The Free Agent is back in shape and working with the latest Ubuntu Linux. Also, Canonical launches the Ubuntu Partnership Programme.

Linspire will release its first enterprise desktop product, "Linspire Professional," by the end of this year, CTO Tom Welch told DesktopLinux.com Tuesday.

San Francisco's plan to blanket the city with wireless Internet access at little or no cost to users might bring a smile to the face of residents who would like to save money. But an array of entrenched telecommunications interests, including Internet service providers and telephone and cable television companies, are far from beaming.

At its heart, Mac OS X is a Unix operating system. This means that plenty of Unix open source software compiles and runs on it. However, compiling software can be tedious, especially if it has many dependencies, or if it hasn't been tested on Mac OS X. You have to perform the usual configure/make/make install process and hope it all works fine. Maybe you have to tamper with the makefile or even the source code. Moreover, you'll need to make sure all libraries used by the software are installed. Here is where Fink comes in.

Quartz is an open source job-scheduling framework written entirely in Java and designed for use in both J2SE and J2EE applications. It offers great flexibility without sacrificing simplicity. You can create simple or complex schedules for executing any job. It includes features such as database support, clustering, plugins, prebuilt jobs for EJB, JavaMail and others, support for cron-like expressions, and many more.

Here's the 5th installment of LinuxJournal's NX series. This time out, learn how to navigate with hands-on exercises that demonstrate all NX can do.

Apple's hugely popular iPod digital music device could be in for another makeover — this time as a highly anti-cipated unit that plays both audio and video. In the meantime, Archos announced yesterday -- available in 30, 60 and 100 GB versions -- the new AV500 which sports a 4-inch colour widescreen display and not only plays back media - it records it as well.

MS PressPass interviewed their own Pieter Knook about the now historic Palm-Microsoft alliance.

Addison-Wesley sent us in the hardcover second edition of the popular book title "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment" and we had a quick look at this classic.

Kristian Rietveld blogs what to expect on GTK 2.10+ e.g. offscreen widgets, faster dialogs and more. Meanwhile, GTK+ stable version 2.8.6 was released with various bug fixes.

A small article introducing the a techniques involved in making C code extensible with the addition of the LUA scripting language.

Sun and Google today announced an agreement to promote and distribute their software technologies to millions of users around the world. The agreement aims to make it easier for users to freely obtain Sun's Java Runtime Environment, the Google Toolbar and the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, helping millions of users worldwide to participate in the next wave of Internet growth. More here.

Motorola plans to enhance the reliability of its emergency services software applications by integrating them on the Microsoft platform, the companies announced Tuesday. However, Motorola in July announced that it would expand its use of Linux beyond high-end products and into midrange items by revising most of its phones to run on Linux.

This week, Microsoft announced that, with the next version of Office, it will support saving files to Adobe's Portable Document Format, or PDF. While logical, the move raises questions about how the PDF support will coexist with Windows Vista's move to its own page description format, known as Metro. Sinofsky also addressed how Microsoft views the controversy surrounding Massachusetts' mandate for the OpenDocument standard.