OStatic

At OSCON last year, Jaspersoft revealed that work was underway to re-vamp JasperForge, its developer community platform. Jaspersoft's goal was to ensure that the Forge could support its community into the future by integrating new collaboration and networking tools, while enhancing the Forge's existing features.

Today, Jaspersoft has announced that the JasperForge upgrade has moved into high gear, with all of its new features and enhancements in place and operational.

There's one little domain name out there that's had a wild ride this year. In January, a rather cryptic post went up on Linux.com, a SourceForge web property, that said updates had been slowing -- and were as of that point ceasing -- because changes were in the works. Then came the silence on the wire.

In early March came the announcement that the Linux Foundation was taking the reins at Linux.com, transforming it from something rather static into something that could better capture the spirit of learning, experiencing, and giving back that is an enormous part of the operating system's allure. Input from existing Linux.com members and others interested in having a say was gathered through the IDEAFORGE submission tool, and the Foundation got to work at making these wishes a reality.

At this very moment, the little domain name is embarking on the next leg of its journey. The Linux Foundation is officially unveiling the new Linux.com, a product by the community, for the community.

openSUSE recently announced the dates and agenda for its very first Community Week. Much like the Ubuntu team's OpenWeek, the purpose of Community Week is to assemble and introduce new contributors all over the Linux-using world to each other, and the openSUSE Project. And while developers are a vital part of an open source community and are encouraged to attend and get involved in openSUSE's Community Week, participants don't necessarily need programming skills -- only a willingness to learn, connect and pitch in the skills they possess.

Community Week kicks off on Monday, May 11th and concludes on May 17th. Most of the events take place on Freenode, with individual components (such as openSUSE-specific discussions on KDE, GNOME, or marketing) having their own unique #openSUSE-project channels and schedules.

Earlier this week, the Qt Labs at Nokia announced a new project, QtMobility. QtMobility's primary goal is to offer a new set of Qt API development tools for mobile device applications.

While this will certainly make life easier for developers working with the Qt framework on specific Nokia devices, one of the best (and intentional) fringe benefits is that the new API tools are cross-platform. A single application, then, can be built and maintained for any supported Qt platform -- regardless of the mobile device model or manufacturer.

Video editing software for Linux is, to put it nicely, quirky. Some editors only work with specific file formats, some work nicely for basic video editing but can be wildly temperamental on seemingly identical machines, and some are powerful to the point of overkill for the average user.

PiTiVi is a non-linear video editor based on the GStreamer multimedia framework. After hearing some positive comments, and seeing development efforts really picking up on the project, I decided to take it for a spin. It is very much in development, but not in the traditional sense. It feels very stable, and the interface isn't confusing or a hindrance. It is, at the moment, very basic when it comes to functionality. There are not plugins or extensions currently available (though feature requests are welcome). However, the project has taken the time to plan its path forward -- and with the basics down, I can't see why real headway won't come quickly.

The Ubuntu Project may have just unleashed a legion of Jackalopes upon the world, but is well aware that time waits for no animal, real or cryptozoological. This is why the first alpha version of Ubuntu 9.10, the Karmic Koala, is now available for brave testers everywhere.

Keep in mind that this is the first alpha, just opened for development. This means not only that it should be kept far, far away from production machines, but that many of the nifty new features that will be in the final Karmic release aren't there at all yet, never mind perfected. Currently, however, there is a new kernel based on the 2.6.30 release, and the latest development version (2.27.1) of the GNOME desktop environment. Applications are being updated (and added) quickly, and there's definitely a wild ride (and a lot of bug-squashing fun) ahead for interested testers.

In my travels, I discovered David Zeuthen's informative peek at DeviceKit (and its use with and in lieu of HAL) in the upcoming release of Fedora 11.

Zeuthen says that while the new storage device handling stack is implemented in Fedora's GNOME 2.26 desktop configuration, it should be appearing in its entirety in the upstream GNOME 2.28 release. The DeviceKit daemon modernizes and adds to many of the features and functions of the tried and true HAL daemon.