For Mac geeks of a certain persuasion, the first mention of a soon-to-be-revealed feature of Leopard during the WWDC keynote set off a mental chain-reaction. That feature was Time Machine, and the name alone was enough to cause one particular phrase to hammer in the mind of many people, including me: "New file system in Leopard!" It was even a bingo square. In fact, it was my personal favorite bingo square, and the one that I most looked forward to marking.

Mandriva Linux 2007 Beta 2 version "Odin" has been released: It comes with GNOME 2.16 beta 2, Kernel 2.6.17 (based on 2.6.17.8, with ALSA 1.0.12 rc2, i965 support, and new kernel factorization: normal, enterprise and legacy). KDE 3.5.4, more applications migrated to XDG menus, new 'Ia Ora' Mandriva Theme (only included in GNOME for now) and a new VPN configuration tool (drakvpn).

Trolltech's Zack Rusin today introduced Glucose on Freedesktop Xorg mailing list. Glucose is a new "OpenGL based acceleration architecture" that "uses XGL code". It does not require any change on the drivers side, except a call to glucoseDriverInit.

"Linspire Inc. claims that the recently released Freespire is the development version of Linspire, much like Fedora Core is the freely available development version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. During the several days that I used it, I found this to be true in both a good and a bad way. It's good in the sense that the software that comprises Freespire is a bit more modern, but bad in that it has a few problems that make it unsuitable for a production release." Read more at TheJemReport.

The new and re-written version of Glade has taken the streets. Glade 3.0 Requires GTK+ 2.8 and libxml2, Glade 3.0 will expose properties, signals and widgets from GTK+ 2.8, but it has deprecated support for custom widgets. Update: Glade 3 is featured on the latest Gnomejournal.

RealNetworks will release open-source software this year that will let Linux computers play Windows Media files legally. The media delivery software company and Novell made the announcement at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Novell said it will include the tool in its Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 in the fourth quarter.

Lenovo debuted its first Linux-based laptops at LinuxWorld in San Francisco on Tuesday, running SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 provided through a partnership with Novell. The systems are the result of a two-year research effort by the two companies as well as Intel, whose Centrino Duo processors power the portable. The Thinkpad T60p is an inch thin and weighs 4.7 pounds. Several features of Lenovo's Windows-based notebooks, including Help Center support, the ThinkPad Configuration Utility, Power Manager and Access Connections have been ported to Linux, the company said.

AMD plans to announce its new 'Rev F' generation of Opteron server processors Tuesday, the next volley in a competition with Intel's newly competitive Xeon models. The Rev F Opterons, all dual-core models, add new virtualisation abilities and faster memory, run at the same 2.6GHz top speed as preceding mainstream models, and plug into AMD's new 'Socket F'. Although that new socket disrupts server designers' easy upgrade path from one Opteron to the next, it also lays the foundation for quad-core chips in 2007 and for server designs through the end of the decade.

Sun Microsystems plans to open-source its implementation of the Java ME specification and is shooting to have that done by the end of this year, Sun executives said Aug. 14. This is the first time Sun has said publicly that Java ME (Java Platform, Micro Edition) is part of its plan for open-sourcing Java.

The LinuxWorld Conference & Expo lurched to a start on Monday at the Moscone Center in San Francisco with half-day tutorials and after-hours parties for the early birds. As per usual, the first day of LinuxWorld consisted of tutorials only, while the exhibitors worked furiously to get their booths set up before the exhibit floor was scheduled to open on Tuesday morning.

Path Finder is a Finder file browser alternative for Mac OS X, which combines the best of Apple's Finder with powerful, integrated utilities and some innovative ways of accessing and manipulating your files. The new version, 4.5, features undo support, superuser mode, labels editor, multiple shelves, file listing reload button and more.

The developers of RISC OS 5 are prepared to open source 'elements' of the operating system, acccording to a report in Archive magazine today. Castle boss Jack Lillingston reportedly told Archive editor Paul Beverley on-the-record that the company is "very seriously considering making RISC OS open source".

A discussion on the Haiku mailing list about the recently announced icon contest has set off a somewhat controversial debate about communication in the project. The Haiku leadership seems to be of the idea that it is not yet a good time to the start PR machine, while the member of the community who initiated the discussion argues that, if done right, communication can be beneficial for the project at any point in time, and that it may actually help find the developers that the project so badly needs. Quite coincidentally, this article related to the topic of marketing open source projects.

Trolltech will ship an "open" Linux-based phone in September. The "Greenphone" features a user-modifiable Linux OS, and is meant to jumpstart a third-party native application ecosystem for Linux-based mobile phones.