The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, has announced today an update to the Linux Standard Base, also known as LSB. The update - LSB 3.2 - brings new features for interpreted languages, printing and multimedia, and more, thus enabling developers to easily support Linux.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, stated: "The LSB meets the increasing demands of ISVs that want to build portable applications for Linux. With the inclusion of interpreted languages, printing support, and a variety of other requested features, this release provides the functionality that ISVs need to deliver their sophisticated applications in a portable, cross-distribution format."

The LSB offers interoperability and compatibility between applications and the Linux operating system, which allows software developers to target multiple versions of it with only one software package. Linux distributions like Debian, Mandriva, Red Hat, Ubuntu and Xandros, have already certified to LSB's standards.

The most important features of the new LSB 3.2 include support for interpreted programming languages Perl and Python, enabling developers to ensure that their applications will work on a large majority of Linux systems. The LSB team and the Linux Foundation's OpenPrinting Workgroup have joined forces to add printing interfaces to the Standard Base and support for portable printer drivers. Here are some other features of LSB 3.2:

￭ New "trial use" modules, replacing the former "optional" modules. This will allow the LSB to add new modules more quickly, yet not lock certifiers into supporting modules not yet ready.
￭ Several freedesktop.org standards, including menus and icon themes, making it easier for developers to write applications for the desktop
￭ Promotion of Qt 4 to a required part of the standard, and deprecation of Qt 3
￭ FreeType support, through both FreeType and the Xft X extension
￭ XRender support

The Linux Standard Base 3.2 specification, test suite and developer tools can be found on the Linux Foundation's web site.