Ore., as a way of making it easier for ISVs to write applications for Linux. Read more at Linux.com »

Google jumped into the open source code search arena this week with the announcement of Google Code Search. The new tool allows users to search billions of lines of open source code and will also search files that the standard Google search engine does not. Google's code search capability falls under the "it's new to us" category, since the same functionality has existed at other sites for years.

As the second Google Summer of Code (SOC) winds down, most participants agree: the program, which pays selected students to work on a free or open source software (FOSS) project for three months, is a unique and exciting opportunity, but needs to continue efforts to become more organized. Those who were previously involved tend to agree that this year was less chaotic than last year. However, whether they are organizers at Google or students or members of mentoring organizations (the projects accepting students), most participants this year also see the need for more structure. Many of them also offer concrete advice about how participants can get more out of the program if it happens next year. Read more at Linux.com »

Most Linux users are well acquainted with the Mono Project by now; the free implementation of Microsoft's .Net Framework and its associated development tools has produced some impressive applications, and is even shipping in the default releases of several prominent Linux distributions. But since Mono bills itself as a cross-platform alternative to .Net, I decided to see how it fares on Mac OS X.

Ark Linux project developers operate on a "no-frills" policy when it comes to deciding what features will be included in their distribution. They strive to provide only the tools necessary for a typical desktop user, creating a lean, mean Linux. When some users came asking for more features, rather than violate their policy of simplicity, the developers launched a completely new company called YOLD (Your Own Linux Distribution). Read more at Linux.com »

Bloggers hate automated comment spammers. One way to foil these vermin is a system called CAPTCHA, which is described in Wikipedia as "an acronym for 'completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart'" -- in other words, a challenge-response system designed to determine whether a site visitor is human or a bot. Here's how I implemented a CAPTCHA system for blog comments using free and open source (FOSS) command-line utilities and PHP, the Web server scripting language. Read more at Linux.com »

Perl and PHP are two widely used languages for building dynamic Web sites. They make up two thirds of the "P" in the Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) stack. How does their performance, using mod_perl and mod_php, compare for everyday Web programming? I attempted to find out.

GNOME's Women's Summer Outreach Program (WSOP) is underway, with twice the number of projects originally scheduled, thanks to Google's generosity. The program has not only brought a few more women into the GNOME fold, but it seems to have jump-started efforts to actively recruit female developers within other open source projects as well.

Learning OOoBasic can be a bit like learning a foreign language. If you have the time and ambition to communicate fluently, you can spend months or even years studying grammar and expanding your vocabulary. But sometimes you just need some basic skills to get you through daily situations. In this case, a crash course that introduces you to some basic principles and building blocks of the language would do just fine. The same is true for OOoBasic -- if you need to write a simple macro that makes your daily computing life a bit easier, you don't have to spend time reading about methods, routines, and object properties. What you need is some working examples and an explanation of how they work. And if you are looking for something like that, then read on. Read more at Linux.com »

As a Python developer, I have always wanted a more powerful integrated development environment than IDLE. Although IDLE is a useful IDE, it lacks some handy features, such as an automatic debugger, auto-completion, and extra formatting options, such as not displaying whitespace. A good FOSS alternative for developers is Stani's Python Editor, a cross-platform IDE for Python written in Python.

As Mozilla prepares to release updates for its calendar applications Sunbird and Lightning, project developers are calling on the user community to participate in the final stages of testing. Mozilla has proclaimed today as Test Case Writing Day, and users worldwide are encouraged to participate.

The GIMP finally has a documented file specification. The free image editor has long been criticized over the fact that its native image format XCF was not publicly documented. Recently the issue came to a head, sparked unintentionally by discussions over the proposed OpenRaster graphics interchange format. Once the argument cooled off, however, an independent developer decided to tackle the problem head on -- to the benefit of all.

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Google is scheduled to announce hosting for open source projects on Google Code today during Greg Stein's talk at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON).

Open standards, and openness in general, enables people to combine a variety of technologies in new and interesting ways. For example, using a camera with Exif support, a GPS receiver, the Google Maps API, and Perl, PHP and JavaScript, Mike Whitton created a Web-based photo album in which the photographs are automatically placed on a map at the exact location they were taken. Let's take a look at how this is done. Read more at Linux.com »

TBR writes "Once upon a time there was CVS for source control, and it was good. It was open source, it was powerful and it worked. But there were problems: no atomic commits, no database backend, directory versioning, networking issues… Subversion is designed to be a better CVS. This doesn't mean tweaking the CVS code-base, it's coded from scratch so that it implements CVS functions, but adds new and improved functionality. It too is open source, and while CVS is still popular, Subversion is growing in popularity all the time. William Nagel's book is not an alternative manual - Subversion actually comes with some pretty good documentation." Read more at http://www.techbookreport.com »

Scott Mattocks writes "The PHP-GTK team is pleased to announce the release of PHP-GTK 2.0.0alpha.

This is the first release of PHP-GTK 2. PHP-GTK 2 is a PHP extension that combines the power and flexibility of both PHP 5 and GTK+ 2 to allow developers to create stand-alone desktop GUI applications using PHP.

This is a preview release that should be used only with the understanding that the software may contain bugs and that certain minor features may need to be adjusted before the final release. We encourage widespread testing and feedback via the PHP-GTK development mailing list.

PHP-GTK 2.0.0alpha can be downloaded from the PHP-GTK website: http://gtk.php.net/download.php

Users looking for help with the new release are encouraged to read the PHP-GTK 2 manual or contact the PHP-GTK General mailing list." Read more at PHP GTK »

Anonymous Reader writes "mojoPortal, named after Audette's dog, is a Web content management system written in C# and runs under ASP.NET on Windows or under mono on Linux or Mac. While the CMS may have roots to Microsoft products, it is being developed and released under a open source license, the Common Public License." Read more at cmsreport.com »

In the last two years, Martin Michlmayr has gone from serving as Debian Project Leader to studying for a doctorate at the Centre for Technology Management, University of Cambridge. His dissertation, tentatively titled "Quality Improvement in Volunteer Free Software Projects: Exploring the Impact of Release Management," is sponsored by Google, Intel, and other companies with an interest in free software development. Michlmayr told NewsForge he sees the need for quality assurance as the price that many projects must pay for their popularity and growing maturity. However, in order to perceive this need correctly, he believes, projects need to take a revised look at the familiar dichotomy of the cathedral and the bazaar.