It seems that a free Linspire clone has hit the ftp mirrors. DistroWatch reports: "Freespire is a new Linux distribution, a free edition of Linspire with all proprietary components and trademarks removed. The distribution comes with a free repository of over 1,500 packages available via apt-get and Synaptic. This initial release functions as a live CD only and serves as a proof of concept. It certainly looks like an interesting idea: combining the benefits of Linspire's excellent usability and hardware auto-configuration with a free repository of Debian packages." Review.

Solaris Express 8/2005 (Nevada Build 19, thanks for clearing that up, Dan) was posted today, providing improved hardware compatibility, a IEEE1394 camera driver, improved USB support, support for USB smartcard readers, and roughly 600 bug fixes. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is also available.

Sun Microsystems, weighing in on the fractious issue of protecting copyrighted digital content, on Sunday announced a project it calls the Open Media Commons initiative aimed at creating an open-source, royalty-free digital-rights management standard.

Linux founder Linus Torvalds is defending protection of the Linux trademark and insists that sublicensing is a loss-making operation. He explained that the "cease-and-desist or sublicense the mark" letters are a requirement of maintaining a trademark. "Not only do I not get a cent of the trademark money, but even the Linux Mark Institute has so far historically always lost money on it."

"One of the more touchy subjects crowding my inbox lately relates to how Windows Vista will fail to render High Definition video in 'pure' High Definition on most existing monitors. There's quite a bit of hemming and hawing over the probability that Windows Vista users will have to buy new monitors to see HD content. Let's get a few facts out on the table before we oil our rags and tie them to our spears, because there's a considerable amount of misinformation out there."

The K Desktop Environment was pleased to see its users recently at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Users were excited to learn about KDE 4.0, some of the hot new stuff in KDE 3.5, and thousands of Linux users got out of the house for a change.

Linux finally has a free mDNS/DNS-SD implementation (Apple Rendezvous/Bonjour, Zeroconf). Avahi 0.1 has been released yesterday and provides a LGPL'd embeddable mDNS core. See the homepage for more details.

ReactOS 0.2.7 has been released. The ReactOS homepage hasn't been updated yet to reflect the release, but you can download it from their SourceForge page. You can get a live-CD, install CD and a Qemu-image. Update: screenshots.

Crisot has made available a new demonstration video (xvid avi mirror1|mirror2 MPEG1 mirror1|mirror2) showing the AmigaOS4-beta implementation of the unique AmigaOS feature, screen dragging. For recent user screenshots of the AmigaOS4 pre-release look here.

"We all know that power management in Linux isn't all that it should be. All this is changing with the rise of Gnome Power Manager. This short article will show the progress we have made on the gnome-power mailing list, and the result of all the hard work from the various people contributing to the list. I'll cover what progress we have made, and detail some of the packages that exist at the moment."

Systemsim970 written in C, is a full-system simulation infrastructure and tools for the PowerPC 970 instruction set built upon the IBM Power architecture. It provides a Linux full-system simulation to develop, run, and evaluate PowerPC software stack solutions in the absence of PowerPC system hardware.

"10 days? Well that hardly sounds hard enough! Sure, it doesn’t sound so hard but take in account that over 500 million of us use a Windows OS at least once, everyday of the week and you too will see that going cold turkey from XP to KDE might be harder or more limiting than first thought."

Microsoft has once again stirred up a hornets nest in the open-source community, this time approaching the OSDL (Open Source Development Labs) to work with it on a joint, independent research project to do some facts-based analysis of Linux and Windows.

"So far, Windows Vista is an interesting OS. It does quite a lot of things much better than the previous versions but then it also requires way too many resources in order to work appropriately. There are also some slight glitches, but those are probably due to its beta status and nothing more. Besides, this is probably the most successful and productive Beta that ever came out of Microsoft."