The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the second release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks the last mile on the road to KDE 4.0.

While progress on the quality and completeness of what is to become the KDE 4.0 desktop has been great, the KDE Community decided to have another release candidate before releasing KDE 4.0 on January, 11th. The codebase is now feature-complete. Some work is still being done to put the icing on the KDE 4.0 cake. This includes fixing some major and minor bugs, finishing off artwork and smoothening out the user experience.

Click here

With this second release candidate, the KDE developers hope to collect comments and bug reports from the wider KDE community. With their help, we hope to solve the most pressing problems with the current KDE 4 codebase to ensure the final 4.0 release is stable, usable and fun to work with. We would like to encourage anyone who is willing and able to spend some time on testing to find and report problems to the KDE developers. It is recommended to have a current snapshot of the codebase handy. That makes trying things easier, it also helps the process by not having to hunt down bugs that have already been fixed and makes it easier to test patches proposed by developers.

More Here (with screenshots)

281 contributors from the openSUSE community participated in a survey last month.

The survey was part of a research project on the topic of firm-sponsored open source communities, hosted by the University of Oslo. Topics in the survey include:

• level of contribution
• reasons for participating
• attitude towards Novell

The results are now ready and can be found here:

• Commented version
• Simple presentation

The commented version includes some analysis of the results and statistical measures of correlation between questions in the survey. The simple version only shows the distribution of frequencies in percent, but also includes the answers to the open text fields in the survey.

– openSUSE news

Korneliusz Jarzebski has done the numbers and produced a chart showing exactly how the RAM consumption of comparable KDE4 and KDE3 sessions measure up.

The result is a mindblowing 39% smaller memory footprint in KDE 4. This just goes to show, that it’s worth making large-scale changes to your desktop environment to get the fruit hanging on the higher branches. With more tweaks and optimization, at least we can hope that it will, if not much faster, slower than KDE 3.5 on the same specs.

Also check out a small and interesting post: KDE 4: like a dream on 256Mb/1Ghz/Intel

Conduit allows the user to take their emails, files, bookmarks, and any other type of personal information and synchronize that data with another computer, an online service, or even another electronic device.
Conduit manages the synchronization and conversion of data into other formats. For example, conduit allows you to;

* Synchronize your tomboy notes to a file on a remote computer
* Synchronize your emails to your mobile phone
* Synchronize your bookmarks to delicious, gmail, or even your own webserver

Homepage
Conduit Screencast

Article By: MoosyBlog

Two days ago Adobe has released the final version of its Flash Player Update 3, an important update that brings several new features:

• Mainly, support for H.264, one of the most efficient video encoding available today
• Hardware based image scaling
• Full screen support on Linux
• Support for HE-AAC, an advanced audio encoding
• Multicore support
• Support for Leopard (Mac OS 10.5)
• Support for Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA)
• Flash Player can play back existing MP4, M4A, MOV, MP4V, 3GP and 3G2 content

To get the update, available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris, visit Adobe Flash Player Download Center.

At the same time, Adobe announced Adobe Media Player: “the first application from Adobe built on Adobe AIR, [that] will leverage both H.264 video and HE-AAC audio support. Adobe Media Player takes Flash streaming video experiences outside the Web browser delivering more viewing options, such as watching videos anytime, anywhere.”

Adobe Media Player will be available in early 2008 according to the same press release.

Adobe Flash 9 Update 3 press release    |    Adobe Flash 9 Update 3 release notes

Stephan Kulow writes on his blog to inform us about his successful attempts in getting YaST ported to Qt4:

“Certain voices claimed, porting Yast to Qt4 would be almost impossible due to the different event loops and threading and all that. But thanks to Thiago’s little explanations on how things to go together, it was actually a job done pretty quickly (it was once tried in july, so I didn’t start from scratch). Damn! Did I say, I have the rest of the year?”

Here’s a screenshot of what can be done with a little editing of the styles:

Looking nice  … click for bigger picture.

In case you are interested in how to run Opera Mini 4 on you Windows Mobile device as a default browser, head to my other blog post here …. cause I am loving it.

Аналитическая компания ABI Research опубликовала отчёт об исследовании рыночных перспектив мобильных операционных систем на основе Linux, и в частности мобильной платформы Android, представленной недавно компанией Google. Аналитики подтверждают, что фрагментация рынка мобильных Linux-платформ не даёт им возможности использовать свои конкурентные преимущества, так как наличие нескольких несовместимых платформ не удобно ни производителям ни операторам. Такая ситуация замедляет темпы роста рынка Linux-смартфонов.
В то же время, по рассчётам аналитиков ABI, мобильная платформа Android, за счёт своей открытости и активной поддержки Google может составить серьёзную конкуренцию платформам от ACCESS, Trolltech и другим мобильным Linux-разработкам. В результате вместо фрагментированного сегмента рынка появится единая, сильно стандартизованная и широко доступная операционная система, которая может вытянуть мобильный Linux на уровень конкуренции с ведущими пропиетарными платформами. Уже к 2012 году аналитики прогнозируют, что уровень ежегодных продаж Linux-смартфонов поднимется до 127 миллионов штук.

 

“Well, all the core members of the team are OK with Open Sourcing it. Now we are checking to see if the community likes the idea and see if we can grow support for it. We want to be sure quality software, however, not have a bin-patch-mania of pieces of our hard work by other people. We are sure that Open Source people will submit their stuff to the tree so the software gets better. It open a lot of possibilities for the future and anyone will be able to participate with quality code.”

Gizmodo reports that the creators of iPhone unlocking app AnySIM have considered open-sourcing their application to spread their code far and wide, hopefully picking up many new coders and eyeballs in the process. They’ve apparently floated the idea about for a while, and found that no one objected to the deal. They then put the idea to the community at hackint0sh, a popular iPhone hacking forum and AnySIM’s main site. Reading from the threads on hackint0sh, it appears that initially most folks advocate keeping the source closed; if you’d rather read a more open-source friendly version of the same discussion there’s always slashdot.

When your computer needs to run programs that are bigger than your available physical memory, most modern operating systems use a technique called swapping, in which chunks of memory are temporarily stored on the hard disk while other data is moved into physical memory space. Here are some techniques that may help you better manage swapping on Linux systems and get the best performance from the Linux swapping subsystem.

Linux divides its physical RAM (random access memory) into chucks of memory called pages. Swapping is the process whereby a page of memory is copied to the preconfigured space on the hard disk, called swap space, to free up that page of memory. The combined sizes of the physical memory and the swap space is the amount of virtual memory available.

Swapping is necessary for two important reasons. First, when the system requires more memory than is physically available, the kernel swaps out less used pages and gives memory to the current application (process) that needs the memory immediately. Second, a significant number of the pages used by an application during its startup phase may only be used for initialization and then never used again. The system can swap out those pages and free the memory for other applications or even for the disk cache.

Complete Article