Bang on target, the new version of Ubuntu Linux is available for our downloading pleasure. Amongst various changes it sports updates to the installer, improved networking, and a new 'Mobile USB' version geared towards the blossoming netbook market. Grab a copy from the Ubuntu website, and check out Linux Format's hands-on look. Or the one at Simple Thoughts. Or the one at PolishLinux. And probably a few other websites as well.

The netbook and MID (mobile internet device) markets are all the rage these days, and Intel is betting big on these markets with its Atom processor line. However, Intel doesn't stop there - the company is even buying wireless networks. According to Intel's CEO Paul Otellini, it's all part of bringing the Internet to new places and people.

Would the internet as we know it exist without Linux? "Absolutely not", says Rich Menga. "Where Linux shines the most is in its server applications".In the 1990's "There were thousands of Mom n' Pop ISPs that operated out of a garage and the vast majority of them were all running Linux. Windows couldn't do it back then and neither could MacOS. What would you have used that you could afford? Netware? Lotus Domino? HP-UX (that requires those refrigerator-sized HP servers)? Linux was literally the only OS out there that had the right price (free), ran similar to a Unix and could use existing computers of the time to connect customers.The internet as we know it today predominantly runs on Linux. There's an extremely high probability that the internet connection you're using right now is connected through a Linux server - and routed through many other Linux servers along the way."

An interesting NYT Bits blog entry covers Opera's mobile browser. Buried in the middle of the article is this quote: "Opera's engineers have developed a version of Opera Mini that can run on an Apple iPhone, but Apple won't let the company release it because it competes with Apple's own Safari browser." It also talks about Opera on the Wii and browsers in cars. A good read. My Take: But back to the iPhone. As tempted as I am to just shrug it off, since Apple is free to run its App Store any way it pleases, as an enthusiastic iPhone user, I think Apple is shooting itself in the foot here, as it is with all the "competitive" apps being rejected. Apple does stand to lose some Google revenue by letting people use other browsers, but they have much more to gain by unleashing the creativity of the developer community and giving them the freedom to improve or replace core iPhone functionality. Hopefully competition from Android forces them to wake up.

Loyd Case over at ExtremeTech attended Microsoft's technical briefing of Windows 7 and can't help but compare how the new operating system will be better than Vista. Key features are better user support, stability, performance, and many other things. Sounds like a broken record? Probably, but Microsoft learned a lot after Vista launched, and they'll be careful not to repeat a lot of the same mistakes twice.

OSNews recently ran a story on UNIX virtualization functionality which was a bit shallow on technical details. HP's Christophe de Dinechin (who had already begun working on virtualization at HP when we interviewed him several years ago, but couldn't talk about it then) contacted us to tell us he'd gone into more technical detail on his blog here and here saying, "They are a bit long, and probably boring to a general audience, but since your readers are generally more interested in OS technology than the average population, I thought I'd bring these to your attention."

I've been running Windows Vista Ultimate on my Acer Aspire One netbook (with 1.5GB of RAM, and a 30GB hard drive) for a while now, without any problems or performance issues. I have the full Aero Glass experience, and I didn't need to do any performance tweaking or fiddling with services. I even made a few very crappy videos to show it all off. Apparently, Steven Sinofsky thinks Vista - and therefore, Windows 7 - can run just fine on a netbook too, and that's why he demonstrated Windows 7 running on a netbook this morning during the Windows 7 keynote. In an interview with Ars he gave a little more details.

Windows 7 is out and about. Microsoft has been unusually secretive about Vista's successor, but now that PDC is under way, they have unveiled the various enhancements to the user interface. Windows 7 might not have any significant under-the-hood changes (in fact, all your applications and devices will still work), but on the outside, Windows 7 represents the biggest change for the Windows user interface ever since Windows 95 came out.

The new OS includes major new user interface updates, and promises to work much better with third-party hardware and software. Can the latest version of the OS wash away the sour taste of Vista? Here's a detailed report and a slideshow of Windows 7 screenshots.

Free Software/open source often gets a bad rap for innovating. It just rips-off the work of commercial developers, right? Not so, as this Linux Format piece argues. FLOSS has pioneered, or been a catalyst in, some notable changes in the computing world. Several of these innovations are OS-related.

It seems that Microsoft may have unintentionally leaked certain details about its upcoming Windows 7 feature set in a privacy supplement that was posted on its homepage. Driver protection, dynamic update, Homegroup, People Near Me, and Trusted Platform Model are all features mentioned (and described) in this document that will be new to Windows 7 that hadn't previously been publicized.

With the release of Ubuntu 8.10 only a few days away, Phoronix decided to take a look at the performance figures over the past releases - from Ubuntu 7.04 to Ubuntu 8.10. Phoronix used its own extensive test suite on fresh installations, with the same parameters, on the identical hardware. The results are rather surprising. Update: I've added some more information about this, gathered from the Ubuntu mailing list. You can find it in the 'read more'.

From the get-go, the company behind the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu - Canonical - has backed Ubuntu with Mark Shuttleworth's money. The big question has always been if Canonical is actually making any money. We have a rather clear and definitive answer to that one now.

Stanislaw Szymczyk has been working on the AROS self-compiling bounty since April. The job, according to its website, has been not a trivial task. Now that some issues with soft links and the SFS file format have been resolved, the job is almost finished.