Kerneltrap has an interview with the creator of project VGA. "The project aims to develop a simple, low budget, open source, VGA compatible video card available this year. Michael is also a member of the Open Graphics Project, but started Project VGA in order to get something affordable on the market as soon as possible."

The European Commission is launching two new anti-competition investigations against US computer giant Microsoft. The first will look at whether Microsoft unfairly ties its Explorer internet browser to its Windows operating system. In the parallel investigation, the Commission will look at the interoperability of Microsoft software with rival products. Note: Remember the OSNews comic? Here is a new comic, which, for now, is attached to the story it relates to. We are working on a separate section for the comic, but until that is done, I will sporadically publish comics this way. I have a whole stack of comics ready for when that section goes live - and you can see the name for the comic too, if you look "closely". Enjoy the new comic, titled "Hawaii".

"I think it's really necessary to respond to some criticism seen on the reactions to the latest OSnews article. I won't go into the article itself, imho it's rather negative, but hey. From an user's perspective, it makes sense to only review 3 or 4 parts of KDE 4 and complain about them, and ignore all the other brilliant pieces of work in there, right? On to the responses, I found this reaction by dagw to be the most typical. Well. That's painful. So, is he right? Did we make the wrong decision? Let's look at it from a broader perspective for a while. Let's see it in the Grand Scheme of Things to Come."

Microsoft has made Vista's Service Pack 1 near-final 'release candidate' available for download to the general public, after initially choosing to restrict it to 15000 beta testers when it debuted last week. According to a blog by ZDNet.com's Mary Jo Foley, a Microsoft representative said the build contained a "number of bugs that testers encountered in previous prerelease versions of SP1". The update is largely a collection of bug fixes and performance and compatibility improvements, but includes some minor new features.

"Operating systems come with cultures as much as codebases. I was forcibly reminded of this fact over the holidays when several family members and neighbors press-ganged me into troubleshooting their Windows computers. Although none of us had any formal computer training, and I know almost nothing about Windows, I was able to solve problems that baffled the others - not because of any technical brilliance, but because the free software culture in which I spend my days made me better able to cope."

"DeviceVM's SplashTop is sharing a booth this week at the CES with ASUS. At their booth we were allowed to check out a SplashTop demo running on an ASUS notebook! This notebook has yet to be introduced by ASUS, but it's intended for high-end gaming and comes with SplashTop Linux as a complementary operating system. This version of SplashTop is slightly updated and has new features too."

"LV2 is a simple but extensible successor of LADSPA, intended to address the limitations of LADSPA which many applications have outgrown. By creating LV2 'extensions' (which can be done independently), virtually any feature is possible for LV2 plugins and hosts."

It has been making waves on the net for a few days already, and I don't want to keep anyone deprived from this utter piece of brilliance. "Mommy, why is there a server in the house?", a children's book made by Microsoft to 'help your child understand the stay-at-home server'. "Big people have a server at the 'office'. The office is a big place where people go and do boring things." Not everybody will appreciate the twisted humour, but I sure do. Utterly brilliant, this. Update: There is more!

The source code to the original SimCity game has been released under the GPL, with all references to the SimCity name removed due to copyright trademark issues; it is now called Micropolis. You can download the source code, or read a bit more about it. SimCity is one of the most critically acclaimed games in history.

Linux.com reviews the Asus Eee PC. "The Asus Eee PC has been heralded as a groundbreaking new computing experience and great for children. While the computer didn't bowl me over, my kids were another matter. When you hear about how small the Eee is, believe it: the unit measures approximately nine by six inches and weighs a mere two pounds. It's hard to take something that small seriously because it looks like a toy (and its name sounds like a sneeze). Open the lid, however, and you'll find power and features that belie its diminutive size."

PC vendor Lenovo has promised ThinkPads with pre-installed Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 for some time now. Lenovo will deliver the goods the week of Jan. 14. Lenovo will release pre-installed SLED 10 on its Intel Centrino processor-powered ThinkPad T61 and R61 14-inch-wide notebooks. In February, Lenovo's pre-integrated Novell Linux offering will expand to include some Penryn-based ThinkPads.

Daniel Robbins, original creator of the Gentoo project, offers a solution to fix the recent leadership crisis at Gentoo: "I have received permission from my employer to return and serve as President of the Gentoo Foundation, renew its charter, and then work in some capacity to help to get Gentoo going in the right direction from a legal, community and technical perspective."

Noel Dellofano, who is part of the ZFS dev team at Apple, has a post on Mac OS Forge announcing a late Christmas gift: she is making available binaries and source code (plus instructions) of the ZFS filesystem for Mac OS X. "ZFS is a new kind of filesystem that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We've blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that's actually a pleasure to use."

KDE 4.0.0 has been released onto the world. "The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era." KDE 4.0 is the first release of "KDE 4", but take note that the developers have clearly stated that KDE 4.0 is not KDE 4, but more of a base release with all the underlying systems ready to go, but with still a lot of work to be done on the user-visible side. Download it from the KDE 4.0 info page. Update: Screenshots.