Many of us grew up with the idea of the component audio system. A receiver (or a separate preamplifier and amplifier), tuner (radio), record player, tape deck, and later on a CD player. If you were into more fancy stuff, you had a DAT or MiniDisc deck as well. While some of us cling on to this mindset like there's no tomorrow, the real world seems to favour a different method of consuming music. According to Erica Ogg (what's in a name), the component audio system is on its way out - thanks to the iPod and the commoditisation of music.

The Equinox Desktop Environment is a small memory footprint desktop environment built on top of the extended FLTK toolkit ('Fast Light Tool Kit'). EDE features a desktop, a Windows-like panel with 'start' menu, taskbar, and system tray, support for theming, and graphical front-ends for software installation, xscreensaver configuration, and much more. Linux.com took a look at EDE version 1.2.

Coverity has published the 2008 edition of its Open Source Report. The report uses static code analysis on C, C++, and Java source code to determine the quality of the code. These reports are funded by the US Department of Homeland Security and supported by Stanford University, and are part of the US government's Open Source Hardening Project. The report is based on over two years' worth of data from Coverity Scan.

Cnet reports: "Fedora is the operating system of choice for AllemaniACs' winning robot in the RoboCup, a soccer tournament played between robots. Fedora has fueled AllemaniACs' victories in 2006 and 2007, and appears to be poised to raise the cup again in 2008." For anyone interested in using Fedora in robotics, a special interest group for robotics has been started within the Fedora Project to support such efforts.

BBC News reports that Microsoft has come up with an interesting strategy to increase usage of its Live Search service: it is "offering "cold, hard cash" to persuade users to shop online using its Live Search engine and help the company catch up to rival Google. The savings range between 2% and 30% on products sold by select retailers through its so-called cashback service... '2008 is the year that search got competitive,' said Bill Gates."

Infoworld takes a look at Hyper-V, Microsoft's hypervisor-based virtualization system, and finds: "In a nutshell, one of Hyper-V's advertised strengths -- the host partition's ability to work with generic Windows device drivers -- is also its greatest weakness. That's because the quality level of Windows device drivers, especially those from third-party developers, is notoriously inconsistent."

A lot of Windows XP users experienced SP3 aches and pains. This tutorial on PC World has some timely tips on what to do when SP3 installation doesn't go well.

A report on PC World says that Linux vendors Red Hat and Novell's SUSE division have unveiled updates for their enterprise Linux operating systems, adding new capabilities and hardware support in between the next major releases of their products.

According to BetaNews, Microsoft has announced that they will support OpenDocument (ODF) and PDF in Office 2007 SP2. This comes as a major victory not only for OpenOffice.org and its offshoots, but also for open source in general. Microsoft is planning on making Office 2007 SP2 available in the first half of 2009.

Several open source applications are available on both Linux as well as Windows. This gave Mohammed Saleh the idea of comparing the performance of various of these applications on both Ubuntu 8.04 as well as Windows XP SP3, to see which of the two performed better with certain applications. The results were rather interesting.

For those who follow my latest activities since I scaled down my OSNews participation, they know that videography has been it. Recently I tried to get more serious about it and so last week I shot a music video clip for a local Bay Area indie band, the HIJK (song is available for free download on their site). Should not be a surprise either that two out of the three band members are actually software engineers, this is the Silicon Valley after all. The following is an account of how I did everything and I also give some pointers on how to help your own favorite local indie bands with some video promotion. I find it to be one of the many ways to stick it to the RIAA and their status quo in the market. Update: Added a small making-of video.

Using the default Gnome desktop, Fedora 9 generally felt solid and polished. Previous versions of Fedora have generally been hit or miss in this respect, so it's good to find a Fedora release that actually feels like a stable one, says Techiemoe. DesktopLinux has a mini-interview about Fedora and some additional info too.

OpenMoko, the project that creates not only a Linux operating system for phones but the hardware to run it as well, has announced some major changes to its software stack. Traditionally a Gtk+ endeavour, this is all going to change rather drastically.

"Right now, Windows Vista SP1 is supposed to be slowly winging its way out to 140 million Vista users, offering better general stability and improved copying performance (albeit perhaps not for dual boot users). After a protracted testing period, SP1 was made available for download in March, and was released for the Automatic Update service in mid-April, where it will in theory trickle down onto most Vista machines over the next few months. But just how many Vista users will actually ever receive it? Microsoft has admitted some users may never be offered the option to download SP1 via Windows Update.