"'Siag, it sucks less!' This is the slogan for Siag Office. This and the self-effacing name for the Siag Office Word Processor, Pathetic Writer, might leave you thinking that this office suite is a mere plaything, a university student's cobbled-together programming assignment. But don't be fooled by first impressions. Siag Office is a lightweight suite of applications which might be just the right set of office tools for you, especially if you have older hardware."

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has often been criticised for keeping their bug reporting and collaboration tool, Launchpad, closed-source. Today, Canonical has started opening up Launchpad by releasing its first open-source component, Storm. "Storm is an ORM that simplifies the development of database-backed applications in Python, especially for projects that use very large databases or multiple databases with a seamless web front-end", said Gustavo Niemeyer, lead developer of Storm at Canonical. "Storm is particularly designed to feel very natural to Python programmers, and exposes multiple databases as /stores/ in a clean and easy to use fashion."

The Linux kernel process scheduler, as you know it, has been completely ripped out and replaced with a completely new one called Completely Fair Scheduler. How fair it will be, remains to be seen. Here's what its original creator Ingo Molnar says: "80% Of CFS's design can be summed up in a single sentence: CFS basically models an 'ideal, precise multi-tasking CPU' on real hardware." Learn more about the new scheduler from the CFS design document.

"Have you ever wondered what really happens to those Windows error reports you can send to Microsoft whenever a Windows app crashes? How many reports it must receive before taking action? Or whether it's worth your time and effort to send duplicate reports if the error occurs repeatedly? I did, and I asked Microsoft. Unfortunately, after a week and a handful of assurances that they were working on responses, the software giant refused to speak with me."

"Now that Microsoft has declared itself untouched by any GPLv3 terms, everyone is trying to figure out if they have a leg to stand on. There is a whole lot of analysis going on, with some wondering if Microsoft is a distributor of software under GPLv3 by means of the voucher distribution and others wondering just what those vouchers included."

Under the name Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office, Sun has released its import/export filter for the OpenDocument format, which the ISO has recognized as a standard, for versions 2000, XP, and 2003 of Microsoft's Office suite; the plug-in can be downloaded via our software repository. The extension allows users of MS Office to read and create text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in the free OpenOffice suite and its commercial version called StarOffice.

Dell is getting ready to launch systems with Ubuntu Linux, but is not yet releasing details of the final specifications. However, the company did say on Friday that as well as a consumer version of Ubuntu, it had plans to launch a small-business version 'in the future'. After some confusion over Dell's Linux strategy, the company said it felt the need to clarify things. "I wanted to be clear that Dell does have plans to offer Linux to more consumers in additional locations outside the United States," said Dell's Lionel Menchaca, digital media manager.

An effort by users to produce a charity that will support future RISC OS software development is beginning to take shape. Using a mailing list to coordinate the project, a group of punters eventually hope to create a website that will allow people to offer cash and skills to developers.

"After internal consideration in the Samba Team we have decided to adopt the GPLv3 and LGPLv3 licences for all future releases of Samba. The GPLv3 is the updated version of the GPLv2 license under which Samba is currently distributed. It has been updated to improve compatibility with other licenses and to make it easier to adopt internationally, and is an improved version of the license to better suit the needs of Free Software in the 21st Century. To allow people to distinguish which Samba version is released with the new GPLv3 license, we are updating our next version release number. The next planned version release was to be 3.0.26, this will now be renumbered so the GPLv3 version release will be 3.2.0. To be clear, all versions of Samba numbered 3.2 and later will be under the GPLv3, all versions of Samba numbered 3.0.x and before remain under the GPLv2."

"I was a huge fan of the Connections series, hosted by James Burke, when it aired on the Discovery Channel. Its basic premise: how seemingly unrelated discoveries influenced other discoveries, which ultimately led to some modern-day convenience. The moral, if you will, is that no advancement is made in isolation. Not surprisingly, the same is true for Language Integrated Query (LINQ). In simple terms, LINQ is a series of language extensions that supports data querying in a type-safe way; it will be released with the next version Visual Studio, code-named "Orcas." The data to be queried can take the form of XML (LINQ to XML), databases (LINQ-enabled ADO.NET, which includes LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Dataset and LINQ to Entities), objects (LINQ to Objects), and so on."

Linus has announced the release of the 2.6.22 kernel. Much has happened in this development cycle, including the addition of the mac80211 (formerly 'Devicescape') wireless networking stack, the eventfd system calls, some new TCP congestion control algorithms, a rewritten CFQ I/O scheduler, a new IEEE1934 (Firewire) stack, support for the Blackfin architecture, the long-awaited IVTV TV tuner driver, and much more. See the KernelNewbies 2.6.22 page for vast amounts of detail, the long-format changelog for even more detail, or the short-form changelog for a (relatively) concise listing of patches in this release.

"Ars Technica recently got its hands on the new Intel Classmate laptop computer, one of the new projects competing for a share of school-aged computer users in developing countries. I was able to survey this machine thanks to Helio Chissini de Castro of Mandriva. The unit I looked at was powered by a specialized version of Mandriva 2007, with customizations aimed at school-aged children."

The third release candidate for Ion3 has been released. "This third 'rc' release again simply fixes some minor problems in the previous release." Get it from the download page. Ion is a tiling tabbed window manager designed with keyboard users in mind.

Mobile-gadget makers are starting to take advantage of software-defined radio, a new technology allowing a single device to receive signals from multiple sources, including TV stations and cell phone networks. But a new federal rule set to take effect Friday could mean that radios built on 'open-source elements' may encounter a more sluggish path to market - or, in the worst case scenario, be shut out altogether. U.S. regulators, it seems, believe the inherently public nature of open-source code makes it more vulnerable to hackers, leaving 'a high burden to demonstrate that it is sufficiently secure'.