Confirming long-standing rumours, Apple has today announced the iTunes-enabled phone together with Motorola in a special press event. The phone will automatically pause when you get a call, explained Jobs. The ROKR can only hold about 100 songs, according to Jobs. "The way we think of this phone is, it's really an iPod shuffle on your phone," he explained. "Both devices can shuffle, both can autofill, neither has a click wheel - but the phone has a display." Meanwhile, Microsoft joins hands with Orange to challenge Apple Motorola iTunes Phone.

Windows Mobile 5 sports many new features and enhancements making it a very worthwhile upgrade. Perhaps the most important feature that everyone will love is persistent memory. Your data won't be lost if the battery runs completely dry; a new concept for Pocket PCs, and an old one for MS Smartphones and some Palm brand PDAs such as the LifeDrive and Treo 650 (and the Tungsten E2). Read more for an in-depth look at this new Windows version.

Intel, AMD, IBM and all other chipmakers are doomed. In any case, that's the case if you were to believe the claims made by the Atom Chip Corporation, "which maintains it will show off a 2TB diskless notebook based on a 6.8GHz 'quantum-optical' microprocessor at next January's Consumer Electronics Show." Pictures of the notebook and various parts are available. Whether these claims hold truth is of course under debate, "but Gendlin (creator) has his patent - and more pending, apparently - and so we look forward to seeing Atom Chip's kit in the flesh at CES."

On Tuesday, the FSF announced the creation of the global "GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project," which will help create the next version of the General Public License. The Dutch nonprofit NLnet foundation is donating €150,000 to the cause. The new project is meant to bring together thousands of organizations, software developers and software users to help suggest revisions to the GPL.

MontaVista Software today announced the release of version 4.0 of its embedded Linux OS, MontaVista Linux Professional Edition. The new release is based on the 2.6 Linux kernel and includes hard real-time capabilities.

"We are pleased to announce a new developer snapshot of GNU Classpath. GNU Classpath, essential libraries for java, is a project to create free core class libraries for use with runtimes, compilers and tools for the java programming language."

"Okay, I’ve had an opinion change I’d like to announce. I’m betting that the future of mobility will be Linux, and not Symbian, Windows or anything else. This is quite a change from my previous pro-Symbian stances, but I’ve been sort of leaning this way for a while - or rather, leaning away from Symbian as it fails to live up to its potential - and now I’ve finally come to a religious change of faith when it comes to mobile OSes."

Terrasoft Solution has published the pdfs of the last issue of the Linux User & Developer magazine in which you can find interviews with Terrasoft's Kai Staats and Genesi's Raquel Velasco and Bill Buck. In it they speak about what has been done with the Open Desktop Workstation and of course about future plans.

Here is a very long and comprehensive comparison of archiving tools for Microsoft Windows. Three awards are rewarded for best commercial, best freeware, and best open-source archiver.

Andrew Morton has provided a short list of features and fixes that will be included in the 2.6.14 kernel which include OCFS2, Relayfs, v9fs, FUSE, pcmcia and scheduler updates among other changes including hundreds of bug fixes.

"Colony CD 4 is ready. This is the fourth in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Breezy development cycle, as images that are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD-build or installer bugs, while representing very current snapshots of Breezy. You can download it here." Bug reports can be filed here.

"Every major release of the 4.x series of Xfce has been pretty major. 4.0 was the result of over a years work, a major rewrite of the entire desktop. 4.2 saw the introduction of major features and enhancements that were incomplete for 4.0, and new developers as Xfce4 gained popularity. 4.4 is going to be a major upgrade to Xfce, with new components, major upgrades to old ones, and more tools for developers. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at what’s coming."

Open Virtuozzo (GPL/QPL) is an operating system-level server virtualization solution, built on Linux. Open Virtuozzo creates isolated, secure virtual private servers or virtual environments on a single physical server enabling better server utilization and ensuring that applications do not conflict. Each VPS performs and executes exactly like a stand-alone server; VPSs can be rebooted independently and have root access, users, IP addresses, memory, processes, files, applications, system libraries and configuration files.

SCO and MySQL announced Friday that the two would be working together to jointly deliver the commercial version of the MySQL database to SCO's latest Unix release, OpenServer 6. OpenServer 6 already includes the Apache Web server, the Apache Tomcat JSP (Java Server Pages) server, the PostgreSQL DBMS and the MySQL Community Edition.