Linux Standard Base 3.2 Released

The non-profit organization did not actually intend to tackle multimedia capabilities until version 4.0 of LSB. Due to the significance of multimedia for the desktop, the Linux Foundation now has at least trial use support for the ALSA sound system, and for the Portland project’s xdg-utils. The other changes in LSB 3.2 are more or less on schedule: as agreed at the conference in November, the LSB team has improved printer support in collaboration with the OpenPrinting workgroup. LSB 3.2 now has complete support for the Perl and Python programming languages. This means that Perl and Python applications will run on most Linux platforms in the future, no matter whether they were specially coded for the operating system or for cross-platform deployment.

Another feature of LSB is trial use modules which replace the previous "optional" modules. The LSB team hopes to accelerate certification in future without forcing stakeholders to support module in the test phase. Various Freedesktop.org working group standards have been implemented in menu and icon design. The FreeType and Xrender font libraries are now supported.

LSB provides a common platform for application developers, giving them the ability to cater to multiple distributions of the Linux operating system with a single software package. Several Linux distributions certify their developments with LSB, including Debian, Novell, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Mandriva, and Xandros.

Linux Standard Base 3.2 specifications with test applications and developer tools are available now from the Linux Foundation website.