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It's easy to understand why compatibility between different operating systems is a complicated procedure.

Amidst the halls of a former seminary built in the 19th Century, the future of 21st technology was explored in the 2008 Linux Foundation End User Summit.The Desmond Tutu Center in Manhattan might seem like an unlikely venue for Linux developers and end users to congregate, but the updated facility's nooks and crannies proved a good place for lots of impromptu discussions between Summit attendees.

A couple of weeks ago, we looked mostly at programs coded in Python and hosted in systems small enough to fit in gadgets like cellular handsets, networking appliances, and other such products. Several Tcl projects illustrate a different role for Linux, one of which marries a conventional personal computer with add-on special-purpose hardware.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and open source software, today announced that its Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) governance workgroup, called FOSSBazaar, has nearly doubled its membership since launching in January.The newest members include Ars Aperta, Black Duck, BT, Krugle, Palamida, and nexB, which contribute to 15 total members today.

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.

Every open source project must deal with the same problem: how do you package your application so that it installs and runs properly on all the major distributions? Use a package manager to bundle the application, configuration scripts and any necessary libraries into a single file. The two most popular methods of accomplishing this are the RPM Package Manager (RPM) and the Advanced Packaging Tool (APT).

The Foundation is helping out with CeBIT 2009, and we're looking for papers now... "Open Source is emerging for the first time as a central theme at the CeBIT 2009 conference. Linux Magazine, together with the conference organizers and the Linux Foundation, is now encouraging Open Source projects to bid for free booths at the conference.

Welcome to Untangle, the newest member of the Linux Foundation!"Untangle, developers of the Open Source Network Gateway, is joining the Linux Foundation as a way to further contribute to the open source community. It plans to take advantage of the exclusive Linux Foundation events and to collaborate with the Foundation on outreach to Linux User Groups (LUGs) throughout the globe.

By Cameron Laird and Kathryn Soraiz Python is among the leading languages for development of embedded systems. You probably already recognize what a temptation exaggeration is for columnists. The world is a noisy place, and when a particular story deserves readers' attention, it's easy for "three elders coincidentally die in remote village" to become "Deadly Mystery Grips Town" by the time it hits the headlines.

If you look under the hood of the majority of today’s Web 2.0 applications you shouldn’t be surprised to find Linux all over the place. Since a Web app runs in the browser, by definition it doesn’t matter what your host operating system happens to be. What does matter to the user is the responsiveness of the interface and how well it does the job.

The coming of the next version of the Linux Standard Base will bring a lot of interesting new features, one of which will be the addition of a cryptographic library that independent software vendors will be able to utilize for their applications.

The Mono project started as an effort to bring the C# language and the Microsoft Common Language Runtime (CLR) to the Linux platform. You can read the reasons behind the project on the Mono site. If you turn a blind eye to the ABM (anything but Microsoft) religious wars you’ll acknowledge the large body of custom applications written for the corporate environment based on the Microsoft .Net platform. Mono makes it possible, and drop-dead simple, to bring those applications into the world o... [more]

Oracle reveals more details about it's kernel development participation..."The kernel is an integral part of Linux that manages system resources and provides services and APIs on top of hardware for all tools and applications to use. Building on a decade-long commitment to Linux, an experienced engineering team at Oracle continues to develop key Linux kernel technology for the open source community.

Ask just about any programmer what task they enjoy the least and more than likely you’ll hear documentation. There are even some programming styles (see agile programming) that actually adhere to a minimal documentation approach, putting the emphasis on working software. While cutting back on the documentation might be a good approach for getting an application out the door, it probably won’t help someone trying to maintain or modify it down the road.

By Cameron Laird and Kathryn Soraiz September is kernel month here at Linux Developer Network. While that might seem to be at an opposite pole from the "lightweight," "agile" programming in which this column specializes, there are actually many connections between kernel work and scripting.... [more]

As part of our month of kernel development coverage, Oracle has kindly allowed LDN to highlight some articles on their Oracle Technology Network site. This article is a good look inside what Oracle's doing for the kernel these days. In future months, Oracle will be contributing new content to LDN, so keep an eye out! -BKP

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.

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.

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]

While the worldwide server market's factory revenue grew 6.4% over the last year, according to the IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Track, Linux server revenue was running ahead of the curve at a growth rate of 10%.