"We now know more details about Red Hat's forthcoming Global Desktop, but there's still no download. In fact, the company doesn't plan to push this new Linux desktop online; instead, you're more likely to see it pre-installed on Intel's white box partners' PCs. Red Hat will be certifying Global Desktop for Intel's vPro PC architecture. The vPro is Intel's attempt to re-invent the business desktop."

Techgage has taken a hard look at the latest release from Gentoo, particularly its installation process. Although there is a revamped installer, using it proved to be a less than perfect experience: "This installer does not function like the previous ones. Before, the installer would wait until you made changes to the last option before it began installing. Now, everything is installed along the way."

What's eating the battery life of my Linux laptop? Which software component causes the most power to be consumed? These are important questions without a good answer... until now. Intel announced the PowerTOP tool, a program that collects the various pieces of information from your system and presents an overview of how well your laptop is doing in terms of power savings. A number of apps, like Firefox, Evolution and Gaim have been modified by Intel to help consume less power and hopefully these patches will be integrated to their main trees or by distros.

"The Free Software movement is dead. Linux doesn't exist in 2007. Even Linus has got a job today." Controversial statements from the head of Microsoft's Linux Labs, Bill Hilf. Speaking on the last leg of a tour of Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, Bill Hilf, more formally known as Microsoft's platform strategy director, was in the region to 'be descriptive and intelligent in giving people an understanding of open source and debunk a lot of the mythology around open source'.

"The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first alpha release of the KDE Desktop Environment, version 4.0. The release is a basis for the integration of powerful new technologies that will be included in KDE 4. It has been given the codename 'Knut'." Meanwhile, the KDe HIG team is looking for help with finding applications that violate the (unfinished) KDE HIG.

"The Intel 965GM Express Chipset represents the first mobile product that implements fourth generation Intel graphics architecture. Designed to support advanced rendering features in modern graphics APIs, this chipset includes support for programmable vertex, geometry, and fragment shaders. Extending Intel's commitment to work with the X.org and Mesa communities to continuously improve and enhance the drivers, support for this new chipset is provided through the X.org 2.0 Intel driver and the Mesa 6.5.3 releases. These drivers represent significant work by both Intel and the broader open source community."

Heise.de has an in-depth review of the OLPC laptop after testing the laptop. Their conclusion: "The XO laptops already shipped out are a clear sign of what can be done when visionaries, global firms, and international political organizations work together."

Red Hat is actively talking to Microsoft to improve Linux/Windows interoperability, but says it will only sign an interoperability agreement with Microsoft if it is based entirely on open standards.

Review of the new Mandriva 2007 Spring Edition. We downloaded and installed three different versions of Mandriva 2007.1 and there was one version that come out head and shoulders above the rest.

The 0.68 release of the Visopsys OS went live today. It's a maintenance release with the usual array of tweaks and bug fixes, plus a focus on disk I/O performance; the software disk caching was re-written, and lookahead/write caching were added to the IDE driver. Another new feature is secure deletion (shredding) of files, partitions, and disks. Change log here and downloads here.

Red Hat announced a new client product, Red Hat Global Desktop, at its annual Red Hat Summit tradeshow in San Diego. This move is designed, in part, to compete with Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Desktop, which has achieved success in business desktop markets, and with Ubuntu 7.04, which will soon appear on Dell PCs. Some reporting about this can also be found at the company's magazine. Update: Elsewhere, talking security with Red Hat's Mark Cox.

"Thanks to the work of one of the most active code contributors lately, Hugo Santos, Haiku is getting a generic FreeBSD network driver compatibility layer that will allow FreeBSD network drivers to be compiled and used in Haiku with few, if any changes. At the time of this writing, not only has Hugo committed the compatibility layer to the Haiku tree, but he has also succeeded in building two FreeBSD drivers (if_em/Intel Pro 1000 and if_le/PCNet) which are now capable of running in Haiku."

In an effort to spur adoption of Solaris, Sun has begun a project code-named Indiana to try to give its operating system some of the trappings of Linux. The project is one of the items on the to-do list of Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian version of Linux and, as of March, Sun's chief operating systems officer. Though he wouldn't confirm the name of the project, Murdock - who's from Indiana - discussed the project's essence at the JavaOne conference here Monday, and Sun spokesman Russ Castronovo confirmed the name.

"Mandriva recently released its first distro of the year, dubbed Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring. Like previous releases, Spring is available in five editions, two of which can be freely downloaded. I installed and worked with the USD 76 Powerpack edition, which includes support and several gigabytes of packages. Not only does Powerpack score over other multiple CD/DVD free-of-cost distros, it also makes competing non-free distros eat dust."