Red Hat's Spacewalk project is getting into place. The project wants to feed development of the Red Hat Network Satellite product for system management. Satellite is a critical tool for Red Hat users as it provides management capabilities for multiple servers for software deployment and updates. Almost six months ago, Red Hat kicked off the Spacewalk project in an effort to create an open source version of Network Satellite that would serve as the upstream project that drives development. According to Red Hat executives, Spacewalk is still in the process of getting aligned with Network Satellite releases in terms of the development model. As well, Spacewalk is now gearing up to replace Network Satellite's proprietary Oracle database backend with an open source database. It's all part of Red Hat's larger efforts to use the open source model effectively in all parts of its business, as well as reducing the costs associated with proprietary databases.

Two weeks ago, I published an article in which I explained what was wrong about Randall Kennedy's "Windows 7 Unmasked" article. This was noted by Infoworld's editor-in-chief Eric Knorr, who suggested that Randall and I enter into an email debate regarding the various points made in our articles. We agreed upon publishing this email thread as-is, unedited (I didn't even fix the spelling errors), on both Infoworld and OSNews. We agreed that Randall would start the debate, and that I had the final word. Read on for the entertaining email debate (I figured it would be best to give each email its own page, for clarity's sake. My apologies if this makes each individual page much shorter than what you're used to from OSNews).

"Mainstream Linux distributions typically default to one of two desktop environments, KDE or GNOME. Both of these environments provide users with an intuitive and attractive desktop, as well as offering a large raft of multimedia software, games, administration programs, network tools, educational applications, utilities, artwork, web development tools and more. However, these two desktops focus more on providing users with a modern computing environment with all the bells and whistles featured in Windows Vista, rather than minimising the amount of system resources they need. For users and developers who want to run an attractive Linux desktop on older hardware, netbooks, or mobile internet devices, neither KDE or GNOME may be a viable option, as they run too slowly on low spec machines (such as less than 256MB RAM and a 1 GHz processor). This article seeks to identify the best lean desktops for Linux, for users that have old or even ancient hardware."

There are lots of interesting desktop environments for X, other than the big two three GNOME, KDE, and Xfce. One of those is Etoile, a highly modular and leightweight environment based on GNUstep. Etoile is entirely project and document based, which means that you focus on your documents, and not on applications. Earlier this month - and we missed it, my apologies - the project released version 0.4.0.

Even though there are a lot of happy people using Apple's iPhone very happily, there's also a group of people who are not so happy, most likely because of Apple's rather strict policies regarding applications and developers. While most of these people would just jailbreak the thing, some take it a step further - by installing another operating system. Yes, Linux now runs on the iPhone (1st gen/2nd gen, and the 1st gen iPod Touch).

El Reg has a write-up on the amazingly beautiful and hopelessly impractical Honeywell Kitchen Computer. We've covered this bizarre piece of computing history before on OSNews, in my list of the ten most beautiful computers. For those that have no idea what I'm talking about, read on for more details. Trust me, you want to know.

Netbooks are still all the rage these days, but according to Intel, this is going to change soon. The company has stated that they first thought that netbooks, who are almost exclusively powered by Intel chips, would be for emerging markets, but as it turns out, they are especially popular in Europe and North America. Intel claims that while these devices are "fine for an hour", they are not something for day to day use. And AMD? They are ignoring the market altogether.

While most people detest Flash for its rather resource intensive operation, and its role in creating really annoying websites where the back and forward buttons don't work, the tool does have an important place on the web. Most internet video players, such as Youtube's, run using Flash, and as such, it's kind of important to be able to run it. eComStation has just taken the first few steps to being able to run the official Flash player - Mensys has received permission from Adobe to distribute the Windows version with eCS, which with a bit of work will work on eCS using ODIN. "This is a first step but the legal block is gone now," Mensys' Roderick Klein writes, "The writing of the code to run the Flash DLL is the next big step!"

The KDE team has released the first beta of KDE 4.2, slated for release coming January. Quite a lot of new features have been added, as well as lots of bug fixes and performance improvements. This release also makes a lot of strides to feature parity with KDE 3.x, by adding those small little features that KDE 3.x users are barely aware of, but which were missed in KDE 4.0/4.1, such as taskbar grouping, multiple rows in the taskbar, panel auto-hiding, a traditional icon desktop through 'full-screen' foderview, and so on.

Linux distributions come and go by the dozens almost every day, and most of them live and die an unknown, irrelevant life, mostly because no, changing three icons and adding the suffix '-nix' to any random word doesn't make it different from Ubuntu. Anyway, sometimes, a new distribution is started that brings something new to the table. One such "distribution" is Glendix, which aims to combine the Linux kernel with the userpsace tools from Plan 9. Distribution is probably not the right term for this project.

Intel joined Taiwanese mobile phone service provider Chunghwa Telecom to launch Gigabyte Technology's M528 mobile Internet device on Monday in Taipei. The device, which runs a Linux OS, sports a 4.8-inch touchscreen, QWERTY keypad and 4GB solid-state drive, has an 800Mhz Intel Atom Z500 microprocessor inside. Gigabyte's specs page for the device is here.

It's a sad day for all those countless admirers (seriously now, apart from myself...?) of Sun's Ultra 20 and Ultra 40 workstations. The Ultra 20 M2 and Ultra 40 M4 workstations have quietly reached their end-of-life, meaning the company currently has no more AMD-based workstations on offer. The magnificent case design of these machines, which made its debut in the form of the Sun Ultra 20, appears to be slowely but surely on its way out, since the UltraSPARC-based Ultra 25/45 have also been retired. This leaves the Ultra 24 (x64 Core 2 Duo/Quad) as the sole bearer of this case design. I would be very sad to see the angular and clean design go, seeing I placed it at number 7 on my list of most beautiful computers.

As most of you will know, Microsoft is currently involved in a class-action lawsuit about the company possibly misleading its customers about which computers could run Windows Vista. The story goes that when Microsoft delayed Windows Vista they allowed computers makers to label existing stock as "Vista Capable", even though these computers could only run the basic, Aero Glass-less version of Vista. The most recent development is that Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer will be questioned under oath.

Although GNU/Linux has the reputation of being a more secure operating system than Microsoft Windows, you still need to secure the Linux desktop. This tutorial takes you through the steps of installing and configuring antivirus software, creating a backup-restore plan, and making practical use of a firewall. When you finish, you'll have the tools you need to harden your Linux desktop against most attacks and prevent illegal access to your computer.