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In another step towards general release, the first beta of Linux Standard Base (LSB) 4.0 was released today. LSB 4.0 will introduce a new application checker, a new shell script checker, and a new multi-version software development kit (SDK) that will enable developers to build applications to earlier LSB specifications without changing SDKs.

By Cameron Laird and Kathryn Soraiz Welcome! This is Regular Expressions, or, more precisely, its early-September 2008 installment. Regular Expressions is a column we've written around a hundred times already, stretching back to the late '90s. We're excited to bring it now to Linux Developer Network (LDN), which will publish two installments each month.

With the advent of Web 2.0 and Software as a Service, cloud computing has come into vogue. Cloud computing has become synonymous with providing services anywhere anytime with the basic requirement being access to the internet. As a new model, cloud computing promises to make any online service available without a large upfront investment in infrastructure. The economics of running a full infrastructure changes dramatically since you only pay for what you use.... [more]

Part one of this article, Cloud Computing and Open Source, presented an overview of several cloud computing solutions available today that are friendly to open source. In this article we'll focus on one of these solutions, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and walk through the development of an open source mashup for EC2. Amazon EC2 is a top player in the cloud computing space and gives organizations the ability to leverage world-class compute resources on a pay-as-you-go basis.... [more]

Your programs are more reliable and often faster when you code with careful memory techniques. Those advantages come at a low cost, too: the ideas behind the five tips presented below are simple enough to understand on a first reading. Start to practice them today, and you'll soon see pay-offs in the the applications or libraries you write.

Once upon a time, Java was persona non grata on Linux distributions.

Creating applications with a visually appealing graphical user interface (GUI) requires some type of foundational toolkit to make the job practical. The leading candidates for Linux are the toolkits behind the two most popular desktop environments--namely GNOME and KDE. While they represent similar functionality, they are two totally different entities with different design philosophies and structure.

Linux today supports more hardware devices than any other operating system in the history of the world. It does this using a development model significantly different from the familiar Windows device driver model. The Linux development process continues to evolve to better support the needs of Independent Hardware Vendors (IHVs), distributions, and other members of the community, and the advantages of the Linux model are increasing with time.

The kernel which forms the core of the Linux system is the result of one of the largest cooperative software projects ever attempted. Regular 2-3 month releases deliver stable updates to Linux users, each with significant new features, added device support, and improved performance. The rate of change in the kernel is high and increasing, with almost 10,000 patches going into recent kernel releases. These releases each contain the work of nearly 1000 developers representing well over 100 corpora... [more]

2008 marks the tenth anniversary of the birth of Eclipse. It got its start in life as a proprietary development tool, but in 2001 IBM decided to change that and make it available under an open source license (Eclipse Public License).  Most people connect Eclipse with Java development, although with appropriate plug-in modules it is now much more than that.... [more]