Phoronix has published a brief preview of Fedora 9. Among the features being worked on are encrypted file-system support, updating KDE to 4.0, PackageKit integration, and switching to upstart initialization. In this article, we are taking a brief look at Fedora 9 Alpha and the features planned for Fedora 9.

A few weeks ago PureMobile sent us in the Sony Ericsson K850i, one of the most high-end non-smartphones in the market today. The device sports a 5MP camera and triband 3G, features that are highly admirable for the price. Read on for more.

"The Elive Linux distribution combines beauty with ease of use. Elive is based on Debian and uses Enlightenment as its windows manager, which gives the distribution a Mac OS X look and feel. Elive comes with dozens of easy-to-use desktop applications that just work. Elive started as a live CD, but now at version 1.0 it works well as a standard hard drive installation. The latest unstable ISO, 1.5, should be released shortly."

The Japanese computer supplier NEC has officially launched a product to let network administrators downgrade machines running Windows Vista to XP. The OEM first made the product, NEC FlexLoad, available to customers on 25 January. However, the product was officially launched on Tuesday. Customers with a Vista licence can purchase the two-DVD pack for GBP 7, according to David Newbould, NEC UK's product marketing manager. The first DVD sets up a partition on the hard drive and installs core XP files and drivers, while the second DVD installs the remaining XP files in the partition, said Newbould. NEC recommends that customers burn a Vista recovery CD before installing the XP partition.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, will announce on Feb. 6 that it's making Parallels Workstation for Linux available to users through the Ubuntu Partner Repository. Parallels, formerly SWSoft, the company behind the open-source virtualization program OpenVZ, is best known for its Parallels virtualization software that works with Mac OS X. Parallels Workstation for Linux won't let you run Mac OS X, but it will enable you to run multiple versions of Windows or Linux with Ubuntu.

KDE 4.0.1 has been released. "The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.0.1. KDE 4.0.1 is a maintenance release which provides corrections of problems reported using the KDE bug tracking system and enhanced support for existing and new translations." Here's the changelog.

A preview of the 0.7 release of Visopsys is now available from the preview page. The page is light on details of the new technical features such as JPEG, 64-bit disk, UDF, and GPT support but provides screenshots and a breakdown of the updated look of Visopsys. As always you can try the OS from the 'live' CD image (and yes, after 10 years of development, there's still a basic version that fits on a floppy).

The Fedora Project has announced the alpha release of Fedora 9. Highlights of the Fedora 9 alpha release include partition resizing support for ext2, ext3, NTFS, and encrypted filesystems in the Anaconda installer, faster and more efficient yum dependency resolver, PackageKit, FreeIPA, GNOME 2.21 development release, KDE 4.0, Firefox 3 beta 2, 2.6.24 Linux kernel, and many others.

How do you recognize good programmers if you're a business guy? It's not as easy as it sounds. CV experience is only of limited use here, because great programmers don’t always have the "official" experience to demonstrate that they're great. In fact, a lot of that CV experience can be misleading. Yet there are a number of subtle cues that you can get, even from the CV, to figure out whether someone's a great programmer. More here.

Well-known Haiku kernel hacker Ingo Weinhold has written an in-depth guide to using the Haiku kernel debugger. It describes the most important commands, introduces the recently added kernel tracing feature, and concludes with an example KDL session in which Ingo debugs an inter application deadlock. A recommended read, especially if you are a Haiku hacker or interested in becoming one.

Ars posted their review of the MacBook Air. "Sure, there are other subnotebooks on the Windows side of the aisle that offer a variety of different configurations. There are ones with smaller screens that people love because they are even more portable. There are ones with built-in optical drives. There are ones with more ports. There are ones with more power. And there's nothing wrong with that, if that's what you want. But the MacBook Air is the only super-thin notebook that (legally) runs Mac OS X, and we feel that Apple did a decent job at figuring out how its users would use such a computer. It's not perfect by any means, and we hope to see Apple make improvements upon the Air with future iterations." AppleInsider has another review.

Today, the non-profit organization in charge of the Internet's fundamental naming structure finally began migrating its root servers to IP version 6. ICANN today is finally beginning the long, and perhaps arduous, process of upgrading its root servers to incorporate IPv6 records. Though the updated protocol has been in the post-development phase for over ten years, it has seen very limited uptake outside of the enterprise sector.

Comic: "WTFs/m".

"I read about Steven J. Vaughan's article on which he tries to explain why you don't see as much corporate support in Debian as you see in other places. The conclusion of Steven's analysis, it seems, is that Debian is immature. I will attempt to respond to it from a Debian perspective."