"Xcerion is a Swedish Internet startup whose founders include ex-Microsoft employees Lou Perazzoli and John Connors. The company will make headlines later this year when they officially unveil what they call an "Internet OS" dubbed XIOS that runs in a web browser. We took an early look at the XIOS concept and had the chance to talk about the project with the company's CEO, Daniel Arthursson."

"Sony has recently updated their VAIO UX Micro PC line with the UX390N series. This little beast packs the power of a full blown Microsoft Windows Vista computer into a form factor of only 5.91"x3.74"x1.27"x1.50". When you first look at palm sized portable device you may guess it to be a souped up version of the Sony PSP, but if you take a look at the USD 2449.99 sticker price, you will probably guess it does a whole lot more. And that it does."

Gaim, the ubiquitous open source instant messaging program, in order to settle a lawsuit with America Online, was renamed "Pidgin" last week. The derivative projects, libgaim and gaim-text will be renamed libpurple and Finch respectively. The new website is at pigdin.im, but it's currently pointing to the Gaim sourceforge site. Pidgin 2.0.0, in development for well over a year, is expected this week.

"The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed etch, after 21 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of eleven processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. It also features cryptographic software and compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.1 of the LSB. Using a now fully integrated installation process, Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 comes with out-of-the-box support for encrypted partitions. This release introduces a newly developed graphical frontend to the installation system supporting scripts using composed characters and complex languages; the installation system for Debian GNU/Linux has now been translated to 58 languages." Update: Debian 3.1r6 has also been released. Update II: Screenshots, and how to upgrade to it.

Paul Thurrot writes about Windows XP SP3: "If you were looking for any glimpse into the mind of Microsoft, this is it: the company has completely abandoned Windows XP, and it has absolutely no plans to ever ship an XP SP3. My guess is that Microsoft will do what it did with the final Windows 2000 Service Pack: claim years later that it's no longer needed and just ship a final security patch roll-up. This is the worst kiss-off to any Microsoft product I've ever seen, and you'd think the company would show a little more respect to its best-selling OS of all time."

"After several weeks of discussion the leaders of Compiz and Beryl have agreed that the two communities shall reunite. This decision is supported by both David and Quinn and represents the majority decision of the administrators and developers in each community."

"IceWM is perfect for Windows' 'immigrants' especially for users with older computers. IceWM will be suitable for advanced users who are looking for a lightweight and simple window manager." More here.

"I, Michael Buesch, am one of the maintainers of the GPL'd Linux wireless LAN driver for the Broadcom chip (bcm43xx). The Copyright holders of bcm43xx (which includes me) want to talk to you, OpenBSD bcw developers, about possible GPL license and therefore copyright violations in your bcw driver. We believe that you might have directly copied code out of bcm43xx (licensed under GPL v2), without our explicit permission, into bcw (licensed under BSD license)." The entire thread can be found here.

Microsoft has just made the Windows Longhorn Server April CTP available for download to tech beta testers. It features several improvements to the core and has implemented a lot of new features to fill in the holes present in the February CTP.

Pawel Dawidek announced today that the ZFS filesystem is now part of the FreeBSD operating system. iSCSI, booting, ICLs, and extended attributes are not supported yet.

Mandriva today launches the 4GB version of Mandriva Flash, its live flash drive. Mandriva Flash 2GB, which was released in December 2006, has been a true success for Mandriva. It was sold out in less than two weeks! Mandriva has listen to user feedback and decided to develop a new version of its best seller flash drive.

This review at DesktopLinux.com takes a quick look at the just-released, Ubuntu-based SimplyMEPIS 6.5 Linux distribution. The author finds it to be easy to install and configure, and a solid desktop platform to use, but notes that the distribution's Beryl 3D graphics support can be challenging to get working.

"Even though I enjoy using my Linux boxes a great deal for the most part, there are still those little annoyances that are enough to drive a guy batty. After all, even something as elegant and as effective as the top Linux distributions can still do certain things to drive you nuts from time to time." More here.

The Free Software Foundation has released the second draft of version 3 of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). In addition to general editing, the new draft ties the LGPL more closely to the GNU General Public License (GPL), introduces the concept of a "linked version," and adds a new option for distributing combined works.