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This weekend as classes have started to wind down I had a bit of time to mess with my laptop for some general geek fun. Playing with KDE 4 is something I’ve wanted to do the past few months but avoided for fear of breaking things when I had too much going on to spend a full day getting them working again. Encouraged by a brief trial of the Kubuntu KDE4 Remix LiveCD I decided to give it a try.

This tutorial will use the PHP Development Tools (PDT) plug-in in Eclipse Europa to show you how to build Web services in PHP. Also, learn how to create and deploy useful PHP projects, learn about the philosophy behind contract-first development, and understand the basic parts that make up a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file.

Ever since Laura Thomson wrote her first program in the fourth grade, coding has been a major part of her life. Over the years, she has been a lecturer in computer science at RMIT University in Australia, a principal at OmnTI, a consulting company that designs Internet systems, a trainer of other programmers, the co-writer of PHP and MySQL Web Development and MySQL Tutorial, and a frequent speaker at free and open source conferences. She is currently a senior software engineer at the Mozilla Corporation, where her recent work includes the API for the Add-ons Manager on Firefox 3. With this background, Thomson has strong views on coding, its future, and its place in business, especially where free and open source software (FOSS) is concerned, which she shared with Linux.com at the recent Open Web Vancouver conference.

May 13th brings with it a 100% chance of sulphurous rain. But don’t worry, this particular sulphur isn’t a sign of global pollution. Instead, it is Fedora® 9–codenamed “Sulphur”–the latest in a continuing line of innovative releases by the community-powered Fedora Project. Get a copy of your very own right now.

Details of Microsoft’s recently announced plan to extend the life of Windows XP for ultra low-cost PCs are trickling out. IDG News got its hands on what it says are Microsoft documents outlining the program for PC manufacturers. Until now, the big question was: What exactly defines an ultra low-cost PC?

Recently, we took action against the Boston Public Library (BPL) demanding that they embargo the use of DRM technology on their collection and create a policy that respects the motto that hangs above their door: "free-to-all." To send a message to all libraries that they too should respect their patrons' freedom, we urge you to sign our open letter. To take action against your local library, we urge you to customize a letter from our template. Please, let us know if you have contacted or written your local library, and please let your friends and fellow patrons know about the open letter. In solidarity, Josh, John, Matt, Peter, and the DRM Elimination Crew.

Developed at Google, MapReduce is a distributed programming model intended for processing massive amounts of data in large cluster. The MapReduce framework has the open source Mule Integration Platform at its core. In this article Eugene Ciurana, Director of Systems Infrastructure at LeapFrog Enterprises, outlines how open source components, particularly Mule, can be utilized with MapReduce. Eugene also shows that writing SOA apps for the Mule integration platform can result as a side-effect of the implementation. This is arguably the most comprehensive article on "how to use Mule for building a system" ever written.

Mystery surrounds the identity of four winners in Google's $10m Android mobile applications competition, announced last November. The search giant Tuesday named 47 of 50 developers who've won the first round of its challenge to build mobile applications for the yet-to-materialize Android phone. The individuals will each get $25,000.

Mark Shuttleworth, head of Canonical and founder of the Ubuntu project, has called on other Linux developers to synchronize releases of new versions of their distros. He also pledged to deliver the next Long Term Support (LTS) release of Ubuntu, version 10.4, in April 2010 - unless, of course, Red Hat, Novell and Debian decide to co-operate on a synchronized release at a different time.

The Fedora distribution has a reputation for innovation, and the new Fedora 9, released today, is no exception. With features that range from easy filesystem encryption to support for the ext4 format, it includes a wide range of features that are likely to become standard in other distributions in the next six months. But for Paul W. Frields, who became Fedora project leader in February, what distinguishes the release is less the technology than the community that supports it, and how the technology contributes to the larger free software world.

Puppy Linux 4.0 has been unleashed recently. It is a major distribution release version of this well-known mini-distro that is why I took some time to check it out. I have used Puppy Linux 3.01 before, and I have said that it was more than just a cute-named distro. So what are the improvements of this latest edition over its predecessor? Has it really learned new tricks?

Debian has warned of a vulnerability in its cryptographic functions that could leave systems open to attack. The use of a cryptographically flawed pseudo random number generator in Debian's implementation of OpenSSL meant that potentially predictable keys were generated. Versions of Debian's OpenSSL packages starting with 0.9.8c-1 (released in September 2006) are potentially vulnerable.

The Fedora project today released a new version of its completely free and redistributable Linux distribution. Showcasing lots of next-generation Red Hat features, Fedora 9 also boasts new features of its own aimed at making the distribution appeal more to newer Linux users.

Linux Game Publishing has announced a Linux port of "Sacred Gold," an action role-playing game first published for Windows three years ago. The U.K.-based game publisher plans to ship the title in August of this year, priced at 27 GBP (~ $50). Sacred Gold was created by Ascaron Entertainment, of Gutersloth, Germany. It will be the first action role-playing game carried by LGP, the company said.

A British watchdog agency said Tuesday it had complained to European Union regulators that Microsoft Corp.'s new file format for storing documents discouraged competition. Britain's agency for education and information technology said it wanted to help the EU with an investigation it launched in January into whether the software giant deliberately withheld information from rivals. The current controversy centers on the ability of other companies to create products compatible with Microsoft's new file format, Office Open XML, which stores Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.

The GNOME SlackBuild GNOME 2.22.1 Desktop is now available for users of the latest Slackware 12.1 release! There have been a lot of improvements in this latest GSB release, including the move to PulseAudio, fewer package replacements, a GNOME-integrated Compiz-Fusion setup, the latest NetworkManager, Abiword 2.6, and OpenOffice2.4 built for GNOME, a richer Mono C# suite, as well as all the great features of GNOME 2.22.

"About 45% architecture updates (counting the include files too), about 30% drivers, and about 25% odds-and-ends. The odds-and-ends are mainly Documentation, filesystems (mostly cifs) and core kernel (scheduler updates etc)," said Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc2 kernel. He added, "if you read the shortlog and get the feeling that most of it is pretty boring small details, you'd be right. There is little exciting there."

Linspire, the San Diego, Calif.-based Linux distributor, is continuing to build up its CNR (Click-N-Run) software installation system with partnerships with Ubuntu parent Canonical and the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint distribution. Linspire recently announced that its beta CNR service now supports the Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron release and Linux Mint versions 4.0 and 5.

Wirth's Law states software becomes larger, more complex, and slower: in the end the win from Moore's Law end is washed out by the loss from Wirth's Law. Let's compare OpenOffice.org against these Laws to see which one wins.

The latest release of Red Hat's community Linux distribution, Fedora 9, a.k.a. 'Sulfur', is out. The Sulfur release adds a host of new features, including virtualization, authentication, networking, file system and yes, even features that will benefit desktop users. "All of those things really put the lie to any claims that Red Hat is abandoning the desktop," Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields said.