Groklaw reports that a company called IP Innovation, LLC, has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Novell and Red Hat. Groklaw goes into black helicopter mode, trying to find a tie between this IP Innovation thing and Microsoft - and it finds it too. A few ex-Microsoft employees now work at IP Innovation. Do with it as you please.

"It has been over four months since Dell started shipping computers preloaded with Ubuntu GNU/Linux to home consumers in the United States. Lets take a moment to look at the progress that has been made so far. John Hull, manager of the Linux Engineering team in Austin was kind enough to let me interview him by e-mail. Besides commenting on the current state of affairs with Ubuntu on Dell machines, he also offers some insight in how the Linux team at Dell works and opens a small window into the future of Linux at Dell."

The release candidate for Ubuntu 7.10 has been released. "The Ubuntu developers are hurrying to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software that the open source and free software communities have to offer. This is the Ubuntu 7.10 release candidate, which brings a host of excellent new features. We consider this release candidate to be complete, stable and suitable for testing by any user. The final stable version will be released in October 2007."

Red Hat is taking a business-as-usual stance in the face of renewed rumblings from Microsoft's Steve Ballmer over the need for Red Hat Linux users to pay up. Ballmer has repeatedly claimed that Microsoft IP is found in Linux. "People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to eventually compensate us," said Ballmer at a Microsoft event last week in London. But Red Hat itself has adopted a stance that keeps it above the Microsoft patent fray. "At this point, please reference our previous statements on this topic," said a Red Hat spokesman contacted Tuesday about Microsoft's statements on Red Hat Linux users. The spokesman pointed out a Red Hat blog posted "after the last FUD statements from Microsoft" in May, she said. Shuttleworth agrees.

"The principal reason given for the tremendous under-the-hood changes to Windows unveiled early this year in Vista was the need to overhaul the security model. Indeed, Vista has proven to be a generally more secure operating system, though some vulnerabilities that apply to ordinary software impact Vista users just as much as any other. But now, software analysts testing the latest build 3205 of the beta for Windows XP Service Pack 3 are discovering a wealth of genuinely new features - not just patches and security updates (although there are literally over a thousand of those), but services that could substantially improve system security without overhauling the kernel like in Vista."

"The Dock in Mac OS X is unique in comparison to the user interface of Windows, most Linux distros that emulate the Windows desktop, and previous versions of the Classic Mac OS. Apple has significantly updated the Dock in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Here's a look at what's new and different in our 3-page report."

"Luke Schierer started using Pidgin (then known as Gaim) in 1999, not long after its first release. He officially joined the project in 2001, after being on the IRC channel and helping out for a few several months. He is now one of the core developers. Somewhere between his full time job working with Linux clusters and his time spent developing Pidgin, he finds time to tell PC World about his life, open source and Pidgin."

SkyOS Beta 6796 has been released. "This build features a complete new multimedia framework (the ISS), automatic file type sniffing, a new Media Center, new Panel, updated Viewer, new Application Manager and various other applications using the new C++ API. Furthermore: 28 additional API Classes, new and updated libraries, customizable WindUI theme, 220+ fixed bugs including critical boot bug fixes."

"Recently there's been a lot of news about OpenSolaris, more specifically in reference to the great progress made by virtualization technologies in it. In this article, I will examine some of these technologies, and compare them with the state of the art on other platforms."

Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available for download on the official site (release announcement), and on the network of public mirror servers. 2008 includes all the latest software and enhancements over previous Mandriva releases. You will find KDE 3.5.7 and the new GNOME 2.20 already integrated, kernel 2.6.22.9 with fair scheduling support, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, a 3D-accelerated desktop (Compiz Fusion and Metisse), Firefox 2.0.0.6, and much more. You can read about the new features of Mandriva Linux 2008 in depth in the Release Tour. The release notes contain important information on changes from previous releases. The errata will contain information on any future known issues and solutions for them.

"Guest columnist Howard Fosdick has previously used Puppy Linux to successfully revive 'mature' PCs. Now, he takes a broader, deeper look at the parsimonious distribution and its potential value on normal desktop PCs, covering its features, flexibility, capability to peacefully coexist with Windows, ease of use, and limitations."

"Novell's long journey from NetWare to Linux is finally complete. On Oct. 8, Novell released Open Enterprise Server 2 to its customers worldwide. Shortly after acquiring SUSE and its enterprise-focused Linux distribution, Novell announced that its follow-on to NetWare 6.5 would ship as a set of network services that could run atop the NetWare and the Linux kernel, OES 1.0. OES, which began shipping in April 2005, was the first major step in Novell moving NetWare's services from its native operating system to Linux. Now, with OES 2.0, the NetWare operating system kernel, NetWare 6.5 SP7, is still there if you run it, but it runs on top of the Xen hypervisor. You can also run the NetWare services, or a para-virtualized instance of NetWare, on top of Xen with the SLES 10 SP 1 kernel. So, if you're wedded to NetWare and its way of doing things, you don't have to wave good-bye to it."

"ROX is one of the genuinely interesting file managers available for the major platforms - GNU/Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows (under Cygwin). As can be inferred from the manager’s website, ROX-Filer is a project aimed to move the best features of RISC OS onto Linux and Unix platforms. Its small footprint and configurability are its unquestionable hallmarks."

"NetBSD has been involved in the Google Summer of Code since its conception in 2005. This year we were glad to once again have the oppertunity to introduce a number of students to our operating system, to Open Source software development and get them sponsored by Google to work on projects defined by the NetBSD developers. The students working on this year's projects were mentored by various NetBSD developers with extensive experience in the respective work areas."