A page for randomness

Geeks and regular people everywhere are complaining about Vista, and even Microsoft admitted its flaws, just watch the Mojave ads.

There’s a great office suite and Ubuntu Studio, a version created especially for audio, video and graphic enthusiasts. The interface is easy to use, media capabilities and even gaming are now mainstream on Ubuntu.

Read more: Why isn’t Ubuntu the number 1 operating system? :: The Tux Geek

A lot of things have changed since 2003, and the Gecko code base has come a long way. Gecko is still very complex, but many of its historical weaknesses have been addressed by Mozilla’s engineering efforts. Gecko received a massive overhaul for Firefox 3, with countless changes that significantly improved the entire browsing experience.

Gecko 1.9 uses the cross-platform Cairo rendering framework. This greatly improved SVG support simplified many aspects of the code base and facilitated some cool features, like support for full-page zooming. The overhaul also included significant refactoring of the reflow algorithm, making it possible for Gecko to pass the Acid 2 test. Mozilla also aggressively reduced memory consumption, coming out ahead of both Safari and Opera.

Read more: Why Mozilla is committed to Gecko as WebKit popularity grows

Let’s face it, the default theme on current Ubuntu releases is more aimed at the (boring) business folks: no transparency, no effects, no shiny icons and cool wallpapers.

That’s why I’m going to walk you through some easy steps to customize your Ubuntu Gnome - for better usability and better looks (to impress your windows buddies?).

Find out how: Pimp your Ubuntu desktop in 7 easy steps! :: The Tux Geek

Ubuntu overlord Mark Shuttleworth announced today that the codename for Ubuntu 9.04, which is expected to arrive in April, will be Jaunty Jackalope. Ubuntu releases are issued every six months and include the latest versions of popular open source software applications. Shuttleworth believes that Ubuntu is ready to compete with Windows and Mac OS X and he expects to see the open source Linux distribution ship on millions of devices in the coming year.

Read more: Ubuntu 9.04 to be called Jaunty Jackalope

As a follow-up to Michael Stutz’s excellent article, this article provides 10 more good habits to adopt that will improve your UNIX® command-line efficiency. Learn about common errors and how to overcome them, and discover exactly why these 10 UNIX habits are worth picking up!

Let’s face it: Bad habits are hard to break. But habits that you’ve just become comfortable with can be even more difficult to overcome. Sometimes, a fresh look at things may provide you with an “A-ha, I didn’t know you could do that!” moment. Building on Michael Stutz’s excellent article, “Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits,” this article suggests 10 more UNIX command-line commands, tools, and techniques that may make you more productive as a UNIX command-line wizard.

The 10 additional good habits you should adopt are:

• Use file name completion.
• Use history expansion.
• Reuse previous arguments.
• Manage directory navigation with pushd and popd.
• Find large files.
• Create temporary files without an editor.
• Use the curl command-line utility.
• Make the most of regular expressions.
• Determine the current user.
• Process data with awk.

Check it out here: UNIX tips: Learn 10 more good UNIX usage habits.

Dynamically linked shared libraries are an important aspect of GNU/Linux®. They allow executables to dynamically access external functionality at run time and thereby reduce their overall memory footprint (by bringing functionality in when it’s needed). This article investigates the process of creating and using dynamic libraries, provides details on the various tools for exploring them, and explores how these libraries work under the hood.

Libraries were designed to package similar functionality in a single unit. These units could then be shared with other developers and permitted what came to be called modular programming—that is, building programs from modules. Linux supports two types of libraries, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. The static library contains functionality that is bound to a program statically at compile time. This differs from dynamic libraries, which are loaded when an application is loaded and binding occurs at run time.

Read more: Anatomy of Linux dynamic libraries

Rowe’s not just being a Linux booster. It’s the Gospel truth. The animation and FX for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull; Star Wars: The Clone Wars; WALL-E; 300; The Golden Compass; Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; and I Am Legend, to name but a few recent movies, were all created using Pixar’s RenderMan and Autodesk Maya running on Linux clusters.

The really short version for why this is so comes down to Linux clustering enables you to put massive computational firepower into rendering 2D and 3D images. It’s ironic. While getting the most out of NVIDIA and ATI graphic cards on a Linux desktop is still a pain and there’s always some trouble dealing with proprietary video formats on Linux, the top animated and FX-heavy videos usually have their start on Linux systems.

Read more: If it’s animation or special effects, it’s Linux | Computerworld Blogs.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Canonical has become a member of the Foundation.

Canonical is the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, a popular version of the Linux operating system, and supports a wide range of other open source projects including Bazaar, Storm and Upstart. Ubuntu has become a popular choice for the server and desktop as well as for the rapidly emerging areas of netbooks and mobile Internet devices.
Matt Zimmerman is the CTO of the Ubuntu project in Canonical, chairs the Ubuntu Technical Board and leads all engineering efforts for the distribution.

“The Linux Foundation occupies a critical, non-commercial function in the use and popularization of Linux around the world. We’ve always seen the Linux Foundation’s value and are pleased to now become an official member and support its activities. We look forward to working with them to continue the march of Linux in all areas of computing,” said Matt Zimmerman, Ubuntu program manager and CTO, Canonical.

Read more: Canonical Joins The Linux Foundation

Users of Compiz, a window manager that provides pretty visual effects, know that a lot of those effects are just for fun. Things like drawing fire on the screen or folding up windows like a paper airplane to close them look cool but have little real value. I think a lot of those features (plugins) were written more to show off what Compiz can do than to provide useful functionality. I don’t doubt that lots of users are still using them though. Linux users cherish the ability to customize settings to the nth degree.

Personally, I am most concerned with the Compiz plugins that add functionality to my desktop. There are plenty of those too. I am going to outline some of my favorites and most useful. First though, I want to point out that if you have Compiz installed, you will want to also have the CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm) installed too.

Read more: My favorite useful Compiz features - Adventures in Switching to Linux

In 2003, Intel announced that it was working on a technology called “Vanderpool” that was aimed at providing hardware-level support for something called “virtualization.” With that announcement, the decades-old concept of virtualization had officially arrived on the technology press radar. In spite of its long history in computing, however, as a new buzzword, “virtualization” at first smelled ominously similar to terms like “trusted computing” and “convergence.” In other words, many folks had a vague notion of what virtualization was, and from what they could tell it sounded like a decent enough idea, but you got the impression that nobody outside of a few vendors and CIO types was really too excited.

Fast-forward to 2008, and virtualization has gone from a solution in search of a problem, to an explosive market with an array of real implementations on offer, to a word that’s often mentioned in the same sentence with terms like “shakeout” and “consolidation.” But whatever the state of “virtualization” as a buzzword, virtualization as a technology is definitely here to stay.

Virtualization implementations are so widespread that some are even popular in the consumer market, and some (the really popular ones) even involve gaming. Anyone who uses an emulator like MAME uses virtualization, as does anyone who uses either the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3. From the server closet to the living room, virtualization is subtly, but radically, changing the relationship between software applications and hardware.

In the present article I’ll take a close look at virtualization—what it is, what it does, and how it does what it does.

Read more: Ars Technica Guide to Virtualization: Part I

Microsoft’s Sam Ramji is like a turkey knocking on Thanksgiving’s door. Ramji has the unenviable task of stretching his neck out into the open source world as Microsoft’s representative. And on top of it, his employer has preheated the oven with years of hubris, sleights of hand and broken promises.

Ramji’s Sisyphean task was evident last week in Portland at the Open Source Conference (OSCon) and will likely be fuel for chatter at next week’s LinuxWorld gathering in San Francisco. (Disclosure: Network World’s parent company IDG sponsors LinuxWorld.)

In Portland, Ramji, who runs the Open Source Software Lab for Microsoft and is the company’s director of open source technology strategy, gave a 15-minute presentation highlighting Microsoft’s work with open source, the company’s first code submission ever to the PHP community and a $100,000 investment to become one of only three Platinum sponsors of the Apache Foundation (Yahoo and Google are the others).

Then it turned ugly.

Read more: Microsoft’s open source guru faces slings and arrows - Network World

You need to run a job at midnight when system usage is low, or you need to run jobs daily or weekly, but you would rather be sleeping, or enjoying life in some other way. Other good reasons for scheduling jobs include letting routine tasks happen automatically, or ensuring tasks are handled the same way every time. This tip helps you use the cron and at capabilities to schedule jobs periodically or at a single future time.

Linux® and UNIX® systems allow you to schedule jobs in the future, either just once, or on a recurring schedule. This article, excerpted from the developerWorks tutorial LPI exam 102 prep: Administrative tasks, shows you how to schedule jobs periodically, and how to run a job at some future time.

Many administrative tasks must be done frequently and regularly on a Linux system. These include rotating log files so filesystems do not become full, backing up data, and connecting to a time server to keep your system time synchronized. See the full tutorial mentioned above for more about these administrative tasks. In this tip, you learn about the scheduling facilities available in Linux using the cron and anacron facilities and the crontab and at commands. Even if your system sleeps or is turned off, anacron can help it catch up the next time it is awake.

Read more: Linux tip: Job scheduling with cron and at

In the context of digital security, a key is a piece of data which is used to encrypt or decrypt other pieces of data. The public and private key scheme is interesting because data encrypted with a public key can only be decrypted with the associated private key. You may freely distribute a public key so that others can encrypt the messages they send you. One of the reasons that public/private key schemes have revolutionized digital security is because the sender and receiver don’t have to share a common password. Among other things, public/private key cryptography has made e-commerce and other secure transactions possible. In this article, we’ll create and use public and private keys to create a highly secure distributed backup solution.

Each machine involved in the backup process must be running the OpenSSH secure shell service (sshd) with port 22 accessible through any intermediate firewall. If you access remote servers, then there is a good chance you’re already using secure shell.

Our goal will be to provide machines with secure access without requiring the need to manually provide passwords. Some people think that the easiest way to do this is to set up password-less access: do not do this. It is not secure. Instead, the approach we’ll use in this article will take perhaps an hour of your time, set up a system which gives all the convenience of “passphraseless” accounts — but is recognized as being highly secure.

Read more: Automate backups on Linux

If you’re running linux on a macbook and you have fuzzy or static like sound especially out of the left channel, whether on speakers or headphones, then this tip from the Ubuntu forums will most likely help. The following was done on my Ubuntu machine, but mostly can be applied with little effort on another distribution like Fedora:

$ sudo emacs /etc/modprobe.d/options

Add the following line to the end of the file:

options snd-hda-intel model=[MODEL_BELOW] position_fix=2 probe_mask=1

Where [MODEL_BELOW] is one of the following:

intel-mac-v1   : Intel Mac Type 1
intel-mac-v2   : Intel Mac Type 2
intel-mac-v3   : Intel Mac Type 3
intel-mac-v4   : Intel Mac Type 4
intel-mac-v5   : Intel Mac Type 5
macmini        : Intel Mac Mini (equivalent with type 3)
macbook        : Intel Mac Book (eq. type 5)
macbook-pro-v1 : Intel Mac Book Pro 1st generation (eq. type 3)
macbook-pro    : Intel Mac Book Pro 2nd generation (eq. type 3)
imac-intel     : Intel iMac (eq. type 2)
imac-intel-20  : Intel iMac (newer version) (eq. type 3)

You’ll also need to update your initramfs:

$ sudo update-initramfs -u

Reboot and see if the sound works. Typically the sound will stop working altogether or work perfectly. If it doesn’t work, try changing the model. I have a 2nd or 3rd generation macbook (I can’t remember which), but I needed to use the model=intel-mac-v3 for it to work. Check out the help article for more information.

Google’s open source’s “Protocol Buffers”. Here’s some examples:

You write a .proto file like this:

message Person {
  required int32 id = 1;
  required string name = 2;
  optional string email = 3;
}

Then you compile it with protoc, the protocol buffer compiler, to produce code in C++, Java, or Python.

Then, if you are using C++, you use that code like this:

Person person;
person.set_id(123);
person.set_name("Bob");
person.set_email("bob@example.com");

fstream out("person.pb", ios::out | ios::binary | ios::trunc);
person.SerializeToOstream(&out);
out.close();

Or like this:

Person person;
fstream in("person.pb", ios::in | ios::binary);
if (!person.ParseFromIstream(&in)) {
  cerr << "Failed to parse person.pb." << endl;
  exit(1);
}

cout << "ID: " << person.id() << endl;
cout << "name: " << person.name() << endl;
if (person.has_email()) {
  cout << "e-mail: " << person.email() << endl;
}

Read more about them: Google Open Source Blog: Protocol Buffers: Google’s Data Interchange Format

“The makefile keeps recompiling itself…when it finishes, it just recompiles itself again.”

John Harry Nancy

Cross-platform media player VLC is often referred to as the “Swiss Army knife of media applications” for good reason: Not only does VLC play nearly any file you throw at it (you even voted it the best desktop media player), but it can do so much more. From ripping DVDs to converting files to iPod-friendly formats, let’s take a look at the four coolest things you can do with VLC and start you on your way to becoming a VLC ninja.

Read more: Vlc: Master Your Digital Media with VLC

According to the research firm, the data is collected from a base of “approximately 160 million visitors per month.” The survey lists Apple’s Mac OS X operating system market share in June with a record 7.94%, which is a 0.11 point increase over the previous month. This figure makes OS X the best-selling UNIX variant ever with the largest overall share of the market. Linux currently stands at 0.80% market share in this survey, a slight improvement over the 0.68% recorded last month. Windows machines still dominate the market and came in at 90.89%, down from 91.13 percent in the month ago. Although the lead of Windows remains unquestioned, its share has been dropping slowly but steadily over the past two years.

Source: TG Daily - Study claims Windows usage market share could fall below 90% soon

Tomorrow, Firefox 3.0 will be released, and everyone is encouraged to download it to help break a download record for one day. So tomorrow, don’t forget to download the new Firefox!

GetFirefox.com

echo -n “username: ”
read username
echo -n “Password: ”
stty -echo
read password
stty echo

source: Mind Download: prompt for password w/o echoing chars in bash

The following is a true story.

Last week I walked into a local “home style cookin’ restaurant/watering hole” to pick up a take out order. I spoke briefly to the waitress behind the counter, who told me my order would be done in a few minutes.

So, while I was busy gazing at the farm implements hanging on the walls, I was approached by two, uh, um… well, let’s call them “natives.” These guys might just be the original Texas rednecks–complete with ten-gallon hats, snakeskin boots and the pervasive odor of cheap beer and whiskey.

“Pardon us, ma’am. Mind of we ask you a question?”

Well, people keep telling me that Texans are real friendly, so I nodded.

“Are you a Satanist?”

Well, at least they didn’t ask me if I liked to party.

“Uh, no, I can’t say that I am.”

“Gee ma’am. Are you sure about that?” they asked.

I put on my biggest, brightest Dallas Cowboys cheerleader smile and said, “No, I’m positive. The closest I’ve ever come to Satanism is watching Geraldo.”

“Hmm. Interesting. See, we was just wondering why it is you have the lord of darkness on your chest there.”

I was this close to slapping one of them and causing a scene–then I stopped and noticed the T-shirt I happened to be wearing that day. Sure enough, it had a picture of a small, devilish looking creature that has for quite some time now been associated with a certain operating system. In this particular representation, the creature was wearing sneakers.

They continued: “See, ma’am, we don’t exactly appreciate it when people show off pictures of the devil. Especially when he’s lookin’ so friendly.”

These idiots sounded terrifyingly serious.

Me: “Oh, well, see, this isn’t really the devil, it’s just, well, it’s sort of a mascot.”

Native: “And what kind of football team has the devil as a mascot?”

Me: “Oh, it’s not a team. It’s an operating– uh, a kind of computer.”

I figured that an ATM machine was about as much technology as these guys could handle, and I knew that if I so much as uttered the word “unix” I would only make things worse.

Native: “Where does this satanical computer come from?”

Me: “California. And there’s nothing satanical about it really.”

Somewhere along the line here, the waitress has noticed my predicament–but these guys probably outweighed her by 600 pounds, so all she did was look at me sympathetically and run off into the kitchen.

Native: “Ma’am, I think you’re lying. And we’d appreciate it if you’d leave the premises now.”

Fortunately, the waitress returned that very instant with my order, and they agreed that it would be okay for me to actually pay for my food before I left. While I was at the cash register, they amused themselves by talking to each other.

Native #1: “Do you think the police know about these devil computers?”

Native #2: “If they come from California, then the FBI oughta know about ‘em.”

They escorted me to the door. I tried one last time: “You’re really blowing this all out of proportion. A lot of people use this `kind of computers.’ Universities, researchers, businesses. They’re actually very useful.”

Big, big, BIG mistake. I should have guessed at what came next.

Native: “Does the government use these devil computers?”

Me: “Yes.”

Another BIG boo-boo.

Native: “And does the government pay for ‘em? With our tax dollars?”

I decided that it was time to jump ship.

Me: “No. Nope. Not at all. You’re tax dollars never entered the picture at all. I promise. No sir, not a penny. Our good Christian congressmen would never let something like that happen. Nope. Never. Bye.”

Texas. What a country.

Source: Godless devil-worshiping evil computers [rec.humor.funny]

Although Nautilus—the GNOME file manager—includes many useful features and offers an excellent implementation of the spatial paradigm, its browser mode is less impressive and is missing some must-have functionality. The Nautilus developers are about to deliver a big improvement, however, with the addition of full support for tabbed browsing.

A tabbed user interface is among the most frequently requested features for Nautilus. The original request in the GNOME bug tracker was opened in 2001 and has 10 duplicates. Despite significant demand, the developers long resisted implementing the feature because it required significant changes to the file manager’s underlying architecture. Some GNOME users have switched to the lightweight PCMan file manager just for the tab support.

Read more: GNOME file manager gets tabbed file browsing

In my last post, sendmail was one of the services on my box that was starting when I enter runlevel 2. Maybe I don’t want sendmail to start, or rather, if it is already started, when I enter runlevel 2, I want to kill it. In other words, I don’t want it running for runlevel 2. How can I make this change?

Well, first, I could just delete the soft link from the runlevel directory /etc/rc2.d/:

aaron@kratos:~ 1355 % sudo rm /etc/rc2.d/S21sendmail
Password:

That would definitely keep it from starting when I enter runlevel 2, but what if I wanted to kill it if it was already started from a previous runlevel? Just deleting the soft link won’t do it. I need to turn it into a K-script. Further, deleting and creating soft links in my /etc/rc[0-6].d/ directories by hand is a bit of a pain. This is where the update-rc.d command comes in:

aaron@kratos:~ 1356 % sudo update-rc.d -f sendmail remove
Password:
Removing any system startup links for /etc/init.d/sendmail …
/etc/rc0.d/K19sendmail
/etc/rc1.d/K19sendmail
/etc/rc2.d/S21sendmail
/etc/rc3.d/S21sendmail
/etc/rc4.d/S21sendmail
/etc/rc5.d/S21sendmail
/etc/rc6.d/K19sendmail
aaron@kratos:~ 1357 % sudo update-rc.d sendmail stop 20 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 .
Adding system startup for /etc/init.d/sendmail …
/etc/rc0.d/K20sendmail -> ../init.d/sendmail
/etc/rc1.d/K20sendmail -> ../init.d/sendmail
/etc/rc2.d/K20sendmail -> ../init.d/sendmail
/etc/rc3.d/K20sendmail -> ../init.d/sendmail
/etc/rc4.d/K20sendmail -> ../init.d/sendmail
/etc/rc5.d/K20sendmail -> ../init.d/sendmail
/etc/rc6.d/K20sendmail -> ../init.d/sendmail

We’ll get into the syntax a bit later, but these commands, as observed, removed any existing soft links that previously existed, and created new K-scripts for all of my runlevels.

First off, why two separate commands? Well, by Debian policy, no package upgrade will ever overwrite a previous configuration. This includes updating soft links in the runlevel directories. This also ensures persistent changes and allows the system administrator to prevent daemons from launching. So, if soft links already exist, they first need to be removed, then new links created.

Source: Aaron Toponce : Managing Services in Ubuntu, Part II: Managing Runlevels

Let me play devil’s advocate here. Mark Shuttleworth’s recent pledge to join a synchronised release plan for Enterprise Linux distributions is no more than a wish to benefit from a lot of work that Novell and Red Hat are already doing in the Enterprise space.

Let me explain.

Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux offering is a very important proposition to businesses, not only because Red Hat guarantees and has proven to support each RHEL version for 7 years after general availability, but mostly because each version is updated with new hardware support every 6 months.

Why is that important ?

When a version comes out all components that comprise a distribution have been frozen half a year before and have been tested very hard. But hardware does not freeze and companies buy new hardware constantly. Red Hat needs to provide support for newer selected hardware from vendors to make its solution acceptable to customers. This work is not taken lightly. Red Hat has to backport fixes and backport kernel infrastructure, update drivers, perform regression tests and provide QA together with hardware vendors.

Every 6 months a new update release is being made to ensure that newer hardware is ready to be deployed with a recent RHEL version. Red Hat guarantees that new boot media is available with newer hardware support for another 3 years. That means 2 RHEL releases at every point in time are being maintained to support new hardware.

Read more: Ubuntu’s need to catch a wave | Field Commander Wieers

Fedora Project

What’s new in Fedora 9? Read the release notes. >>

Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that showcases the latest in free and open source software. Fedora is always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute. It is built by people across the globe who work together as a community: the Fedora Project. The Fedora Project is open and anyone is welcome to join.

The Fedora Project is out front for you, leading the advancement of free, open software and content.

Learn more. >>

A weakness has been discovered in the random number generator used by OpenSSL on Debian and Ubuntu systems. As a result of this weakness, certain encryption keys are much more common than they should be, such that an attacker could guess the key through a brute-force attack given minimal knowledge of the system. This particularly affects the use of encryption keys in OpenSSH, OpenVPN and SSL certificates. This vulnerability only affects operating systems which (like Ubuntu) are based on Debian. However, other systems can be indirectly affected if weak keys are imported into them. We consider this an extremely serious vulnerability, and urge all users to act immediately to secure their systems. (CVE-2008-0166)

This advisory also applies to the corresponding versions of Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and Xubuntu.

== Who is affected ==

Systems which are running any of the following releases:

* Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty)

* Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy)

* Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy)

* Ubuntu “Intrepid Ibex” (development): libssl <= 0.9.8g-8

* Debian 4.0 (etch) (see corresponding Debian security advisory) and have openssh-server installed or have been used to create an OpenSSH key or X.509 (SSL) certificate.

All OpenSSH and X.509 keys generated on such systems must be considered untrustworthy, regardless of the system on which they are used, even after the update has been applied. This includes the automatically generated host keys used by OpenSSH, which are the basis for its server spoofing and man-in-the-middle protection.

Source: [USN-612-1] OpenSSL vulnerability

Wine 1.0-rc1 was released today, with the following main changes:

Bug fixes only, we are in code freeze.

Binary packages are in the process of being built and it may take a few days for them to appear, but the source is available now. You can find out more about this release in the announcement. Check out our download page for packages for your distribution.

Get it: Wine HQ

Ext4 is the latest in a long line of Linux® file systems, and it’s likely to be as important and popular as its predecessors. As a Linux system administrator, you should be aware of the advantages, disadvantages, and basic steps for migrating to ext4. This article explains when to adopt ext4, how to adapt traditional file system maintenance tool usage to ext4, and how to get the most out of the file system.

Ext4 features

Linux supports several different file systems. Some are specialized network file systems or file systems developed for other operating systems, but a surprising number may be used as Linux native file systems—you can place your Linux root (/) and system directories on such file systems. Currently, file systems in this category include ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, and Journaled File System (JFS). However, file system design and development are ongoing, and new file systems are on the horizon.

Perhaps the most important file system currently under development for Linux is ext4—the fourth incarnation of the original extended file system (ext or extfs) developed exclusively for Linux. Given its heritage, it seems likely that ext4 will become an important standard file system (perhaps the standard file system) for Linux in the not-too-distant future.

Read more: Preparing for the newest Linux file system

Trolltech has announced the official release of Qt 4.4, a much-anticipated update to their popular, cross-platform software development framework. Qt is distributed under a dual-licensing model that enables open-source as well as proprietary commercial development, and it is widely used on the Linux platform, where it provides the underlying widget toolkit used by the KDE desktop environment. It is also used in a variety of commercial applications such as Skype, Google Earth, and Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Some of the most significant features added in Qt 4.4 include a multimedia abstraction layer, an HTML rendering widget based on WebKit, a new concurrency framework, and support for rendering widgets on the toolkit’s drawing canvas. This is also the first Qt release to include support for Windows CE and Windows Mobile.

Read more: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/other/troll-treasure-qt44-in-depth.ars