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GSmartControl is a graphical user interface for
smartctl. It allows you to inspect the hard
drive’s SMART data to determine its health, as
well as run various tests on it.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
Many Windows-specific bugs were fixed. Windows 2000 is officially supported now. New scripts were added to read SMART data from cron-generated files, thus preventing the need to run GSmartControl as root for read-only tasks. Some configure system improvements were made.

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Ah3 is an invoicing and inventory system for
repair shops. It comes configured for an auto
repair shop but can be configured to handle any
shop with customers who have things to be
repaired. It includes a customer and vehicle
database, the ability to generate invoices, and
the ability to track the repair history of a
vehicle. It also tracks inventory, allowing for
parts with multiple vendors and costs and other
information. Ah3 is the successor to Autohouse II.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This release fixes a bug that kept the SQL files from loading. It fixes a first record insert error from forms. Binaries are built using the Qt-4.4.3 libraries. The ability to have validators and echo modes to line-edit entries in forms has been added.

Doxygen is a cross-platform, JavaDoc-like
documentation system for C++, C, Objective-C, C#,
Java, IDL, Python, PHP, VHDL, and Fortran. Doxygen
can be used to generate an on-line class browser
(in HTML) and/or an off-line reference manual (in
LaTeX or RTF) from a set of source files. Doxygen
can also be configured to extract the
code-structure from undocumented source files.
This includes dependency graphs, class diagrams
and hyperlinked source code. This type of
information can be very useful to quickly find
your way in large source distributions.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This release introduces an updated wizard, which now uses Qt4 and provides more convenience in configuring and running doxygen. It also features a new Qt Help generator, which no longer requires an external tool to postprocess the output. An option had been added that allows configuring the parser that doxygen will use for a given file extension. As always, a large number of bugs have been fixed.

Disko is a plugin-based framework providing
components to create
media-oriented applications with special user
interfaces on embedded
platforms. It is closely connected to the DirectFB
hardware abstraction
library and specialized in touchscreen and remote
control navigation.
There’s a plugin-based management component which
enables easy
development, customization, and extension of
embedded applications.
Disko has been ported to the TI Davinci platform
together with DirectFB,
and runs on x86, as well. The goal is to have
Disko up and running on
every single platform DirectFB is working on.

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License: GNU General Public License v2

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Changes:
This release has a new X11 backend, making Disko independent of DirectFB if running on X11. Basic SIP client and flash support was added. There are new widgets and animations. The build system has been switched from make to scons, providing more flexibility.

GNU `tar’ saves many files together into a single tape or disk archive, and can restore individual files from the archive. It includes multivolume support, the ability to archive sparse files, automatic archive compression/decompression, remote archives and special features that allow `tar’ to be used for incremental and full backups. It also includes `rmt’, the remote tape server (the `mt’ tape drive control program is in GNU `cpio’).

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License: GNU General Public License v3

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Changes:
This release adds new options: –lzop, –no-auto-compress, and –no-null. It has compressed format recognition and VCS support (–exclude-vcs). It fixes the –null option and fixes record size autodetection.

ZenMagick is an alternative frontend for Zen
Cart-based e-commerce applications. It provides
database access to virtually all data relevant to
templates (and more) via an object-oriented API.
It also includes an alternative theme system that
offers superior separation of application code and
custom HTML. A flexible plugin architecture allows
you to easily extend and add functionality without
the need to modify existing code.

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License: GNU General Public License v2

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Changes:
Plugin improvements were made. Minor bugs were
fixed. New caching implementations (xcache,
memcached) were added. Database access was
improved for price lookups. New plugins include
form_handler, a general purpose form handler with
email notification, and theme_switch, which allows
users to switch themes.

As part of its initiative to improve the usability of the Linux desktop , Canonical has made a proposal for a desktop notification system for both GNOME and KDE.

Today, December 26, is the first day of LinuXmas, the Festival of Distros. This three day, three night uber fest of booting new Linux distributions is a new tradition for geeky boys and girls around the world. Here’s how it works

One of the biggest misconceptions in software is that open source equals free. The early commercial open-source vendors like MySQL and JBoss were able to build decent businesses on top of a license/support-only business model, but over time we’ve seen that approach become difficult to grow beyond a certain threshold. I suspect that in 2009 it will start becoming clearer as to what you pay for and why you should. Redmonk analyst Michael Cote made the prediction that next year “it will be cool to pay for software” and I agree. It’s one thing to consume open-source software and quite another to pay for it.

Subsequent to the introduction of the Graphics Execution Manager earlier this year, Intel had introduced a new acceleration architecture. UXA, or the UMA Acceleration Architecture, was developed as a temporary solution based upon the EXA architecture but with support for the kernel-driven GEM memory management. How though does the UXA performance compare to that of EXA? In this article we have ran some benchmarking looking at the Intel graphics performance.