When you want to customize the look and feel of your Linux desktop environment, you can find many resources for altering window managers and interface widgets, but working with icons has always been more of an issue. Now you can get help with icons from a new program called Tango Generator.

"...I’ve also recorded a short chat with Martin Albisetti who is leading the new Bazaar IDE integration team. Martin talks about the technical and advocacy approaches they plan to take. Listen to the interview with Martin." -- (Bzr is now a GNU package and should be used by Emacs team => https://launchpad.net/vc-bzr )

The next major update of FreeBSD 7, due this December, is in the running to be one of the most impressive FreeBSD releases to date. The ULE scheduler has now reached maturity, leading to significant gains across the board (particularly in server workloads). This new scheduler brings notably impressive performance improvements to both MySQL and PostgreSQL.

"He wasn’t on the program, but this morning’s keynote was given by Professor John McCarthy—the inventor of LISP and coiner of the term 'artificial intelligence.' This morning, he’s talking about Elephant 2000, a programming language designed for writing programs that interact with people. One of the things he points out that I find interesting is the idea that the compiler should generate required data structures without the user having to specify them..."

Known in the development world as the father of Java, Sun Microsystems' vice president and fellow James Gosling has urged coders to stop using the antiquated Emacs text editor and move to a more modern IDE like Sun's own open source NetBeans.

"It seems that the Debian team doesn't like to release minor versions anymore. After Debian 4.0 (code name 'Etch') released last year, the next Debian release (code name 'Lenny') will be numbered as Debian 5.0 as announced yesterday by Marc Brockschmidt: 'For reading this far, you receive the small reward of the knowledge that Lenny will be shipped as Debian 5.0.'

"Also interesting enough he mentioned that Lenny might be released with KDE4..."

The Mozilla Foundation's new e-mail spin-off is aiming at a quick delivery of the first alpha version of Thunderbird 3.0, according to discussions among developers.

This article discusses some of the things to consider when planning the partitioning of a Linux system. These considerations include thoughts on how different directories will be used and how the usage of different directories might suggest how to partition your disk space. Also my thoughts on the relationship between backup strategies and partitioning are covered.