During a surprise guest appearance at Novell's annual BrainShare user conference, the Finnish open-source guru took part in a question-and-answer session with the networking-software company's chief executive and chairman Jack Messman and vice chairman Chris Stone. Linux creator Linus Torvalds says that non-technical issues such as software patents constitute the single biggest threat to the future success of the open-source OS.

This week, Microsoft will release its first upgrade to its .NET Compact Framework, bringing mobile developers more performance, more UI support and a raft of new access technologies to make it easier for devs to integrate mobile devices with a wide array of XML, SQL and COM resources on legacy apps and databases.

Linuxlookup newest staff member Rich Hughes takes a look at Arch Linux version 0.6 (Widget). "I am a recovering distribution junkie. I would obsessively spend my time at Distrowatch, looking for something new. There were plenty of exciting releases. After a while, the excitement would wear off, and the sexy distribution I installed would have some annoyance, so I would dump it and look for something new."

One of the more whimsical case mods I've seen: A mini ITX-based PC carefully constructed inside a retail box for Windows XP. And at the end, the creator decides that he'd like to run Red Hat Linux on this machine too, so he tries to find a Linux box that fits over his new case. Unfortunately, Windows XP and Linux are not very compatible. The Red Hat Linux boxes he found were either a little smaller or a bit larger than his WinXP wonder.

We all know about the benefits of open source software in lowering total cost of ownership, offering more choice and the increasing quality and functionality of the code. The rise of Linux as an edge server and now migrating toward the data center is clear validation that the open source model has taken root. But there are still significant barriers to overcome before Linux and other open source projects are broadly accepted across enterprises, says ZDNet's Dan Farber.

Most people don’t know about Microsoft's other multitasking operating system, MS-DOS 4.0 which was actually a version of MS-DOS 2.0 that was written in parallel with MS-DOS 3.x (DOS 3.x shipped while DOS 4 was under development, which is why it skipped a version). The MS-DOS 4 version described here was never shipped and instead a beefed-up version of 3.x was labeled 4.0 and shipped instead.

Lots of Novell news today, Linux certification, migration to Linux desktops, iFolder release as GPL and a VPN solution for Macs. Read more for the details.

PalmSource today announced it has joined the Khronos Group as a contributing member to encourage the development and adoption of OpenGL ES as an important open 2D/3D graphics API standard for mobile multimedia applications. The company also announced to integrate OpenGL ES APIs into future versions of Cobalt to enable broad 3D and multimedia support.

This is the first release of XPDE with a completely rewritten code base. A screenshot can be seen here. Go at TechDigest to pose your question for an interview with XPDE.

Do you like playing detective and solving mysteries? Performance problems come in many guises, giving you ample opportunity to indulge your clue-hunting proclivities to identify and resolve them. The main man behind the MegaJogos multi-player game site and a member of the Java Games community, recently altered the application behind the site to use the NIO package to enhance its scalability.

Sun Microsystems, a company that has been making noise lately in the Linux desktop market with StarOffice 7 and Java Desktop System, is currently working on an experimental 3D successor to Java Desktop that they believe will change the way we interact with computers, and in the end elevate the popularity of Linux in general.

VMWare 4.5.1 includes updates and fixes include changes to the EULA, a more reliable SCSI implementation, better support for Linux guest operating systems using kernels in the 2.6 series, and support for Windows 95 guest operating systems on high-speed processors. Some of the new features are an increased memory range up to 3.6GB per virtual machine (4GB to all vms), experimental support for Longhorn, support for PXE on virtual network hardware, and support for Novell NetWare 5.1, 6, and 6.5 and SUSE LINUX 9.0.

Sun Microsystems Inc., Research In Motion Ltd. and Sybase Inc. are each readying products and services that could expedite the development of mobile enterprise applications. Sun and RIM will join forces at the CTIA Wireless conference in Atlanta this week to announce plans to bring Java Web services to RIM's corporate customers. In the meantime, Microsoft aims to score with sports fans with the launch Monday of its first add-on service for so-called "smart" watches.

This long-term Red Hat Linux user has given an honest look at Gentoo, and has concluded that the stereotypes surrounding this distribution are false. After all these years, he has finally found his new distribution: Gentoo Linux.