"With an avalanche of last-minute commits, the KOffice Google Summer of Code students finished yet another great Summer of Code. We had some very exciting projects this year, and most of them were as great a success as last year. Read on for details of the achievements."

A curious network performance reduction noticed by many Windows Vista users of the 2CPU forum that became the talk of Slashdot last week has been identified as having been caused not by DRM, as Slashdot users expected, but by a curious prioritization 'feature' of Vista that's intentionally biased toward Media Player at the expense of network and system resources.

A few months ago, Sun responded to criticism of its claims of being a transformed and open company. As part of their initiative to address this issue, they have opened a Wiki-based FOSS Open Hardware Documentation page working with individuals from the OpenBSD project and others. If you need documentation for Sun hardware, please post your request on the aforementioned page.

"This article will briefly discuss the new features found within Gutsy Gibbon and hopefully give you a better idea of what to expect when the final version of Gutsy Gibbons is released in October. Some of the more notable new features are a Graphical Configuration tool for X, improvements in plug-in handling for Mozilla Firefox, revamped printing system with PDF printing by default, fast user switching, new desktop search (Tracker) application and the new AppArmor security framework."

Taiwan's leading computer seller Acer is to take over US PC maker Gateway in a USD 710m deal. The takeover will create the world's third largest producer of personal computers, with shipments of more than 20 million PCs and sales of USD 15bn. The deal may also see Acer try to block Chinese rival Lenovo from buying Packard Bell's operations in Europe.

The earliest OSNews articles and news postings have not been available online in many years, as they were mostly static HTML, and when we made the switch over to our v1 CMS, I just filed it away on my hard drive. But to celebrate our 10 year anniversary, let's take a peek at what was hot in the OS world in 1997. Visit our OSNews 1997 archive. We have some feature articles, opinion pieces, and a fascinating view of several days of daily news frozen in time (and chock full of dead links). Take some time to look it over. On an unrelated note, Read More if you are in, or have contacts in, the graphic design world and would like to help OSNews.

The BBC has interviewed Vint Cerf. "Vint Cerf is known as one of the founder fathers of the internet and played a key role in the development of the protocols which underpin the global net. He was a founding member of the Internet Society and is Google's Chief Internet Evangelist."

The second beta of Mandriva Linux 2008, codenamed Galilee, is now available. The release notes are available here. A guide to major new features (some of which are not yet implemented in this beta) is available here, and the detailed technical specifications are available here. This beta is available as a three CD or one DVD Free edition (containing no non-free software or drivers) for the x86-32 and x86-64 architectures, with a traditional installer. Future betas will be available in One live/install CD hybrid editions with proprietary drivers.

"Late last night we started receiving reports from readers experiencing problems with Windows Genuine Advantage authentication. Users of both Windows XP and Windows Vista were writing to say that they could not validate their installations using WGA, and one user even said that his installation was invalidated by the service. We contacted our sources at Microsoft, who told us off the record that the company is aware of a major WGA server outage affecting users across the globe. Microsoft is telling users who are affected that they should 'try again' later, with some support techs telling readers that Microsoft is aiming to have a fix in place by Tuesday, August 28th."

Syllable's resident graphics designer Ruud Kuin has published the first issue of his Syllable Development Newsletter . This new project is a continuation of the SDN magazines by Michael Saunders that were popular around two years ago. The first issue contains five main articles and five smaller ones, for a total of eleven pages, by six contributors. Subjects range from a developer interview to the first part of a programming tutorial series. It is accompanied by an archive that conveniently collects software that was released recently: three pieces this time.

Microsoft will launch several projects around Linux and other open source technologies for allowing Indian customers the option to run its products on different operating systems and technologies. The initiative, to be rolled out in around a month's time, is aimed at grabbing "more market share for the Windows platform by allowing interoperability with open source technologies such as Linux," said Radhesh Balakrishnan, director, platform strategy, Microsoft India.

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 5 has been released. "The Ubuntu developers are hurrying to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source Community has to offer. Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 5 is the fifth alpha release of Ubuntu 7.10, and this alpha release brings a host of excellent new features."

"In this article, I'll compare Ubuntu 7.04 with the upcoming release of PC-BSD 1.4. Having used both operating systems extensively, PC-BSD is the one I recommend and the one I install in desktop environments. If you've used Ubuntu before, but haven't tried PC-BSD, give it a try. The increase in responsiveness (i.e., everything seems to just run faster) and ease-of-use will surprise you."

OpenSUSE 10.3 beta 2 has been released. "The openSUSE Team is proud to announce the release of openSUSE 10.3 Beta 2. Though this release should not be used on any production machines, everyone can help shape this release by testing out installations and much more. For more information on the release schedule, take a look at the Roadmap."