"MontaVista announced a new version of its embedded Linux development platform, now offered in separate packages for major system-on-chips. In addition to providing "Market Specific Distributions" for Intel, Freescale, and Texas Instruments SoCs, MontaVista Linux 6 adds a new build engine and content server, plus an upgraded DevRocket IDE."

"With the announcement back in January of Qt going LGPL there was a small piece of information that slipped though the cracks of the wider news reporting, namely the fact that we were planing on opening up our repositories and development model. The first major phase of this work is now complete, and we are proud to present the results."

As you may know, the global economic depression has hit the media hard, due in large part to the fact that ad rates are in the toilet. OSNews is in the same boat. Despite the fact that we still have good advertisers, our income from advertising this year will only be a fraction of what it was last year. We probably won't make enough to cover our costs. Other news sites, as they've seen revenue decrease, have responded with more, and more intrusive, advertising. We don' t want to do that. We feel we have a covenant with our readers. If you'll be respectful of our need to run ads, we'll be respectful of your need to read the site without having ads shoved down your throat. Please read on, for more discussion of our ad "covenant," and a plea for help, including a plea to all Adblock users to please unblock OSNews.

This week I received a triumphal press release from the Open Document Foundation, announcing that the just-released Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 has native support for the ODF (Open Document Format) file format. This makes the latest MS Office "the last major office suite to support ODF." This set me to thinking about how movement and advancement in several areas of technology and interoperability may well invigorate the alternative OS world.

The boys and girls of the Mozilla project have taken the wraps off the beta for Prism 1.0. Prism is a technology which blurs the boundaries between the web and the desktop, allowing you to approach web sites as if they were ordinary desktop applications. Prism is cross-platform, and runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Something I bumped into on Maemo-developers mailing list: "Intel and Nokia are pleased to jointly announce the oFono project, an open source project for developing an open source telephony solution." The full announcement is available at the oFono website. It's GPLv2, but not really hampered by the license because the API is exposed through DBus.

The official stance from Microsoft has always been that Windows 7 would be released three years after Vista, which would put its release date somewhere in January 2010. However, various rumours already indicated a release ahead of that schedule, and if the beta and RC are anything to go by, they could release it today and get away with it. Microsoft seems to have realised this, as it has now said it will release Windows 7 in time for the 2009 holiday season.

We already reported on the port of RISC OS 5 to the Beagleboard, but at that time, it couldn't yet boot the graphical shell. This has now been resolved, and there's a screenshot to prove it. The code should already be in the ROOL CVS repository, so adventurous Beagleboard owners can start playing with it.

You can find out a lot about your network by using a variety of different tools. Understanding the layout of your network, and where packets are going, and what people are doing is important. This tutorial examines techniques for monitoring the traffic and content of your UNIX network and how to read and diagnose problems on your network.

An understanding of native memory is essential when you design and run large Java applications. The lack of predictable behaviour means there's no one simple way to identify native-memory exhaustion. Instead, you need to use data from the OS and from the Java runtime to confirm the diagnosis. To get the best performance from your Java application, you must understand how the application affects the Java runtime's native-memory use.

And another week passes us by. This week we were informed about two projects replacing some GNU software with alternatives, FreeBSD, KDE, OpenOffice.org, and Windows 7 did new releases, Psystar replied to Apple's allegations (and the Apple world completely ignored it), and Chrome users were the most up-to-date with their browsers. This week's my take is a prelude to the one for next week.

Linux Mint 7 RC1 has recently been released, and a poster over at EasyLinuxCDs.com has been good enough to detail some of the features in ten different videos. He details everything from installation to mintUpdate to even small features, such as the Xchat app. Though the bulk of the videos seem a bit elementary for most readers here, I at least found Linux Mint 7 a very good-looking system aesthetically and technically and would like to test it out sometime in the near future.

The past few years, it seemed as if virus writers had moved away from doing actual damage to systems to instead focus on stealth, so that infected machines can silently, and unknowingly, be used for all sorts of malicious practices. Sadly, there are still those crackers out there that prefer the old-fashioned approach to these matters. The result: 100000 ruined Windows machines.

Sun Microsystems shareholders have filed three separate class action lawsuits to block a $7.4 billion acquisition by Oracle, the company revealed in a 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The lawsuits allege Sun's board didn't live up to its fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders when it accepted Oracle's acquisition offer, saying "the consideration offered in the proposed transaction is unfair and inadequate."