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).

Xen Virtualization is a new book from Packt that helps Linux administrators to use Xen virtualization for development, testing, virtual hosting or operating systems training. Written by Prabhakar Chaganti this book is a practical guide for supporting multiple operating systems with the Xen hypervisor.

Xen was originally developed in 2003 at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and users now have the choices of both commercial and free versions of the Xen hypervisor. The commercial versions are built on top of the open-source version with additional enterprise features. In this book Chaganti explores and uses the open-source version of Xen.

Xen is an open-source paravirtualization technology that provides a platform for running multiple operating systems on one physical hardware resource, while providing close to native performance. Xen supports several operating systems like Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and NetBSD. It enables the user to easily test, deploy and run their software and services on multiple operating systems with resource isolation and great performance. It is also a terrific way to consolidate servers, save hardware and maintenance costs, and minimize downtime. Xen is one of the most popular open source projects in the world and vendors like IBM, Sun, HP, RedHat and Novell are working on integrating Xen into their Linux servers.

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced an agreement with Sun Microsystems to advance open source Java™ software. Red Hat has signed Sun's broad contributor agreement that covers participation in all Sun-led open source projects by all Red Hat engineers.

In addition, Red Hat has signed Sun's OpenJDK Community TCK License Agreement. This agreement gives the company access to the test suite that determines whether an implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) platform that is derived from the OpenJDK project complies with the Java SE 6 specification.

Jeremy Andrews of KernelTrap has today announced the availability of the new Linux Kernel Job Board service on his site. Here's the original announcement:

I am pleased to announce that KernelTrap has partnered with Specialty Job Markets to offer a unique Linux kernel job board for our readers. It is completely free to submit your resume, which will then be personally reviewed and matched with current and future employment opportunities. If you're an employer, it's also free to post jobs. Jobs and resumes that are posted to our boards are individually reviewed and matched by a professional recruiter, not a computer program, offering quality results with a personal touch. The contact information you provide is kept confidential and is only visible to our dedicated recruiter.

Myah OS 3.0 alpha 1 is now available to kick off the 3.0 release cycle. This first alpha release has been very carefully put together. The only thing really missing so far is the graphical installer, which is under construction. This release is a live CD that includes package utilities and all development tools.

Myah OS is an original linux distro created by Jeremiah Cheatham. Myah OS is built for the i686 intel/amd PCs but will also work very well with the newer 64bit intel/amd PCs. Myah OS uses it's package management suite designed to be simple and fast. Myah is designed to be a full featured distro, with at least 1 or 2 applications for every need. XFCE 4.4.1 desktop makes Myah run very fast without taking a lot of resources. Myah will also handle all of your multimedia needs.

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.

Sunnyvale, Calif - September 7, 2007 - AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced a major strategic initiative to support the Open Source development community for ATI Radeon™ graphics processors. The week of September 10th, AMD plans to provide an open source information and development package supporting the ATI Radeon™ HD 2000 series as well as ATI Radeon™ X1000 series of graphics processing units (GPU) on Linux desktops. To accelerate this initiative, AMD partnered with Novell's SuSE Linux engineering team.

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

The Perl Survey is attempting to take a snapshot of the Perl world as it currently stands. Whether you're a web developer, sysadmin, or using Perl for scientific research or finance or just tracking your DVD collection, we'd love to hear about it.

We're trying to answer questions like:

The Debian project has updated the stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codename Etch). This update adds security updates to the stable release, together with a few corrections to serious problems. As always, the first point release also corrects a few issues that have been noticed too late in the release process to stop the release, but still should be fixed.

This point release for Etch also includes an updated release of the installer, which includes the following changes:

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.

The nonprofit Linux Foundation has unveiled the Linux Weather Forecast, a Web site aimed at giving people a better sense of the status of specific Linux kernel projects. The Foundation created the forecast site by teaming up with Jonathan Corbet, a Linux kernel developer and writer, who's also executive editor of the LWN.net Linux and free software news site.

The forecast is already live and tracks work in the Linux developer community likely to be included in the operating system's kernel and in major distributions of the open-source software, or both. The forecast provides summaries on work in areas such as core Linux kernel development, virtualization and containers, file systems, security, networking, and support for hardware.

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.

Charlotte, NC, August 03, 2007 -- Blue Gnu Media and Technology announced that it launched a Free Software news website, Blue GNU on Wednesday, 01-Aug-2007. Both the website and the business itself will be driven by Free Software. While there are a number of Linux and Open Source news outlets on the Internet, Blue GNU will focus more narrowly on Free Software and is closely aligned, editorially, with the Free Software Foundation.