Having almost disappeared completely late last year, SCO says it has been resuscitated by a new financing plan. Under the terms of the deal, Stephen Norris Capital Partners and "its partners from the Middle East" will supply up to $100 million, enabling SCO to reorganize and launch a new series of products. SNCP will gain a controlling interest in the company, and take it private, allowing it to slip out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Update: As part of the reorganisation, Darl McBride will be let go. Buried in the proposed MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) between Unix vendor and Linux litigator SCO and SNCP is the note that "upon the effective date of the Proposed Plan of Reorganization, the existing CEO of the Company, Darl McBride, will resign immediately."

eWeek takes a look at Vista's first service pack. "On the whole, Vista Service Pack 1, which becomes generally available in mid-March, is a fairly staid update with very little in the way of new features or cosmetic changes. SP1 consists of a rollup of Vista's first year of security and bug fixes, new support for a handful of emerging hardware and software standards, and an update to Vista's kernel and core systems that brings the operating system in line with Windows Server 2008, which was also recently released to manufacturing. SP1 also features a handful of performance improvements around file copy operations, which I was able to confirm during my tests in our lab." Concerning the file copy operations, Mark Russinovich has a detailed post about that one.

The fourth pre-release of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring is here. This pre-release brings recognition of other installed distributions during installation, NTFS-3G (with write support) by default for all NTFS partitions, significant improvements to the Mandriva graphical software management tool and more. See here for download information.

"Last year leading up to the release of Ubuntu 7.04 and Ubuntu 7.10 we had published several articles looking at various aspects of this desktop Linux distribution. These articles had varied from looking at Ubuntu's power consumption for the past six major releases to presenting the visual history of Ubuntu and how its graphics have evolved since Ubuntu 4.10. With Ubuntu 8.04 shipping in just two months, we are once again looking at Ubuntu from several points of view. In this article, we are looking at Ubuntu's boot performance for the past five releases through the use of Bootchart for measuring its boot time, disk throughput, and the running processes."

"It is much easier to criticize somebody else's work than to create something cool yourself. But if you apply a systematic approach to criticizing, make a numbered list and prepare illustrations, it will be regarded as a fully-fledged analysis! In my opinion, icon design is undergoing a transitional period. On the one hand, screen resolutions are increasing, hence enhancing icons. On the other hand, we still have good old pixels. Icons sized 16x16 and even smaller are still widely used. And so, here are the most commonly observed mistakes in icon design."

The IcedTea project provides a harness to build the source code from OpenJDK using Free Software build tools and provides replacements libraries for the binary plugs with code from the GNU Classpath project. This release adds the "Zero-assembler" port which will allow IcedTea to run with zero (ok, minimal) porting effort on any GNU/Linux architecture that has a gcc and libffi port available. JNLP support has been added through the addition of NetX, which makes a lot of java webstart applications work out of the box. Check out the screenshots. Gary Benson will give a talk about the zero-assembler port at FOSDEM during the free Java developer meeting where GNU Classpath, OpenJDK and many other Free Java projects come together to plan the future of Free Java on GNU/Linux.

LLVM 2.2 has been released. Wikipedia summarises: "The Low Level Virtual Machine, generally known as LLVM, is a compiler infrastructure, written in C++, which is designed for compile-time, link-time, run-time, and 'idle-time' optimization of programs written in arbitrary imperative programming languages. The LLVM project started in 2000 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign."

The Fedora 8 Xfce Spin has been released. "Fedora Xfce Spin is a bootable Fedora Live CD image available for x86 and x86_64 architecture. It can be optionally installed to hard disk or converted into boot USB images and is ideal for Xfce fans and for users running Fedora on relatively low resource systems. As a additional bonus, this release rolls in updates for Fedora 8 released till yesterday (2008/02/12)."

The annual FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting) is coming up at the end of February. This year, as in past years, the FOSDEM crew is publishing interviews with the speakers. The first batch includes interviews with Bill Hoffman, author of CMake, Robin Rowe, project manager of CinePaint, who will be talking about Linux in Hollywood, Kohsuke Kawaguchi from the Hudson project, Stéphane Magnenat, the author of Globulation 2 and Patrick Michaud, who'll be talking about Perl 6. The second batch introduces Steven Knight, who wrote the python-based build system SCons, Kurt Pfeifle and Simon Peter from the klik project, Matthias Rechenburg, openQRM author, Andrei Zmievski of the PHP project, who will be enlightening the FOSDEM 2008 audience about PHP6 and its Unicode and internationalization features and Mark Finkle (Mozilla Platform Evangelist).

Comc: "Fault".

And more Haiku news; Ars took a short look at Haiku. "As an open source enthusiast and former BeOS zealot, I'm very excited to see Haiku reach this level of usability. I look forward to the day when it is a viable operating system for day-to-day use, and, when it achieves the requisite level of hardware compatibility, I fully intend to install it on my Eee PC, where Haiku's extreme responsiveness and fast boot time will be of significant value. Although Haiku and its technologies aren't quite as relevant today in the face of more modern and advanced operating systems, many of the traditional advantages of BeOS that are present in Haiku still have value today in some contexts."

InfoWorld reviews the MacBook Air, and concludes: "The MacBook Air is not perfect, but it sure is attractive and functional. If you're looking for a desktop replacement system, get a MacBook Pro. If you're looking for a basic laptop, get a MacBook. If you're looking for supreme portability and more than reasonable performance, definitely get a MacBook Air."

Fluxbuntu's aim is to be a lightweight, productive, agile, and efficient operating system; this review takes a look at Fluxbuntu and whether it lives up to the challenge of creating a user-friendly experience on a tight resources budget. The review discusses included applications, ease-of-use, and some of the limitations of this featherweight operating system.

With many recent stability fixes and other improvements by Michael Lotz (mmlr) as well as others - he was able to finally nail down a couple last minor tweaks that allowed him to checkout the Haiku source from the SVN repository, compile a raw Haiku image, and test it in QEMU entirely from his Haiku install. This is the first time ever that Haiku has reportedly 'self-hosted', an unofficial important requirement for an alpha release. Please note that there are a few technicalities to be ironed out before the process can be easily reproduced by all. Update: Please note that Haiku won't be taking over the world just yet.