The Fedora Project Board met this week to discuss issues surrounding the upcoming release of Fedora 7. Though originally scheduled for release on April 26, that date has now been moved back to May 24, dashing the development team's plan to debut the final release at this year's Red Hat Summit. One thing that Summit attendees will see, though, is the artwork that has been selected as Fedora 7's new theme.

"Windows Vista has been available to consumers for nearly a month now. Many new and revamped PCs incorporating Microsoft's latest operating system have been released, with lots more on the way. So far, we've looked at a range of Vista desktops from gaming rigs to all-in-one PCs to low-end machines, and by and large, we've liked what we've seen." By the way, some people really go to great lengths to... Well, I don't know.

When a project with the size and scope of KDE gets to be as big as it is, sometimes changing a decision established almost a decade earlier is very difficult. KDE has relied on autotools to build most of the project since its inception, but for the last year, KDE 4 has been building with CMake, a newer build system that is rapidly becoming a heavyweight contender. Read on for more.

The NetBSD Foundation announced that Force10 Networks, the pioneer in building and securing high performance networks, has leveraged NetBSD as the foundation for the Force10 Operating System (FTOS). Based on the open source UNIX-like system, FTOS provides the software scalability and resiliency that powers the Force10 TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers.

There are currently at least five popular ways of installing software in GNU/Linux. None of them are widely accepted throughout the popular distributions. This situation is not a problem for experienced users - they can make decisions for themselves. However, for a newcomer in the GNU/Linux world, installing new software is always pretty confusing. The article tries to sum up some of the recent efforts to fix this problem and examine the possible future of packaging software in GNU/Linux.

Linux distributor TerraSoft is accepting pre-orders for Sony Playstation 3 gaming devices pre-installed with Linux. Linux is installed alongside the Playstation 3's native gaming OS.

Windows developers can now port Visual Basic applications to Linux without modifying their code, using an open source project backed by Novell. The Mono project has built a compiler that lets developers code using Visual Basic inside Visual Studio or other preferred tools environments and run the Visual Basic code on non-Windows platforms without the time and cost of modification.

"Samsung knows a thing or two about designing notebooks. The Q35 Red that I recently reviewed created quite a stir every time I pulled it out of my bag at CES last month, and the ultra-slim Q30 won over many users who were looking for a machine that was ultra-thin and light. But now the Samsung design team has pushed the boat out and created the new Aura series of notebooks, which look set to go head to head with Apple's ultra-stylish MacBooks."

"Say, you've got an SVN for your OpenSource project and would like to mirror it to some remote location that hosts opensource projects (such as SourceForge.net or dev.java.net). I'll skip the phase of an account and project registration and assume you've already got your credentials and SVN repo url. I also assume you are on Debian or Ubuntu and your SVN is up and running under Apache httpd."

The release focuses on bug fixes, better connectivity and support for additional devices. Changelog is here. You can dowload the client here. Please note that the server-side was upgraded too and has introduced a small rendering bug with the mobile OSNews menu; hopefully it will be resolved soon.

"Are you confused by the plethora of testing and comparison options in the Bash shell? This tip helps you demystify the various types of file, arithmetic, and string tests so you will always know when to use test, , ], (( )), or if-then-else constructs."

Artificial Intelligence has been at the center of any geek's dream for years. One of the projects that's closer to true AI is Cyc. The open source version of the commercial Cyc product is called OpenCyc and it reached v1.0 status last year. Their mission is to grow both the Cyc & OpenCyc ontology and knowledge base -- even if they are not directly affiliated with Cycorp (the original creators of the Cyc technology). The answers to our mini-interview are provided by project members Mark Baltzegarm, John De Oliveira and Brad Bouldin.

Microsoft has apologised for serving malware via its websites and Windows Live Messenger software. APC reader Jackie Murphy reported the problem: "With Microsoft launching Vista along with their Defender software to protect users from viruses and spyware, it seems therefore to be an oxymoron that they have started to putting paid changing banner advertisements for malware, on the popular MSN groups servers." A Microsoft Australia spokesperson confirmed the malware vendor had slipped through its ad booking processes.

"As Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, UK-based Simon Phipps' job could become ever more tiring, it seems. The biggest step the company has taken so far is definitely the announcement of the Java Development Kit (and Runtime Environment) becoming free software. We invited Simon to keynote at FOSDEM and, due to his busy schedule, interviewed him about Sun's position in the free software universe over the phone."