Luis Villa writes "The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project at UC Berkeley and Stanford is working on statistical debugging techniques to report, find, and fix the bugs that drive the most users crazy every day. A handful of outside bug volunteers have been running the project's special feedback builds for a few weeks, and that has generated some really interesting data. But for strong results they need more runs. /. has been known to generate those kinds of big numbers ;) Their site has feedback builds of several open source applications, and the entire project is open sourced. Read more about it, then install some applications, and help them make our free software better for everyone. I'm really looking forward to the end results."

SmellsLikeTeenGarlic writes "Seth Nickell (of Storage and Gnome HIG fame) has started a new project which aims to replace the aging Init system on Linux. OSNews has more details on the project, directly from Seth. The new Python-based approach will make booting faster and it will talk to the D-BUS daemon, freedesktop.org's leading project. And speaking of freedesktop.org, it is important to mention the release of HAL 0.1, an implementation of a hardware abstraction layer for KDE, XFce and Gnome, based on a proposal by freedesktop.org's founder Havoc Pennington and being implemented by David Zeuthen. It is innovative projects like Storage, SystemServices and HAL that can bring the kind of integration to the underlying system that current X11 desktop environments lack."

ThatComputerGuy writes "Slackware 9.1 is now officially released. This is another great release, featuring GCC 3.2.3, GNOME 2.4.0, KDE 3.1.4, ALSA, and Kernel 2.4.22. Check the official announcement for the full feature list. Note that ftp.slackware.com will not allow ISO downloads starting with this release; instead, the first distribution of the ISOs will be via BitTorrent."

An anonymous reader writes "Abiword 2.0 has been released. Finally the Linux desktop has a quality word processor that is faster to load than OpenOffice.org and includes proper footnotes. It also no longer uses its own font directory. At the same time Enchant 1.0.0 has been released, a cross-platform abstract layer to spellchecking. Enchant has been proposed to be a Freedesktop.org standard." That's not the only news, though: Abiword 2.0 is part of the just-released GNOME-Office 1.0, which, as riggwelter writes "coordinates GNOME2 versions of AbiWord, Gnumeric, and GNOME-DB, the database interface." Sun's StarOffice has just reached version 7, as well: read on below for some more information on that, including a first-look review.

JigSaw writes "OSNews published an interview with Havoc Pennington, the head manager of Red Hat's Desktop department, also known for his freedesktop.org initiative and his very active/leading role in Gnome. Havoc discusses the internal changes on Red Hat, the future of the desktop version of Red Hat Linux, the XFree86 fork Xoutert, GTK+ and Gnome while he characteristically says regarding Linux eating UNIX's marketshare: '...nails are firmly in the UNIX coffin, and it's just a matter of time.'"

ubiquitin writes "While KNOPPIX has been around for some time, the GNOPPIX project has only recently made its first release. The main difference is that it lets you boot into the GNOME desktop environment. Usually forks are more trouble than they're worth, but given the limits of what you can compress onto a single CD, separate projects makes sense to me. Hopefully more widespread recognition will also bring about a few more mirrors."

wembley writes "The Associated Press is running a story about a forthcoming Sharp laptop with a 3D screen. I can't find any pictures, but it requires no glasses, so you don't have to walk around looking like Biff's sidekick in Back to the Future. It comes with WinXP, but it's only a matter of time before we're arguing here about what looks better in 3D, Gnome or KDE."

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke says that GNOME 2.4.0 is now available for FreeBSD. Unfortunately, due to timing issues with FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE, it will not make it into the official ports tree until after 4.9 is released (looks like early October right now). In the meantime, you can get to it from his CVS tree. For those without CVS access, he has periodic tarballs made, and are downloadable from the same URL. You should also download the marcusmerge script to aid in merging his ports tree with the official tree. If you already have a copy of the script, download it again because things have changed." Update: 09/18 15:25 GMT by M : FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke says due to popular demand, but more importantly to the fact that 4.9-RELEASE has been pushed back at least two weeks, GNOME 2.40 has been merged into the ports tree.

chendo writes "Gnome 2.4 will be released today. Here is the link to the article on Ars Technica. GNOME 2.4 is the result of quite a bit of work toward complying with the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), which mainly focus on user interface consistency and predictability. This release has also undergone some general polish, and it can finally be said that the GNOME 2 platform has achieved maturity with this release. The Epiphany web browser, a major new component of GNOME, also makes its debut with this release. (From Footnotes)"

Crypto Gnome writes "News Interactive is reporting that anti-spam legislation is being fast-forwarded by the Australian Federal Government. The proposed law will ban sending commercial emails without the recipient's prior consent and ban the use of email harvesting or list-generating software. Naturally, this will only directly impact local Australian spammers, but they're also hoping this will set a precedent for the International community." Banning list-generation software seems a bit heavy-handed, doesn't it?

JigSaw writes "OSNews is reporting on Storage, an innovative project which aims to replace the traditional hierarchical filesystems with a new document store which is database-based (PostgreSQL). The current implementation, built under Gnome 2.x for now, offers natural language access, network transparency, and a number of other features. The project is currently in alpha (screenshots already available), and it is part of the next major generation of Gnome. It is currently developed by Seth Nickell, the person responsible for the enhanced Gnome usability on 2.x and its HIG, among other things."

drdink asks: "I am an avid FreeBSD and Windows user. This semester for a class I'm having to use MacOS X for the first time, and I've also been pondering jumping into the Apple scene anyway. However, I am also visually impaired and I can't seem to find a way to do specific color theming in a way similar to Windows, KDE, and GNOME. I want to be able to say 'Text is white, backgrounds are black, but EVERYTHING ELSE is its normal color.' The only options I've found that are similar is using 'White on Black' in the Universal Access control panel. However, this results in me losing all display colors and my machine looking monochrome. I don't want to use a $2,000+ machine just to have no colors. Is there anybody out there who has actually managed to get Mac OS X to use the normal colors but have high contrast white on black dialog boxes? I am interested in the Apple platform, but I can't use it for useful things, if I have no color."

StArSkY writes "The Australian has an article today outlining how Telstra, Australia's largest Telco, is switching to Linux and open source on the desktop. Their pilot has been quite successful, and improved stability has been noticed. On trial are Star Office, Gnome, Mozilla and Wyse. Spending AUD$1.5 Billion a year on IT, means Telstra using Open Source is a massive boost to Open Source developers and support professionals. Not mentioned in the Article is that Telstra also just Dumped IBM Global Services, and will be running IT in-house again! Telstra will be hiring Linux-savvy people I think..."

Suresh Chandra Das writes "Gnumeric 1.2 is to be released on the 8th of September, and we have a preview of what is coming up ( mirrored here). Also, linmagau.org is running an interview with two of Gnumeric's lead developers -- Jody Goldberg and Andreas L. Guelzow."

Gianluca Insolvibile writes "I plead guilty: I have always admired Microsoft's COM architecture and the relative simplicity that allows you to reuse already installed components to create even complex programs. And I have always been fascinated by the distributed nature of DCOM, which seemed to me much more graspable than complex monsters like CORBA and J2EE. While looking for equally expressive Open Source component technologies among GNOME and KDE, I was never able to find something fitting my needs (I never got into Bonobo deeply enough, though)." Read on to see how this led Gianluca to Juval Loewy's O'Reilly-published Programming .NET Components, and what he thinks of the book.

ThaReetLad writes "In this article at DevX, Executive Editor A. Russell Jones makes the case for a standardised GUI for Linux. He argues that the promotion of choice of GUI as a positive feature of using Linux is detrimental to its chances of attacking Microsoft's home user monopoly. From the article: '...the open source community must recognize that its primary goals: freedom of choice, freedom of source code, and freedom to alter applications, are not the goals of the average user.' In particular he argues that the choice of desktop between KDE, Gnome, IceWM etc, is not one that a former windows user, even a fairly technically competent one, is going to able to make an informed choice on, and that they should not be forced to make that choice in order to get good use out of any applications they might want to use."

An anonymous reader writes: "FootNotes is reporting about what might be the coolest thing since textmode Quake: a curses-based GTK-2.0 port called Cursed GTK. This not only makes it possible to give Gnome the look and feel of Contiki, but also brings many real opportunities, such as remote logins where X forwarding is not possible, or remote logins over very slow modem lines. Screenshots here, here, here and here! Patches for bugs are welcomed by the authors."

magellan writes "Sun has released screenshots of its upcoming Mad Hatter Linux desktop. Mad Hatter includes GNOME, StarOffice, Evolution, and Mozilla. Sun has made minor modifications to Gnome to make it more familiar to Windows users. Sun's Mad Hatter, along with SuSE's new push on the desktop, could make Linux on the corporate desktop and laptop a bigger reality."

A user writes "The latest beta release of Gnumeric has been released. According the the developers, it is now ready and stable enough for general use and deployment, and the final 1.2.0 release will be made on September 8th. This release also marks the realization of a major milestone -- all of the worksheet functions in the U.S. version of MS Excel are now supported. I have been using 1.1.19 for quite some time now, and it is incredibly fast, and hugely improved compared to Gnumeric 1.0."

valluvar9000 asks: "I recently was able to talk a local secondary school (public) into letting me convert their existing computer systems (not in use and in storage) into a LTSP based setup. They are OK with it as long as it does not cost them money. However the whole solution needs to be deployed in the local language (Tamil) as the medium of instruction is not English. Fortunately Tamil (TSCII & Unicode) support is widely available and quite mature on KDE and GNOME. Can Slashdot help with the selection of good educational tools (Maths, Science, General problem solving and any other topic of interest) that are GUI based (KDE preferably) and internationalizable (this is important)? The target ages are between 6 years to 12 years."