"Red Flag Linux has turned out to be little more than a key bargaining chip in a high stakes game of commerce between the Chinese government and the world’s largest software maker. Thanks to some major concessions on source code and a precipitous price drop, the Chinese government has now thoroughly embraced Windows and Office. And thanks to a major about-face in the way that it deals with piracy, Microsoft has also won over the Chinese people."

"During this years GUADEC Red Hat developer Havoc Pennington proposed his idea of an 'Online Desktop' to the developers of the GNOME project. Through deep integration with web services and 'zero-maintenance' the Open Source client aims to get the 'perfect window to the Internet'. During GUADEC Andreas Proschofsky had the chance to talk to Pennington about advantages and possible problems of the Online Desktop concept, the necessity of Windows-support and about Red Hats 'return to the desktop'."

A lot of people have been emailing us about an issue we are having with one of our ads taking over OSNews. Thank you all for emailing us, the information provided is of good use to us. We are currently working on the problem, and will let you know once it has been fixed. We would like to apologise for the inconvenience. Update by DA: I think that I've tracked down the offender. Read more for details Update 2: This time I think we really fixed it.

"This article describes how to easily create a user interface using Python bindings, Edje, Embryo, and Animations. The application will be a small application launcher and the actual interface will be written using edje and animations. The python part doesn't have any knowledge of the interface, where the icons are placed, how they should move, nor if they are using some kind of effect, like for instance pulsing. All it does is listen for 'selected' signals."

SkyOS has received an update to the Viewer application (system file browser). Many changes have been implemented, including a tabbed interface, universal drag-and-drop, and many others. Head on over to the SkyOS website to see a video of the new Viewer features in action. Thanks to the recently implemented Profiler, an interesting system bottleneck has been identified and fixed in SkyOS. This has allowed for increased performance across many functions within SkyOS.

Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Dell will expand its Linux offerings. "What's been announced to date is not the full extent of what we will see over the next couple of weeks and months," Shuttleworth said an interview late on Wednesday. "There are additional offerings in the pipeline," he said. Shuttleworth founded Canonical to provide support for Ubuntu Linux. A Dell spokeswoman, Anne Camden, declined comment, saying the company does not discuss products in the pipeline.

Rafael J. Wysocki (a suspend maintainer) has written an article speaking about the current status of suspend and hibernation support in Linux, its design, know problems, and future development. "Below is a document describing the current state of development of the suspend and hibernation infrastructure: how it works, what known problems there are in it and what the future development plans are (at least as far as I am concerned)."

Mac OS X is a powerful platform for Java development. While the Java development environment is fully integrated into Mac OS X, the Eclipse integrated development environment brings a fully integrated Java development environment to Mac OS X that provides a consistent cross-platform experience. This article shows you how to use this environment to import existing Xcode projects into Eclipse, tweak key bindings, and integrate Eclipse with the Mac OS X-bundled Concurrent Versions System.

"After 6 months of careful integration and testing, I'm happy to announce availability of Linux 2.4.35," 2.4 maintainer Willy Tarreau announced on the lkml. This is the second stable 2.4 kernel released since Willy became the 2.4 kernel maintainer nearly a year ago in August of 2006. Source level changes can be viewed through the linux-2.4 gitweb interface.

"As suspected, the European Union formally lodged antitrust charges against Intel, accusing the CPU maker of using illegal methods to compete against its main rival AMD. "I can confirm the statement of objections has been sent," European Commission spokesperson Ton Van Lierop said in a statement given to Reuters. This action represents the culmination of years of antitrust investigation by the EU - and is likely beginning of a very unpleasant experience for Intel. While the exact Statement of Objection has not yet been made public, the EU charges that Intel used illegal methods to coerce OEM computer manufacturers to ship systems with Intel rather than AMD processors."

"This article briefly goes over six mini systems that you don't have to build yourself. They are an ideal platform for a project or for a silent system for simple tasks like checking your email. The intention was to find systems that are small, Linux-ready, and customizable, but price was factored in as well."

IBM has announced a version of its System i business server range that uses the company's Power6 processor, which the tech giant claims is the fastest chip it has ever built. The System i 570 uses the 4.7GHz Power6, launched in May, with up to 16 cores, a processor that has come top in many industry benchmarks.

Sun's latest Niagara and Rock details have reached El Reg, and they confirm that the hardware maker is up to some very ambitious stuff. First off, Sun looks set for the imminent release of its first Niagara II-based servers - the T5120 and T5220 systems. Customers will see 1U and 2U boxes, respectively, each with one of the 'Niagara II' or (more formally) UltraSPARC T2 chips. It looks like the eight-core, 64-thread chip will arrive at 1.5GHz.

"In his keynote at OSCON, Microsoft General Manager of Platform Strategy Bill Hilf announced that Microsoft is submitting its shared source licenses to the Open Source Initiative. This is a huge, long-awaited move. It will be earthshaking for both Microsoft and for the open source community if the licenses are in fact certified as open source licenses. Microsoft has been releasing a lot of software as shared source (nearly 650 projects, according to Bill). If this is suddenly certified as true open source software, it will be a lot harder to draw a bright line between Microsoft and the open source community." In addition, Microsoft has launched a new website where it details its relationship with open source.