"Google Summer of Code 2007 is on! Last year, Google funded over 600 students in 93 countries to work with 100 open source groups. We're extremely happy to announce that we'll be holding Google Summer of Code again this year. We look forward to helping new contributors join the community and write more code."

In this interview, Sam Leffler of the FreeBSD Project and FreeBSD Foundation and 'old school' hacker from the UC Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group (where the original Berkeley Software Distribution was developed) explains what the Foundation actually does, and the kind of work it has fostered. He also talks briefly about the current status of FreeBSD, and the degree to which Apple contributes to the project.

For consumers looking to boost their computers' security, is Vista the way to go? Or can Linux provide greater protection from hacker attacks? In the face of viruses, worms or other breaches, the answer is obvious. "We don't need a survey or study to determine the answer. The answer is universal with those that actually manage these systems," said John Cherry of the OSDL Desktop Linux Working Group.

MBReview.com reviewed Windows Vista, and concluded: "Overall, my first impressions of Vista, and specifically Vista Ultimate, are quite good. I had few problems moving over hardware and software, other than issues of driver support by manufacturers. This is an extremely annoying issue and I'm sure I'm not alone in my distaste for such lack of driver support. The new Aero interface is gorgeous and is one of the big reasons I have moved over to Vista on my main system. It has it's quirks like anything, but it is a big improvement from WindowsXP. Thus far, I'm impressed."

Greg Kroah-Hartman's announcement for free Linux driver development included the necesssary legal framework to honor NDAs when creating GPL'd drivers. This allowance was discussed on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list. In a public exchange with Greg KH, Stephan Rickauer said: "Now these companies have a great excuse to keep specs locked up tight under NDA, while pretending to be 'open'. The OpenBSD project has made clear more than once how this will hurt Free Software in the long run. Signing NDA's ensures that Linux gets a working driver, sure, but the internals are indistinguishable from magic. It is a source code version of a blob." OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt called the free driver effort a farce, "you are trying to make sure that maintainers of code - i.e. any random joe who wants to improve the code in the future - has less access to docs later on because someone signed an NDA to write it in the first place. You are making a very big mistake."

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer said Thursday that Wall Street's current expectations for revenue from its newest operating system may be too 'optimistic'. "I'm really excited about how enthusiastic people are about Vista, but I think some of the revenue forecasts for Vista in 2008 are overly aggressive," Ballmer said in a meeting for financial analysts. " is primarily a chance to sustain what revenue we have - not every release is a revenue growing opportunity." On a related note, boxed sales of Vista trail those of XP in the first few weeks after launch.

"Zero Install is one of the more promising alternatives to native package systems for Linux distributions, such as RPM and Debian's dpkg. Originally developed by Thomas Leonard, who works in the Department of Electronics and Computing at the University of Southampton, it begins with a criticism of existing package systems the difficulties of using them, and is built to provide an answer to the problems raised by the critique. However, like other alternative package systems, it faces the problems of winning acceptance from the major distributions and fine-tuning its features."

KVM, a new virtualization technology that lets Linux computers run multiple operating systems simultaneously, has won a significant endorsement from Red Hat. Red Hat, the dominant Linux seller, will include KVM in the next version of its hobbyist Linux version, Fedora, Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens said Tuesday. "We're packaging it for Fedora 7," Stevens said.

Shock and awe; Windows Vista has been released to the hounds (that would be us). As just about every publication has reiterated a thousand times over it took 5+ years of design and development and cost USD 5.5 billion both directly and indirectly. We were promised (maybe not even promised, but bullshitted) a revolutionary operating system and what we got is for you to determine for yourselves. I personally think it's a disappointment to say the least.

"Parallels recently made a definitive statement saying that the company won't be making it easy for users to run OS X in a virtual environment anytime soon. The reasoning behind this was because they don't want to put their users at risk of breaking the OS X EULA - unlike Windows Vista, there is no version of OS X that can be run under a virtual machine - and more importantly, they don't want to strain their (currently good) relationship with Apple. As a followup to that statement from Parallels, I was able to also get in touch with Srinivas Krishnamurti, VMWare's Director of Product Management and Market Development in order to get VMWare's official position on the matter. "Apple does not currently allow running Mac OS X in a virtual machine," he said. "Apple is an important partner and VMware respects Apple's intellectual property."

OpenSUSE 10.3 Alpha1 has been released. "Since the openSUSE 10.2 final release, the most significant changes are: GNOME has been moved to /usr (lease do test especially updates from older distributions); KDE updated to KDE 3.5.6; Linux kernel updated to 2.6.20 (no Xen support enabled for now); pattern for minimal text install; update of OpenOffice.org to version 2.1.3; the whole distribution is build now with -fstack-protector to better guard against some buffer overflows; and much more."

KolibriOS is an operating system for the PC, written in assembly, which is based on the source code of MenuetOS. It fits on a single floppy. Some of the features are: NTFS read support, AC'97 player, drivers for Fat12/16/32/ISO9660, tcp/ip stack, network applications include ftp/http/mp3 servers, GUI with resolutions up to 1280x1024, 16 million colours, over 150 programs (text editor, paint editor, file managers, games, etc.), and much more.

Metisse is a window manager developped by the In Situ project. It is available under the GPL Licence. Mandriva Linux is using Metrisse in its latatest Live-CD. Metisse differs from a 'classic' 3D desktop in the way that it offers innovative windows interactions, thus enforcing work efficiency. It is using basic openGL commands for most of its feature and can run on entry level 3D graphic cards. This workshop describes the hard disk installation and Mandriva One setup. Additionally you will find information how to use the Metrisse 3D Desktop.

The Beryl project has often been criticised as being nothing more than eyecandy for the sake of eyecandy. However, there are numerous features in Beryl which could improve usability and workflow. In this series of three articles, some of the new usability features in Beryl 0.2.0 are highlighted and explained (article I, article II, and article III).