Mozilla's Firefox browser will probably abandon support for older distributions of Linux, a company executive has said. Mike Conner, director of Firefox development, has proposed that the browser's next edition work only with more-or-less current Linux runtimes, rather than support aged versions.

Microsoft has said it will not sue Linux users with regards to the company's patent claims. "We're not litigating. If we wanted to we would have done so years ago," said Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's VP for intellectual property and licensing, in an interview. When asked for a reply regarding the claim of Microsoft that the Linux kernel infringes 42 of its patents, Linus Torvalds replied: "Can you get a list of which ones? Before that, it's just FUD, and there's not a whole lot I can say or do. Is there prior art? Are they trivial and obvious to one skilled in the art? Would we need to work around them? We don't know, because all I've heard so far is just FUD. If MS actually wanted us to not infringe their patents, they'd tell us. Since they don't, that must mean that they actually prefer the FUD."

"Good operating system performance depends in part on the operating system's ability to efficiently manage resources. In the old days, heap memory managers were the norm, but performance suffered due to fragmentation and the need for memory reclamation. Today, the Linux kernel uses a method that originated in Solaris but has been used in embedded systems for quite some time, allocating memory as objects based on their size. This article explores the ideas behind the slab allocator and examines its interfaces and their use."

"Jerry Rosenthal, chief executive officer of Open Invention Network, has just issued a statement about the Fortune article, which I take as a warning to any litigious folks out there who might be thinking about litigation against Linux that any such action will have consequences. 'We stand ready to leverage our IP portfolio to maintain the open patent environment OIN has helped create,' the statement concludes." Sun's Schwartz chimes in too.

"XGI Technology is still in business, but what has happened to them? We once saw hope in them for providing discrete graphics processors to take on the NVIDIA and ATI duopoly, but they have since discontinued their Volari 8 series. While they're no longer producing these desktop chips, they remain an active player in the server and embedded graphics industry - accompanied by their OSS driver."

Linux/Java has topped CEO Ed Zander's list things to look for from Motorola as it attempts a financial turnaround. At a New York press conference this morning, Zander introduced Linux-based 'Rokr' and 'Razr2' models, along with new top-level executives. Native SDKs won't be available.

Apple has updated its line of MacBook computers. "Apple today updated its MacBook consumer notebooks with faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors, 1GB of memory and larger hard drives in every model. The MacBook is just one-inch thin and features built-in 802.11n wireless networking for up to five times the performance and twice the range of 802.11g."

"After a long and controversial discussion with the project admins we've agreed on guidelines for creating a 3rd-party Haiku-based distribution. In brief, other distributions may not use the word 'Haiku' in their name and we will provide a 'Haiku Compatible' logo for distributions that comply to a short list of rules that ensure binary and source compatibility. Please read the detailed guidelines for further information."

AMD says its badly needed quad-core desktop processors are on the way, and they'll arrive bearing a new name. Two quad-core chips will be available in the second half of the year, the Phenom FX and the Phenom X4, and a dual-core chip based on a similar design called the Phenom X2 will also appear by the end of the year.

"This week, Microsoft laid out the next chapter in their plans regarding patents and open source Linux software, by going public with the claim that Linux infringes on some 235 of their software patents. The first chapter in this story began back in November of last year, when Microsoft entered into a agreement with Novell. These events, in my opinion, form the most important dynamic today as to the future success of Linux. How will all of this affect open source software and Linux? What should the open source community do? And... What will Linspire do?"

IBM's Power6 push began this week with a tweak to AIX support. In a letter to customers, IBM vowed to support future updates to AIX 5.3 for an additional two years. This appears to be IBM's Power6 concession, since the vendor, according to our sources, will announce Power6 systems this month and ship them in the middle of the year but won't have AIX 5.4 available for months. Normally, IBM would like to have a new major release of AIX ready for its new processors and have customers upgrade accordingly. No such luck.

Linus Torvalds has announced the first release candidate for version 2.6.22 of the Linux kernel, noting that the changelog itself for this release is just too big to put on the mailing list. According to the kernel-meister himself: "The diffstat and shortlogs are way too big to fit under the kernel mailing list limits, and the changes are all over the place. Almost seven thousand files changed, and that's not double-counting the files that got moved around. Architecture updates, drivers, filesystems, networking, security, build scripts, reorganizations, cleanups... You name it, it's there."

"Free software is great, and corporate America loves it. It's often high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and then copied at will. It's versatile - it can be customized to perform almost any large-scale computing task - and it's blessedly crash-resistant. A broad community of developers, from individuals to large companies like IBM, is constantly working to improve it and introduce new features. No wonder the business world has embraced it so enthusiastically: More than half the companies in the Fortune 500 are thought to be using the free operating system Linux in their data centers. But now there's a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it's being cast by Microsoft. The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft's patents."

AMD will soon deliver open graphics drivers, said Henri Richard just a few minutes ago, and the audience at the opening keynote of the Red Hat Summit broke into applause and cheers. Richard, AMD's executive vice president of sales and marketing, promised: "I'm here to commit to you that it's going to get done." He also promised that AMD is "going to be very proactive in changing way we interface with the Linux community".