Doug McIlroy once said, "write programs that do one thing and do it well," but even Linux developers aren't immune to the desire to add more features over time.

We counted the number of options described in the man pages of 16 common commands, and compared them across three Unix/Linux distributions. Read on to see just how some of the core Unix commands have, er, "blossomed" over the years...

The first column below shows the results from the manual for sixth edition Unix, circa 1975. The second column is from the User's Reference Manual for System V Release 4, dated 1990, and third column is from the man pages for Ubuntu 9.04, in 2009. In some cases we had to exercise some judgement about what counted as a separate option, so there's a little give and take on the numbers, but we think the general trend is clear...

Via TuxRadar

Free software is often developed with the mantra 'release early, release often'. This is a great idea, because new tools can be tested, trialled and critiqued as they're developed, rather than waiting for some arbitrary point of readiness.

Which brings us to KOffice 2.0, the latest productivity package designed specifically for KDE. Like the completely rewritten KDE 4 release, KOffice 2.0 has been let loose in a state that isn't quite ready for production use. Read on for our views of the new release from the KOffice camp...

The package consists of word processor (KWord), project manager (KPlato), spreadsheet app (KSpread) and presentation tool (KPresenter), plus two drawing editors (Karbon 14 and Krita). If you're missing Kexi or the formula editor, these are destined to return in version 2.1, but the Kivio flowchart package is currently without a maintainer, so it may not be updated to run on KDE 4.

The main release should, if things go as planned, be the first in a family of KOffice releases, with specific packages aimed at the education market, kids and other sectors. This is all possible, the developers say, because of the new modular nature of the suite's core.

Changing ways

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After a short break in the sun, we're happy to return to the land of Linux and see that Firefox 3.5 has now gone into its second release candidate.

Codenamed Shiretoko, it now has many more new features compared to the 3.0.x releases, including: support for HTML 5, adding <audio> and <video> tags so you can now watch embedded Ogg Vorbis and Theora content, and a new, faster JavaScript engine called Tracemonkey, featuring faster code execution.

• The new W3C Geolocation API which allows your code to be "location aware".
• A private browsing mode, dubbed by some as "porn mode" which does not save your browsing history or anything that could trace your activities when in use.
• Downloadable fonts!
• Over 70 languages supported
• Improvements to the layout engine, Gecko, which now allows "parsing for faster content rendering".
• HTML5 local storage, application storage, CSS media queries, and other new web technologies

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It's a wee bit later than originally planned, but finally we have a shiny new version of Fedora to play with. Codenamed Leonidas, Fedora 11 brings together a bunch of tweaks and enhancements, described in boring business-like language in the official announcement and with a fantastic, surreal slant in the Fedora mailing list post.

Grab a full-on DVD installer ISO or a smaller CD Live version from this page, and see after the break for a summary of the changes.

• Boot time cut down
• ext4 is the default file system
• Ctrl+Alt+Backspace disabled in X
• 'bluez-gnome' Bluetooth management tool replaced by 'gnome-bluetooth'
• For security reasons, you can't log in as 'root' at the GDM display manager
• 'kpackagekit' is the default package updater in KDE
• TigerVNC is the default VNC software
• 'system-config-printer' uses PolicyKit to control access to restricted CUPS functionality
• Updated volume control applet with better PulseAudio integration
• New Fedora Games Spin edition
• Better integration of fingerprint readers
• 'virt-manager' virtualisation tool has major updates - GUI redesigns and disk usage reporting
  
  Via TuxRadar

Taking a short break from his coding academy, Hudzilla has spent the last few weeks touring Italy and - believe it or not - fiddling around with Python. The first fruits of his effort are now available for world + dog to try, so if you're looking for something new to hack on, continue reading to hear from the man himself...

Everyone knows Pygame is a super-fast way to produce cross-platform games. But its one major flaw is that it's very slow to do simple operations such as scaling, rotating and recoloring. In fact, even making extensive use of transparency can be a bit slow, so I've produced a new graphics toolkit that makes all those things extremely fast, and I've called it Gloss.

Here's what Gloss lets you do:

• Scale, rotate and recolor textures and text in real time
• Create particle systems for explosions and other effects
• Render your scene to a texture for use elsewhere
• Assign callback functions for events such as mouse clicks and key presses

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