Ask any independent software vendor what he hates most about developing for Linux and he'll tell you that it's having to develop for SUSE and for Red Hat and for Ubuntu and ... you get the idea. The Linux Foundation has just released a beta of a new program, Linux Application Checker (AppChecker), that's going to make ISVs and other programmers start to love developing for Linux.

"The default indentation levels of GNU Emacs for the case statements of sh(1) scripts (and derivative or compatible shells) are a bit smal for my taste (4 columns). This makes case statements in shell scripts look almost “ok”, but I don’t like the small indentation for the rest of my scripts. Here is how the default indentation would look for a part of my ~/.bashrc file: ..."

To speed up ODF recognition Qt 4.5 will ship with an ODF writer. Qt’s text module turns into a one stop document generation API where you can use QTextCursor to create your document via a nice API and you can then export the created QTextDocument to ODF ready to be opened by any opendocument implementation. Naturally exporting to plain text and html are still supported, as is printing to PDF.

Esther Schindler came home from OSCON with thoughts on growing the size of the pool in open-source development communities. And it's all upbeat news.

The beagleboard is low cost fanless development board with Linux support. And it is low cost, you can get one for $149 from digikey. And it is low power, it uses less than 2 Watts and can run via USB power (although it does have a secondary power input).

Webcams are notorious for their lack of support under Linux. But thanks to GSPCA, many webcams now have functional V4L drivers. This tutorial covers the building, installation, and configuration of the GSPCA drivers, including how to adjust color balance and brightness directly at the kernel module level.

One of the great tech non-events of the last few years involves Linux on PCs. Every so often, another wave of hype washes in about how companies are finally going to ditch their Windows machines in favour of the open-source operating system and productivity apps like Sun’s StarOffice and (more recently) IBM’s Symphony.

OSI softens, Microsoft claims to have built an open-source lab