OStatic

Today, both Ubuntu and openSUSE are releasing beta versions of their upcoming releases.

Ubuntu's 8.10 is in its first beta version, and openSUSE 11.1 plans on issuing its second beta release shortly.

The openSUSE Project recently announced the availability of openSUSE 11.1 Beta 1 for wide scale testing and bug squashing. This development release is available in x86, x86-64 and PPC architectures as a DVD disk image (liveCDs are not available for the current beta).

The 11.1 beta provides a decently solid look at where the final release is heading. As with any development release, there are known bugs that vary in severity and new or updated features that the development team is encouraging users try out, in order to find and resolve any bugs and suggest changes and improvements.

Red Hat, along with the City University of New York and Intel, announced yesterday that they are creating the New York City Open Source Solutions Lab. This lab, which will be headquartered at CUNY's Institute for Software Design and Development in Manhattan, is aimed at helping local and state government agencies in New York take advantage of open-source solutions. The lab will provide governments with the ability to develop and test a variety of open-source technologies running on Intel chips.

Coverity recently used its code analysis tools on more than 250 open source projects, in order to assess the general code quality of the software applications. The tests indicated that open source software is already of high quality -- but more interestingly, it found that the code had improved over time, with fewer defects detected this time than previously. What does it mean to find that open source software is continually improving?

PHP is not the sexiest language, and many people are quick to point out its deficiencies for Web application development. However, PHP is one of the most popular open-source projects, with a huge following, and many installations. Given that it is a relatively stable project, you might expect the PHP development team to be resting on its laurels. But no; in addition to a regular bug-fix release, the PHP QA team is sponsoring a test fest, in an attempt to improve the language's automated test suite.