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Google’s Linux-based mobile operating system — Android — has become a popular choice for phonemakers worldwide. Now, if Firefox developers are getting what they think they are, we may finally see the combination of Google’s power OS with Mozilla’s groundbreaking browser

Sugar Labs has issued a LiveUSB version of its “Sugar” Linux distribution and educational software, used by One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)’s XO-1. “Sugar on a Stick v1 Strawberry Learning Platform” can be plugged into any netbook or PC, offering 40 activities designed for K-12 students.

According to wordnetweb.princeton.edu, Computer Science is “the branch of engineering science that studies (with the aid of computers) computable processes and structures”. It’s the study of computer architectures, languages, and mathematical structures as applied to the process of computing. So what have Campbell, et al produced in this book…a Computer Science textbook that teaches Python? Kind of. Imagine you wanted to learn how the computer is used in the various scientific disciples. Further, you wanted to learn how computer programs and programming is used in this context to construct tools, perform investigations, and to solve problems. You also want to use a single programming language as your example. Welcome to “Practical Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science Using Python”. Not a book about learning Python as such, but an introduction to the discipline of Computer Science with Python as your guide.

WDVL: “odern programming languages, including Python, have tools which facillitate introspection. In the case of a programming language, introspection is the ability of a program to examine itself, or even the parent interpreter or compiler.”

Geek.com: “No longer are companies willing to pay the price (in money and the intentional depression of technology) by catering to Microsoft and its proprietary architectures and related policies and procedures.”

I write about Vala fairly often because I think it’s a new and interesting part of the Gnome desktop. For those who don’t know about Vala, it’s a C# and Java-inspired language which pre-compiles to C and eventually becomes native binaries. This means that Vala programs don’t need a VM and are suitable for embedded operations, etc. Vala supports the following interfaces

• Properties
• Signals
• Foreach
• Lambda expressions
• Type inference for local variables
• Generics
• Non-null types
• Assisted memory management, and
• Exception handling

Vala 0.7.4 was recently released, and added support for array properties, support for implicit and explicit GValue casts, initial support for generic methods, and Postgres bindings.

There have been a couple of popular IDEs for Vala, namely Valide and MonoDevelop, but Gnome’s default text editor has been left out until now. Sure, it’s had Vala highlighting, but that’s not enough for a lot of people.

Welcome Valencia, a Vala plug-in for GEdit that offers the following features:

• no configuration needed: simply open a .vala file and browse its symbols immediately
• jump to definitions of classes, methods, fields, and variables
• build your project within gedit, with build output in a gedit pane
• double-click any build error to jump to the line where it occurred
• use the Run command to run your program, with output appearing in a gedit pane

The Valencia Wiki gives the following installation instructions.

To build Valencia, you’ll need to have the following programs and libraries installed:

• valac, the Vala compiler. We recommend using a relatively recent version, but you cannot build Valencia with valac 0.7.4 due to a Vala bug.
• gedit
• libgee
• libvte

On Ubuntu (and perhaps Debian), you can install the required build dependiencies like this:

sudo apt-get install valac libvala-dev gedit-dev libgee-dev libvte-dev

You can download the latest source release at valencia-0.1.0.tar.bz2 . Or check out the latest code (possibly unstable) at svn://svn.yorba.org/valencia/trunk. Then run make and make install. (Do not run sudo make install. Valencia installs in your ~/.gnome2/gedit directory, and if you install as root the permissions will be wrong.)
To enable Valencia in gedit, go to Edit->Preferences->Plugins and check the Valencia checkbox.

Adam Dingle, the developer, says

I know that there are a growing number of Vala IDEs and plugins available today. I believe that Valencia’s particular strengths are its ease of use and its symbol browser; Valencia was designed to make it effortless to jump between symbols even in a large Vala program. Feedback, patches or code contributions are welcome!

The New PCLinuxOS Magazine, which comprises volunteers from the PCLinuxOS community is proud to announce the release of it’s July 2009 edition. This edition brought forth several decisions from the new crew to bring it forth to a monthly release and the selection of a new Chief Editor, Paul Arnote aka parnote.

Keith Packard has been the release manager for the X Server 1.6 series and back in early May he issued an X Server 1.6.2 release cadndidate to close a few more X.Org bugs in this critical piece of software. After pulling in another heaping of bug fixes, Keith has now announced X Server 1.6.2 Release Candidate 2, which will go on to become the official 1.6.2 release assuming no bugs or regressions appear.In X Server 1.6.2 are over 36 bug fixes that address a variety of different problems from DRI2 to EDID to fixing up other problems…

KDE e.V. President, Aaron Seiger, is calling for help to rescue freedesktop.org. Seigo warns of the danger of the free open source software platform sliding into insignificance and he’s appealing to community members for help.

LWN.net: “Thus, free applications do not normally implement “features” which allow their users to do less. One might think that the consensus against “antifeatures” in free software is nearly universal, but, as the case of the okular PDF reader in Debian shows, there are still exceptions.”