Recalling the lambda notation…

gedit is the default text editor of GNOME. In 2.14 there are a number of important changes, like draggable tables, interactive search and embedded print preview. Steve has wrote a preview in its blog.

I spend most of my time teaching classes on Solaris internals, device drivers, and kernel crash dump analysis and debugging. When explaining to classes how various subsystems are implemented in Solaris, students often ask, “How does it work in Linux?” or, “In FreeBSD, it works like this, how about Solaris?” This article examines three of the basic subsystems of the kernel and compares implementation between Solaris 10, Linux 2.6, and FreeBSD 5.3.

The three subsystems examined are scheduling, memory management, and file system architecture. I chose these subsystems because they are common to any operating system (not just Unix and Unix-like systems), and they tend to be the most well-understood components of the operating system.

Article here.

It has been a very exciting development cycle thus far. Dapper has seen many improvements including a new graphical installer splash using gfxboot, a new kernel version with special builds for various types of servers, speed improvements all around, and new versions of all sorts of software. This week brings us Dapper Flight 4, the fourth alpha release of Ubuntu 6.04 - The Dapper Drake. Dapper Flight 4 is the product of over 3 months of tremendous effort to mold the latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer into a coherent easy to use whole. The most significant milestone for Dapper Flight 4 is the UVF (Upstream Version Freeze). Aside from a few exceptions such as GNOME 2.14 and Espresso, most of what is in Dapper now is what will be in the final release in April. Let’s take a look at what you are going to get.

Read more here.

Built on the shoulders of giants, GNOME 2.14 hits the shelves on the 15^th of March. As well as new features and more polish, developers have been working around the clock to squeeze more performance out of the most commonly used applications and libraries. This is a review of some of the most shiny work that has gone into the upcoming GNOME release.

Here.

To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited < 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last few session history entries. This can be a lot of data. It's a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web.

More here.

Two articles about the work on Gnome 2.16.

http://gnomerocksmyworld.blogspot.com/2006/02/gnome-216-polish-polish-polish.html

http://gnomerocksmyworld.blogspot.com/2006/02/thoughts-about-gnome-216.html

With DTrace, administrators and developers can trace low level services like I/O and scheduling, up the system stack through kernel functions calls, system calls, and system library calls, and into applications written in C and C++ or any of a host of dynamic languages like Java, Ruby, Perl or php. One of my contributions to BrandZ was to extend DTrace support for Linux binaries executed in a branded Zone.

PDF slides here.

DTrace for Linux here.

This Beta 2 version of the toolbar contains functionality and stability enhancements over previous versions and includes the following improvements.

– You can now selectively enable and disable CSS parsing.
– The Misc menu contains a color picker.
– Several link reports are available.
– When you select an element in the DOM element tree list, the selected element scrolls into view if it is not already visible in the browser window.

Download it from here.

According to the Wall Street Journal, quoting sources close to the matter, Google would pay Dell $1 billion over three years for the rights to place its software as the default applications on new Dell computers.

Entire article here.

From this blog:

It’s been exactly one month since we released the well-received WordPress 2.0 release. In the past 4 weeks we’ve been listening closely to feedback, squashing bugs wherever we find them, and watching how 2.0 handled under different loads.

We’ve rolled up all the most important fixes into a 2.0.1 release, which is now available for download.
All in all we’ve closed 114 bugs in the 2.0.1 release, which you’re welcome to check out if you’re curious about every fix. To summarize:

• You can now specify an upload directory, and whether to use date-based storage or not.
• Caching has been fixed under certain PHP enviroments.
• Permalinks have been fixed for weird enviroments as well.
• XML-RPC uploading works.
• Compatibility with older versions of PHP.
• Several WYSIWYG fixes and cleanups.
• Imports now use much less memory.
• Now works with MySQL 5.0 in strict mode.

What’s new:

• Improved stability.
• Improved support for Mac OS X.
• International Domain Name support for Iceland (.is) is now enabled.
• Fixes for several memory leaks.
• Several security enhancements.

Get it from here.

Google + Ubuntu = Goobuntu!