X.Org 7.5 with X Server 1.7 will be arriving months late once it's released after failing to meet the original April release schedule and then failed twice with two more proposed releases during the summer. However, the latest release schedule, which puts the final release in late September or so, might actually work out this time -- in good part thanks to Peter Hutterer.

At the end of last week, Linus Torvalds released the fifth pre-release version of Linux version 2.6.33, with the final release expected in 4 to 5 weeks time. At this stage in the development cycle, it is usually predominantly more minor changes and fixes which find their way into the main development tree.

"I just watched Mark Shuttleworth’s Keynote on aKademy. The discussion afterwards was mainly dominated by his suggestion to switch KDE’s development cycle to a 6 month release cycle. Here is a closer look at what Mark said - and what KDE did in the past."

The major Firebird version currently in development is v.2.5. Its feature set is being finalized at the moment in preparation for entering the Beta stage of development. The start of the Beta cycle will be accompanied by a "feature freeze" rule.

While development efforts within the X.Org community are now ramping up for the release of X Server 1.9 that should arrive in August, there is an ongoing discussion concerning a planned long-term change for the X Server: pulling the drivers back in.

The GIMP image editor is preparing for the start of a new development cycle, and you can have your say in the way the next version looks by submitting a mock-up to the GIMP UI Brainstorm blog. User interface designer Peter Sikking spoke with us about the project and how it fits into the larger work of creating the GIMP's UI.

In May we shared that Multi-Pointer X (or MPX for short) was entering the mainline X server. While it was merged to master that month, X Server 1.5 was already branched out and therefore it won't appear in X.Org 7.4, but it will appear in X Server 1.6 (X.Org 7.5) until next year. While it's now in the mainline branch, Peter Hutterer, the chief developer of MPX, hasn't stopped there.

The Groovy-Eclipse developers have delivered version 2.0 of the plugin for developers who want to work with Groovy and Java in the Eclipse IDE. The new version is the culmination of work which began in May 2009 to create a more integrated, incremental compilation process. This has resulted in what the developers call an "almost completely rewritten" plugin.

The poor experience of many users upgrading to Jaunty has prompted calls for a less ambitious Ubuntu release cycle (for examples, see the comments on my recent post about video-driver problems).  Instead of pushing out an updated version of Ubuntu with a new feature set every six months, some have argued, developers should issue new releases less frequently, or recommend that only LTS versions be