"It has been over four months since Dell started shipping computers preloaded with Ubuntu GNU/Linux to home consumers in the United States. Lets take a moment to look at the progress that has been made so far. John Hull, manager of the Linux Engineering team in Austin was kind enough to let me interview him by e-mail. Besides commenting on the current state of affairs with Ubuntu on Dell machines, he also offers some insight in how the Linux team at Dell works and opens a small window into the future of Linux at Dell."

Earlier this week, Mandriva released Mandriva Linux 2008.0, the latest version of their flagship Linux distribution. Mandriva was so kind as to provide me with a copy of Mandriva Linux 2008.0 PowerPack, the commercial version. Back when it was named Mandrake, it was my first ever Linux distribution (I bought a Linux magazine), so I have always had a special place for Mandriva. Read on for a review.

Red Hat is taking a business-as-usual stance in the face of renewed rumblings from Microsoft's Steve Ballmer over the need for Red Hat Linux users to pay up. Ballmer has repeatedly claimed that Microsoft IP is found in Linux. "People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to eventually compensate us," said Ballmer at a Microsoft event last week in London. But Red Hat itself has adopted a stance that keeps it above the Microsoft patent fray. "At this point, please reference our previous statements on this topic," said a Red Hat spokesman contacted Tuesday about Microsoft's statements on Red Hat Linux users. The spokesman pointed out a Red Hat blog posted "after the last FUD statements from Microsoft" in May, she said. Shuttleworth agrees.

The developer team behind Firefox has announced plans to bring a mobile version of the technology to the market in 2008. "People ask us all the time about what Mozilla's going to do about the mobile web, and I'm very excited to announce that we plan to rock it," Mike Schroepfer, a Mozilla developer known as 'schrep', wrote on the Mozillazine blog.

"The Dock in Mac OS X is unique in comparison to the user interface of Windows, most Linux distros that emulate the Windows desktop, and previous versions of the Classic Mac OS. Apple has significantly updated the Dock in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Here's a look at what's new and different in our 3-page report."

"This report covers FreeBSD related projects between July and October 2007. The sixth EuroBSDCon was held in Denmark in September. The Google Summer of Code project came to a close and lots of participants are working getting their code merged back into FreeBSD. The bugs in the FreeBSD HEAD branch are being shaked out and it is being prepared for the FreeBSD 7 branching."

SkyOS Beta 6796 has been released. "This build features a complete new multimedia framework (the ISS), automatic file type sniffing, a new Media Center, new Panel, updated Viewer, new Application Manager and various other applications using the new C++ API. Furthermore: 28 additional API Classes, new and updated libraries, customizable WindUI theme, 220+ fixed bugs including critical boot bug fixes."

After 3 months, Linus has released Linux 2.6.23. This version includes the new and shiny CFS process scheduler, a simpler read-ahead mechanism, the lguest 'Linux-on-Linux' paravirtualization hypervisor, XEN guest support, KVM smp guest support, variable process argument length, SLUB is now the default slab allocator, SELinux protection for exploiting null dereferences using mmap, XFS and ext4 improvements, PPP over L2TP support, the 'lumpy' reclaim algorithm, a userspace driver framework, the O_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag, splice improvements, a new fallocate() syscall, lock statistics, support for multiqueue network devices, various new drivers and many other minor features and fixes.

Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available for download on the official site (release announcement), and on the network of public mirror servers. 2008 includes all the latest software and enhancements over previous Mandriva releases. You will find KDE 3.5.7 and the new GNOME 2.20 already integrated, kernel 2.6.22.9 with fair scheduling support, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, a 3D-accelerated desktop (Compiz Fusion and Metisse), Firefox 2.0.0.6, and much more. You can read about the new features of Mandriva Linux 2008 in depth in the Release Tour. The release notes contain important information on changes from previous releases. The errata will contain information on any future known issues and solutions for them.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has warned users of Red Hat Linux that they will have to pay Microsoft for its intellectual property. "People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to compensate us," Ballmer said last week at a company event in London discussing online services in the UK.

"Novell's long journey from NetWare to Linux is finally complete. On Oct. 8, Novell released Open Enterprise Server 2 to its customers worldwide. Shortly after acquiring SUSE and its enterprise-focused Linux distribution, Novell announced that its follow-on to NetWare 6.5 would ship as a set of network services that could run atop the NetWare and the Linux kernel, OES 1.0. OES, which began shipping in April 2005, was the first major step in Novell moving NetWare's services from its native operating system to Linux. Now, with OES 2.0, the NetWare operating system kernel, NetWare 6.5 SP7, is still there if you run it, but it runs on top of the Xen hypervisor. You can also run the NetWare services, or a para-virtualized instance of NetWare, on top of Xen with the SLES 10 SP 1 kernel. So, if you're wedded to NetWare and its way of doing things, you don't have to wave good-bye to it."

Fluxbox 1.0 has been released. There's a changelog, and a download page, of course. "Fluxbox is yet another windowmanager for X. It's based on the Blackbox 0.61.1 code. Fluxbox looks like Blackbox and handles styles, colors, window placement and similar thing exactly like Blackbox (100% theme/style compability)."

"NetBSD has been involved in the Google Summer of Code since its conception in 2005. This year we were glad to once again have the oppertunity to introduce a number of students to our operating system, to Open Source software development and get them sponsored by Google to work on projects defined by the NetBSD developers. The students working on this year's projects were mentored by various NetBSD developers with extensive experience in the respective work areas."

"While the industry is distracted by the ongoing tussle between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org over document formats, the KDE project is quietly preparing the next generation of its own office suite, KOffice, for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. KOffice 2.0, to be released sometime in the first half of 2008, will be cross platform like many other applications in the KDE suite built with the Qt4 GUI toolkit."