Almost two months after the technical preview was released, the development of version 4.7 of the cross-platform Qt C++ framework for GUI applications is beginning to take shape, as Nokia has now presented a beta version. A beta of the Qt Creator 2.0 development environment, which is part of the framework, has also been released. The developers highlight the integration of Qt Quick (Qt UI Creation Kit) as the prominent feature of the next version of Qt. Qt Quick is a tool collection for creating animated, touch-enabled Qt interfaces and applications for mobile and embedded devices.

Read the full thing at http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Touch-support-in-Qt-4-7-995793.html

We've spent some time talking with Dave Burke. Dave is the originating author of Osmos. As we announced albeit a bit late Osmos is now ported to Linux and it's quite an entertaining game. Dave speaks with us about some of his history in gaming and why he ported it to Linux.

Read the full thing at http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2010/05/why-games-dont-get-ported-to-linuxa.html

We are now very near from final release. Here comes the second beta release for 2010 Spring version of Mandriva Linux. As usual you will be able to test it as it’s available on your favorite public mirror:

Read the full thing at http://blog.mandriva.com/2010/04/30/mandriva-linux-2010-spring-beta2-is-available-for-tests/

Monitoring and analyzing performance is an important task for any sysadmin. Disk I/O bottlenecks can bring applications to a crawl. What is an IOP? Should I use SATA, SAS, or FC? How many spindles do I need? What RAID level should I use? Is my system read or write heavy? These are common questions for anyone embarking on an disk I/O analysis quest. Obligatory disclaimer: I do not consider myself an expert in storage or anything for that mater. This is just how I have done I/O analysis in the past. I welcome additions and corrections. I believe it’s also important to note that this analysis is geared toward random operations than sequential read/write workloads.

Read the full thing at http://www.cmdln.org/2010/04/22/analyzing-io-performance-in-linux/

n the last couple of years I have tested many Linux distros. I was never a diehard fan of any of them, kept an open mind and was willing to simply use the one that best fit my needs. Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian and others have been put to the test at some point or another. PCLinuxOS was one of the few popular ones I had not tested. Being based off Mandriva, I was assuming it would be similar to the Linux Mint - Ubuntu case, so no surprises expected. After all, I had tested several Mandriva releases, so what could be that interesting about PCLinuxOS? Now, let me tell you... boy, was I wrong!

Read the full thing at http://cristalinux.blogspot.com/2010/04/pclinuxos-2010-review.html

The past few days we have been reporting on Valve's Steam client coming to Linux (and some of the Source Engine games too) soon as we had found Linux references within the Steam Mac OS X client and then other Linux references. We even ended up finding the unreleased Linux files on the Valve servers.

Read the full thing at http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODE3OA

After a long delay, eComStation 2.0 GA will finally become reality. It will be released in time to be presented at the Warpstock Europe 2010 event which is held in Trier, Germany, from May 14 to 16.

We consider eComStation 2.0 to be the biggest overhaul of OS/2 so far. Together with a team of both hired and volunteer developers, we have extended the functionality, removed limitations, updated hardware support as far as possible, and resolved close to 1000 issues that had been reported since the release of eComStation 1.2R. The new eComStation 2.0 GA is the result of several years of combined efforts and investments.

Read the full thing at the longest URL known to mankind....

am very happy to announce the new stable version 0.40 of the KDE office software Kraft. After eleven month of porting work, Kraft 0.40 is the first version which is based on the KDE 4 software platform. Huge changes on the codebase of Kraft happened to benefit from the new technology of KDE 4 and after long long hours of work, we’re there

Read the full thing at http://lizards.opensuse.org/2010/04/18/kraft-0-40-for-kde-4-released/

f you didn't already know, I am in the computer repair business. Normally, people come in with either PCs or Macs, and request repairs that are really rather simple. Occasionally, I'm called on to do large installations, or set up servers, but that's rare. What's even more rare is having a Linux client. I did just happen to get one though. The first I've ever had.

Read the full thing at http://elevenislouder.blogspot.com/2010/04/linux-client-at-work.html

Dive Into Python is one of the worst books for learning Python and it must die. I've had too many potential programmers find this book and get tripped up by its horrible design decisions that I'm declaring war. The book is weird, uses antiquated technology, has horrible examples, and Mark Pilgrim is too much of a neckbeard ass to listen to anyone about it:

Read the full thing at http://oppugn.us/posts/1272050135.html