Mad Penguin has published a short review of the Penguicon 4.0 convention and has an interview with Chris DiBona of Google. When asked what percentage of people at Google use Linux, he replied: "Probably way more than half. I don't know the exact ratios though. All the developers use it and most of the engineers and sysadmins."

Gstreamer developer Christian Schaller explains why he thinks Phonon (announced a few days ago by the KDE project) is a broken wheel. "I have held back blogging about Phonon for some time to avoid flamewars, but I don't want to have efforts like OSDL delayed due to setups like Phonon being promoted or thought of as a workable solution for the issues faced. Let me start of with a brief introduction to the area of multimedia frameworks."

Apple has sent in the clones. Well, sort of. "Some nine years after the Apple clones were officially killed off, pirates in South America have resurrected the trade. Apparently, the latest thing is a 'PowerPC G6 Macintosh', an 'Apple G6 Macintosh-Clone Computer' with a 3.8GHz Pentium 4. These come with shedloads of OSx86 compatible hardware, and pre-loaded with something called a 'Mac OSX-86 Apple MacOS X Tiger 10.4.3'." As for real Apple news: there's a solution to a problem whitch will affect virtually all Mighty Mice eventually. The problem, where the MM stops scrolling down, can be solved by opening the mouse and cleaning it . I tested it, and it works (my two MMs had the problem).

Six months ago, architects from two dozen desktop-oriented Linux projects gathered in Portland to work together on creating the best possible Linux desktop. Thus was born the Portland Project. Now, in Mainz, Germany, the expanded group is meeting again on May 8 and 9 to see how far it's come and to look at what's ahead.

Nintendo has turned to Opera as the browser for their upcoming Wii gaming console. "Opera Software today announced that Nintendo's much anticipated new generation game console, Wii, will use the Opera browser. Users of the Wii console will browse the Internet using their consoles. Navigating via the innovative new Wii Remote controller, users can visit Web sites in between gaming sessions."

"IBM's contribution to the launch of the new Open Ajax Initiative aims to increase accessibility to the powerful Web programming technique through the Eclipse Foundation. To help prepare developers for the new tool set, this article introduces two existing runtime tools - Dojo and Zimbra - which will be supported in Eclipse's Ajax Toolkit Framework."

Got $18m to spare? That's the market capitalization of one of Silicon Valley's most glamorous companies this morning, after Silicon Graphics Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The size of SGI's debt - at $664m it's twice the value of its assets - is enough to deter all but the most determined bargain hunter. Apart from a ragbag of trademarks - such as OpenGL - what growth has SGI left to offer?

The successor to the Linux-based GP32 handheld games console will launch in the UK on 18 May, promising to bring gamers a gadget capable not only of playing native games and well-known titles under emulation, but also movies, music, and picture slideshows. The GP2X contains two 240MHz processors, 64MB of RAM, and 64MB of Flash. It sports a 320 x 240 LCD and is powered by a pair of AA batteries - enough, claimed the console's UK distributor, for six hours' gameplay. There's an SD card slot for expansion, and a USB port for PC connectivity.

LinuxHelp reviews Vector Linux, and concludes: "All things considered, if one is on the lookout for a Linux distribution which is robust, fast, secure, able to play multimedia files without any configuration from the user's side, containing the latest versions of the software and good enough to be used in a small business setup then Vector Linux could fit the bill. Additionally if you are looking for a Slackware based distribution which covers all the above criteria, then Vector Linux is definitely the obvious choice."

PC-BSD achieved a milestone recently with the release of their first stable version, 1.0, as reported by OSNews earlier. Two members of the PC-BSD team, founder and developer, Kris Moore, and language co-ordinator and contributor Charles-Andre Landemaine, have been interviewed for this release.

Coverity has released the results of a Homeland Security Department-funded bug hunt that ranged across 40 popular open-source programs. The company found less than one-half of one bug per thousand lines of code on average, and found even fewer defects in the most widely used code, such as the Linux kernel and the Apache Web server.

Kevin Carmony has taken the heat from some in the FOSS community for offering non-free software in Linspire, and in particular, for attempting to lure the FOSS community into contributing to Linspire via Freespire. Don Parris spoke with Linspire's Kevin Carmony to learn more about his position. Are the community's accusations fair? What other options are there?

Micheal Robertson gives a summary of the Desktop Linux Summit: "The 4th Annual Desktop Linux Summit was wrapped up in San Diego last week and it was the biggest yet. This year was host to 800 attendees, 30 exhibitors and sponsors, and three packed speaker tracks with close to 40 sessions. Here's my view from the floor."

"It is my great pleasure and privilege to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE. This release is the next step in the development of the 6.X branch, delivering several performance improvements, many bugfixes, and a few new features. These include: Addition of a keyboard multiplexer. This allows USB and PS/2 keyboards to coexist without any special options at boot. Many fixes for filesystem stability. High load stress tests are now run successfully on a regular basis as part of the normal FreeBSD QA process. Automatic configuration for man Bluetooth devices, as well as automatic support for running WiFi access points. Addition of drivers for new ethernet and SAS and SATA RAID controllers."