Columnist Bill Thompson at the BBC asks whether the time has come for Apple to be put under the EU microscope in the same way as Microsoft has. "If Apple was serious about building a music industry around downloads and digital devices then it would open up its devices and interfaces to allow greater innovation and greater competition."

Hewlett-Packard, the world's Number 1 PC maker, will try selling pre-loaded Linux on PCs in several countries as it expands a test program - evaluating a market that some competitors have already entered - and moves its personal computer business into a new generation of form factors and functionality.

Apple recently seeded developers with yet another build of Mac OS X 10.4.11, destined to be the final update to Tiger. Builds 8S155 (PowerPC) and 8S2155 (Intel) deliver an additional number of bug fixes, including remedies to issues with the BSD Kernel and interlock timeouts, ASR and scanning and restoring, CoreText Layout, and a bug with ImageCapture that creates problems downloading images from an iPhone when the phone has a large number of saved photos.

The openSUSE development team has announced that openSUSE 10.3 Release Candidate 1 is available for testing. "After quite a few rebuilds and testing, the openSUSE team is happy to announce that RC1 looks brilliant and is now available for download. We consider this release to be feature complete, stable, and suitable for testing from any user. For more information on the release schedule, take a look at the Roadmap."

GNOME 2.20 has been released. "The improvements in GNOME 2.20 include: Improved support for right-to-left languages; desktop search integrated into the file chooser dialog; convenient new features in the Evolution email and calendar client; enhanced browsing of image collections; simplified system preferences; efficient power management and incredibly accurate laptop battery monitoring. Developers receive more help with application development thanks to a new version of the GTK+ toolkit, improved tools, and a great new documentation web site."

"The FreeBSD Project is proud to have taken part in the Google Summer of Code 2007. We received more high quality applications this year than ever before. In the end it was a very tough decision to narrow it down to the 25 students selected for funding by Google. These student projects included security research, improved installation tools, new utilities, and more. Many of the students have continued working on their FreeBSD projects even after the official close of the program. We are happy to report that all students made some progress towards their goals for the summer, and the 22 students listed below completed the program successfully."

"Slackintosh was a little-known PPC port of Slackware Linux which after some years of development was put on indefinite hiatus. Adrian Ulrich has recently restarted the project and is again providing (together with Marco Bonetti) a Slackware distribution for Apple (and non-Apple) RISC-powered hardware. We contacted him for a short interview to ask him what happened, what is his role and what is the distribution’s status."

"Before installing a new shared Linux database- and webserver I wanted to get an idea of the real world performance of various filesystems combined with the noatime and atime flags. This article contains a brief analysis of the results of my testing. To get a good idea of the relative impact of the chosen filesystem I also tuned the amount of shared buffers used in the PostgreSQL database software, which powers a number of sites on the server. On top of that, I also took a look at the benefit of using APC, the Advanced PHP Cache."

Microsoft is making the third service pack for Office 2003 available for free download Sept. 18, which the company says strengthens the product's defenses against malicious software. "While SP3 will be available as a free download on Sept. 18, customers will also begin to get notified of its availability via Microsoft's AutoUpdate over the next few weeks," a Microsoft spokesperson told eWEEK.

"It's over. The magic is gone. The dream is dead. The egg has fallen off the wall and no amount of 'sudo' super glue can put his pieces back together again. I'm referring, of course, to the not-so-recent departure of Con Kolivas from the Linux kernel development community. Con - that champion of all things desktop centric - hung-up his keyboard this summer, the victim of an ideological rift within the Linux community." Update: And the first rebuttal appeared.

IBM plans to mount its most ambitious challenge in years to Microsoft's dominance of personal computer software, by offering free programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. Steven A. Mills, senior vice president of IBM's software group, said the programs promote an open-source document format. The company is announcing the desktop software, called IBM Lotus Symphony, at an event today in New York. The programs will be available as free downloads from the IBM Web site.

"Here it is, at last. Gnash 0.8.1 no longer segfaults on FreeBSD, I've solved all configure problems, all dependencies are checked, all test builds completed successfully. Behold, native Flash player for FreeBSD. It seems like I'm the first to try it, so why not do some tests while the port is being committed? I wonder, can I play flash games now? Can I be see those shiny flash banners? Can I watch YouTube videos at last?"

OpenOffice.org 2.3 has been released. "Available for download now, OpenOffice.org 2.3 incorporates an extensive array of new features and enhancements to all its core components, and protects users from newly discovered security vulnerabilities. It is a major release and all users should download it."

Trolltech announced that Qtopia Phone Edition has been ported to the Neo1973 mobile phone from FIC and open-source software provider OpenMoko and has been GPL'ed. Now, in addition to Trolltech's Qtopia GreenphoneT, developers have an additional reference platform and form factor for development and testing of new mobile Qtopia applications. Read on for more and a short Q&A with Benoit Schillings, CTO of Trolltech (also of BeOS fame as one of the original Be, Inc. engineers).