The One Laptop Per Child project, including its leader Nicholas Negroponte, has weathered quite a few storms lately. There was a flood of criticism coming from the open source world when Negroponte stated that Windows might become the platform of choice, and when former employee and contributor Ivan Krstic stepped in the round, both the project as well as its leader had to face quite a few harsh words. All this hasn't slowed down the project at all, it seems, as Negroponte just unveiled the plans for version 2.0 of the OLPC. Instant update: There's a video of the unveiling too.

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.

Vista has not exactly been a massive market success. Sales numbers might be satisfactory due to OEM agreements, but press and public reception have been terrible, and there are several recurring themes in the complaints from people. Microsoft took five of these recurring themes, and addressed them in a document called 'Five Misunderstood Features in Windows Vista'.

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.

A week ago, the Fedora Project released Fedora 9 into the world. Fedora 9 comes with GNOME 2.22, KDE 4.0.3, Xfce 4.2.2, PackageKit, Firefox 3.0 beta 5, a 2.6.25-based Linux kernel, and much more. As always, the intertubes have been flooded with reviews, so we figured we would summarise a few of them.

A feature at OSNews for many years, the OS Resources page has been a popular reference for OS enthusiasts, but it hasn't been tended very much over the past couple of years, and it's in need of an update. While the OSNews staff will be working on making our own updates, we wanted to involve the readers, so we've set up an OS Resources Wiki to help with collaboration. Please "read more" if you'd like to help out.

It's one of those catch phrases that never really seems to die out. Wherever you look in the operating systems world, at personal blogs written in crummy English, or at high-profile quality websites, there is bound to be someone, somewhere who used it. Even I, myself, used it in articles in a far and distant past, and I'm not particularly proud of it. "Ready for the desktop" is no longer acceptable - in fact, it's on its way out.

When Microsoft said it withdrew its offer to buy Yahoo earlier this month, many people figured the acquisition dance was far from over - that the withdrawal and the subsequent letter from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to his Yahoo counterpart were nothing more than a move in an ongoing strategic battle. It appears those people were right, as Microsoft just issued a statement regarding Yahoo.

Back when Windows Vista was still known as Windows Longhorn, the operating system contained a very interesting and promising feature, a feature promoted as one of the 'pillars' of Longhorn: WinFS. WinFS was a storage subsystem for Windows, based on a relational database, that could contain whatever data you wanted to put in it. Thanks to the relational properties of the database, you could then create relationships between data, or let the computer do that for you.

BeOS (and Haiku) has a very powerful filesystem, thanks mostly to its extensive use of attributes and live queries to search through these attributes. In order to access these powerful features over a network, you need a network file system that also supports attributes and queries - cue BeServed, Kevin Musick's network file system. A few weeks ago, the code to BeServed was donated to the Haiku project as open source under a MIT license, so HaikuNews and OSNews decided to interview Kevin Musick together. In addition, Haiku launched the Haiku Code Drive 2008.

Peter Hintgens, writing at Freesoftware Magazine, explains why the adoption of Microsoft's OOXML as an ISO standard is a dreadful development, and explains how some open standards partisans are organizing to combat insufficiently-open "open" standards.

Andrew Min gives a taster of the open source goodies being developed at Google's Summer of Code: a GUI for Aptitude, a GUI for Grub 2, search based menu browsing for GIMP and Audacity file import/export with FFmpeg amongst others. Read (or listen to) to the full article at Freesoftware Magazine

The Fedora team has clearly spent a lot of time trying to refine some of the smaller, but perhaps more common user interface elements in some thoughtful ways. Take, for instance, the new setting that allows you to manage power settings from the login screen. It's a small tweak but it makes shutting down simple. There's no need to login when you wake from hibernate - just shut down straight from the login screen. Similar attention to these basics can be found throughout the new release.

Microsoft and the One Laptop Per Child project have announced an agreement to work together on getting Windows XP available on the XO laptop, with trials starting in June 2008, and the RTM date set for August or September. Microsoft also demonstrated Windows XP Professional and Office 2003 running on the XO laptop - fully featured.