Motorola last month quietly shipped its first Linux-based RAZR2 V8 phone "bound for North America," in its words. Additionally, the world's third-largest handset vendor (Motorola was passed up by Samsung this year) is offering new "MotoMAGX" tools supporting native Linux third-party apps.

The release 2.8 of GPE is complete and available for download. The new release comes with a large number of bugfixes and improvements such as an improved calendar, many fixed import/export and synchronisation issues as well as support for Maemo in additional components like Starling (the new audio player) and gpe-filemanager.

Apple has released new iMacs, with a new interior (up to 2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo) as well as new exterior (thinner, with a black back, as well as black 'eyeliner' around the screen), including a new keyboard, during a press event in Cupertino today. Apple also released new version of its iLife and iWork suites. iLife has seen updates on all its applications, while iWork has also received a new spreadsheet application called Numbers. Update: The Mac Mini has been updated too.

Microsoft has succeeded in fracturing the Linux and open-source community with the patent indemnity agreements it has entered into with several prominent vendors, Ubuntu leader and Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth told eWEEK. The strategy behind that was to drive a wedge into the open-source community and unsettle the marketplace, Shuttleworth said. He also took issue with the software maker for not disclosing the 235 of its patents it claims are being violated by Linux and other open-source software.

Fedora 8 Test 1 has been released. "Fedora 8 Test one has been loosed upon the world today. Included in this release is a 'Fedora' installable 'choose your own adventure' style set of isos and trees for i386, x86_64, and ppc(64). Also included are Live images of both the Fedora Desktop and the Fedora KDE desktop." And there are screenshots.

"About half a year ago I was looking around me and seeing stagnation in the GNOME community. I was concerned that GNOME had lost its momentum and that we were just making boring incremental releases that added very little new functionality. I think I was very wrong. I'd like to take this time to list some things that are happening right now in the GNOME community that have me very excited. These are the projects that are actively improving the future of the GNOME desktop." Let's hope a punctuation checker will be part of GNOME too. One Aaron is enough.

Dell has launched two PCs in Europe with Ubuntu 7.04 Linux factory installed. The Inspiron 6400n and the Inspiron 530n are now in the UK, Germany and France, as Dell's initial response to calls from Linux enthusiasts for the open source operating system to be pre-installed.

MidnightBSD 0.1 is now available. It includes several software packages such as ksh, sudo, OpenNTPD, gcc 3.4.4, BIND 9.3.4 (plus patch), and others in the base system. "MidnightBSD is a desktop operating system for x86 compatible, and soon amd64 compatible architectures. It was originally based on FreeBSD 6.1 Beta. The goal of the project is to create a BSD with ease of use and simplicity in mind."

AmigaSYS 3 Plus has been released. "AmigaSYS is a pre-installed Amiga operation system pack for WinUAE and for high performance Amiga computers. AmigaSYS contains everything you need for emulation. AmigaSYS supports Workbench 3.0, 3.1, and AmigaOS 3.9."

Hi-Mobile sent us over the Sony Ericsson W580i Walkman feature phone for a review, and we give it a whirl. It's been over a year since the last time we tested the non-smartphone Sony Ericsson platform and it's interesting to see the advancements in the software department.

"Lenovo, the world's No. 3 PC maker, said on Monday it would start selling laptop computers preloaded with Linux software from Novell instead of Microsoft's Windows operating system." Ars Technica has more on the announcement. "ThinkPad customers will soon have a new configuration option, as Lenovo and Novell have announced that the popular laptops will begin shipping with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED) preinstalled. Although the ThinkPad has been certified for Linux for some time, this marks the first time Lenovo will ship a laptop with Linux preinstalled - while providing both hardware and OS support." Lenovo is the third big name to sell consumer computers with Linux installed (after Dell and Acer).

Openbox 3.4.4 has been released. "Openbox is a minimalistic, highly configurable, next generation window manager with extensive standards support. Openbox lets you bring the latest applications outside of a full desktop environment. Most modern applications have been written with GNOME and KDE in mind. With support for the latest freedesktop.org standards, as well as careful adherence to previous standards, Openbox provides an environment where applications work the way they were designed to."

"In an interview today with Linux-Watch, controversial Linux leader Kevin Carmony confirmed rumors that he had resigned as CEO of desktop Linux vendor Linspire on July 31. Carmony said he plans to work on several of his own business projects, and on Mitt Romney's presidential campaign."

"It has been almost two years since LWN covered the swap prefetch patch. This work, done by Con Kolivas, is based on the idea that if a system is idle, and it has pushed user data out to swap, perhaps it should spend a little time speculatively fetching that swapped data back into any free memory that might be sitting around. Then, when some application wants that memory in the future, it will already be available and the time-consuming process of fetching it from disk can be avoided. There is a vocal set of users out there who will attest that swap prefetch has made their systems work better. Even so, the swap prefetch patch has languished in the -mm tree for almost all of those two years with no path to the mainline in sight. Con has given up on the patch (and on kernel development in general). It is an unfortunate thing when a talented and well-meaning developer runs afoul of the kernel development process and walks away. So it is worth the trouble to try to understand what went wrong."