Though GNU/Linux was successful applied into movie production (e.g. the movie ``Titanic''), it was not designed for the ``ever-regarded niche'' market of media oriented system like the proprietary BeOS addressed to. Un*x left very few nice desktop applications for GNU/Linux as its legacy.
More and more desktop users use their computers for handling the multimedia information over the networks, and there are many efforts notworthy in our community which are trying to improve the network-based multimedia support.
In this issue, we gladly published Mono & GNOME written by Miguel de Icaza, the founder of GNOME Project, and JFS for GNU/Linux contributed by Steve Best, the senior researcher at IBM Linux Technology Center.
Due to the nature of heavily applied OOP and distributive computing in GNOME's architecture, GNOME's effort often causes confused and arguements around it, Miguel in his article tries to explain the relation between Mono and GNOME.
Linux kernel used ext2 file system by default. JFS, IHMO, has better support to multimedia applications over it. Though JFS is not a standard part of Linux kernel yet, it can be running on GNU/Linux now, and Steve Best tells you how to do that.
Scheme and Java have got ``married'' as in Kawa, which compiles the Scheme program into Java bytecodes to run on any JVM, we regard this is a new example of the hybrid computing, and we invited Per Bothner --- the creator of Kawa contributed an article cover JEmacs, i.e. Emacs written in Kawa, in which Emacs Lisp is replaced by Scheme.
With the hybrid computing in Kawa, you could make the prototype in Scheme on the fly, and use the rich Java class lib for the program implementation, the practice's indicated this is an effective way for programming. However, SUN's Swing or Java AWT is still not so fast and ideal, thus there are enough space for you to join and make contribution for it, if you like this interesting programming paradigm.
Happy Reading!
Hong Feng
Editor-in-Chief
FSM