GSmartControl is a graphical user interface for smartctl (from Smartmontools package), which is a tool for querying and controlling S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. It allows you to inspect the drive's S.M.A.R.T. data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on it.

In the Linux operating system, the disks are mounted through labels, instead of device path. This is the most effective approach as the device name and path may change when you boot and thus may create several complications for the system and hence for the user.

So the disks are assigned labels so that the devices may mount up in the correct place. Thus disk labels are the important structure for the access of the Linux volumes. All entries for disks to be mounted at startup are in the file /etc/fstab.

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.

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.

The highlights of this release are native VC-1/WMV3, On2 VP5 and VP62 (used in some Flash video files) decoding, which works even on non-Intel platforms and SSA/ASS/color subtitles.

Furthermore MPlayer can now run natively on Intel Macs (you just have to pass --disable-loader --disable-mp3lib to configure), -endpos was finally added to MPlayer and the Windows GUI has seen a number of improvements.

Raph Levien, a lead developer on project Ghostscript has announced that the leading edge of Ghostscript development is now under GPL license, as is the latest release Ghostscript 8.54.

From the announcement:

By switching to the GPL, we're reaffirming our commitment to the free software world. One big reason for this decision was to reduce the lead time between bugs being fixed in the development tree and users seeing the fixes, especially those users dependent on Linux distributions.