Adobe has just released a public beta of the next Flash Player, version 10. Mike Melanson from Adobe says:

There are plenty of nifty new features covered in the labs link. More interesting for Linux users is that we have been addressing the graphical performance issues that manifesting starting in 9r115, the version where we had to rework the graphical system due to the new XEmbed support (trying to remember what that bought us... oh yeah: context menus consistent with the desktop). The key to performance? Move away from recommended APIs and use unrecommended ones (without resorting to deprecated APIs).

The first release of Flex Builder Linux, a plugin-only version of the Flex Builder that you can use to build Flex applications on Linux is now available on the appropriate labs page.

This alpha version is based on several features from Flex Builder 3 (codenamed "Moxie"). It includes project creation, code coloring, code hints, compilation, the Ajax Bridge, Find All References, and debugging. Not all Flex Builder 3 features are supported, so be sure to check out the release notes for a list of unsupported features.

Adobe wanted to get an early release out with the base Flex Builder features so they could get valuable feedback from early adopters and thus better prioritize development of additional features.

Well, Linux team at Nvidia certainly know their job, because they released new version of Nvidia Linux display driver 100.14.19 not long after X.Org 7.3 started showing up in popular Linux distribution. It even looks like they actually waited for X.Org to release 7.3 first, so they could sync with it pretty fast. I can only agree with such strategy. :) The new drivers come with all sorts of fixes and improvements and I can't wait to test it on my desktop.

This morning, hardworking Debian developers pushed the remaining pieces of the brand new X.Org 7.3 to Debian sid (unstable) distribution. And it must be said, a well done job!

ii  x11-apps            7.3+1      X applications
ii  x11-common          1:7.3+2    X Window System (X.Org)
ii  x11-session-utils   7.3+1      X session utilities
ii  x11-utils           7.3+1      X11 utilities
ii  x11-xfs-utils       7.3+1      X font server utilities
ii  x11-xkb-utils       7.3+1      X11 XKB utilities
ii  x11-xserver-utils   7.3+1      X server utilities
ii  xbase-clients       1:7.3+2    miscellaneous X clients - metapackage
ii  xorg                1:7.3+2    X.Org X Window System
ii  xorg-dev            1:7.3+2    the X.Org X Window System development
ii  xserver-xorg        1:7.3+2    the X.Org X server
ii  xutils              1:7.3+2    X Window System utility programs


Features

• Xorg server 1.4 - see Server14Branch for more details. Highlights:
  • RandR 1.2: RandR 1.2 offers output hotplug, as well as on-the-fly output reconfiguration and mode switching.
  • Input hotplug: Input hotplug allows hotplugging of input devices, and also adds enhanced support for touchscreens and tablets, through either HAL or D-Bus.
  • KDrive: Numerous enhancements have been made to the KDrive codebase, including better support for multiple input devices.
  • DTrace: When running on OpenSolaris, DTrace support is available in the X server, allowing detailed accounting of operations inside the server.
  • EXA: A great deal of work has been done on the EXA framework to make it more usable.
• New applications: xbacklight
• New drivers: xf86-video-glide, xf86-video-vermilion
• New man pages for API's: libXinerama, libXcomposite, XKB functions in libX11, Xtest functions in libXtst
• Support for font catalogue directories in font path
• xdm: Xft support added

Referencing the post Nvidia Linux driver 100.14.11 and Linux kernel 2.6.23. Here I have reported the patches for older versions of Nvidia drivers. The procedure to follow is the same described in the above document.

DesktopLinux.com launched its 2007 Desktop Linux Survey on August 13, asking users of Linux desktops to identify what distributions they use, as well as their choice of windowing environment (KDE, GNOME, etc.), web browsers, email clients, and Windows-on-Linux solutions.

Participants are asked to refrain from promoting or advertising the survey to mailing lists, or encouraging friends or co-workers to vote for specific software, in order to ensure that the survey represents a broad sample of Linux desktop users rather than being used to advance a particular open-source software cause.

As usual, DesktopLinux.com will publish the results of the survey following its conclusion.

Exactly 10 years ago, on 15th August 1997, Miguel de Icaza started his first announcement about GNOME Desktop project with this words:

Goals
We want to develop a free and complete set of user friendly applications and desktop tools, similar to CDE and KDE but based entirely on free software:

• We want the applications to have a common look and feel, and to share as many visual elements and UI concepts as possible.
• We want to use the GTK toolkit as our toolkit for writing the applications.
• We want to encourage people to contribute code and to test the code, so that the software will compile out of the box by using GNU's tools for automatic source configuration.

This is the first development release of Compiz Fusion, the result of more than six months of work and polish. The first stable release, 0.6.0, will follow after the Compiz 0.6.0 release.

Compiz Fusion is the result of a merge between the Compiz community plugin set "Compiz Extras" and the parts of the Beryl project that are independent of the window manager core. The two communities have re-united to create a user experience for Linux that rivals anything available on other platforms.

The merge between Compiz and Beryl, combined with the continuing increase in stability, reliability, and usability both in Compiz, Compiz Fusion and the surrounding software environment (better driver support and so on), means Compiz Fusion will be included in many more distributions. Compiz and Compiz Fusion will be enabled by default in some of them, making Compiz usage easier for everyone.

Well, they're not working together. Unless you're not willing to tweak it a little bit. So, out of the box, you won't be able to test brand new Linux CFS scheduler, merged in the 2.6.23-rc1 release, if you drive your Nvidia card with the proprietary driver. I guess that's what we get for running binary drivers.

This one has bothered me for a long time. The solution is, of course, simple. But, I still don't understand why was it necessary to force users to search so hard for this piece of information, where all the older X server releases worked OK out of the box?

If you find that after upgrading to X.Org 7.3 your display becomes very slow, and you own ATI Radeon, all you need to do is to put this line in the Device section of your xorg.conf:

Jerome Glisse announced today that a small team of X.Org developers has managed to provide the initial support for ATI R500-based cards (ATI Radeon X1300 up to X1600 at the time) by reverse engineering. The released code is definitely not yet ready for the normal users, but it's the big step ahead nevertheless. Especially having in mind how ATI (now owned by AMD) has not provided specifications of their hardware to the open source community. Jerome writes:

The other day I stumbled upon this neat tool that helps cleanup your GConf registry, called GConf Cleaner. While GNOME registry size isn't nowhere near the size of Windows registry, and thus shouldn't slow your computer too much, it's still nice to have a tool that cleans unused and obsolete entries.

Meet GConf Cleaner

The tool is still in early stages of development (version 0.0.2), but I've successfully run it on my desktop and was amazed how many old entries it found. Typically, if you install some GNOME application, play with it a little bit and later decide to delete it, it's configuration settings will remain in the GConf database. So your registry will only grow in time.

Release Highlights

• Adds support for new GPUs: GeForce 8600 GTS, GeForce 8600 GT, GeForce 8600M GT, GeForce 8600M GS, GeForce 8500 GT, GeForce 8400 GS, GeForce 8400M GT, GeForce 8400M GS, GeForce 8400M G, GeForce 8300 GS, Quadro FX 1600M, Quadro FX 570M, Quadro FX 360M, Quadro NVS 320M, Quadro NVS 140M, Quadro NVS 135M, Quadro NVS 130M.
• Adds support for Quadro FX 4600 G-Sync and Quadro FX 5600 G-Sync boards.
• Improved notebook GPU support.
• Improved RenderAccel support for subpixel antialiased fonts.
• Added XV brightness and contrast controls for GeForce 8 GPUs.
• Improved interaction with newer Linux kernels.
• Fixed a locale-interaction issue in the nvidia-settings configuration file parser.

GNU Emacs 22.1 has been released. It is available on the GNU ftp sites at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/ and its mirrors (see http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html). Please send any bug reports to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. You can use the function M-x report-emacs-bug to do this.

Here are some new features of Emacs 22. See etc/NEWS for a complete list.