The Southern California Linux Exposition's fifth year has been its best yet, with record attendance, vendor participation, and excellent presentations and talks. There were few new things to announce or showcase at the event, but if you wanted to measure the pulse of the open source software community, this was undeniably the place to be this past weekend. More on SCALE 2007 at Linux.com.

"Almost a month ago InnoTek, the co-developer of VirtualPC, released their Virtual Machine as Open Source. The software was formerly not targetted at desktop users, but that changed when it was released under the GPL. This review tries to shed some light on the question if VirtualBox can get some market share between Vmware and Qemu."

14 months ago, the Autopackage project was small and active, and members sounded optimistic about its success. Now, although the alternative installer project continues, progress has almost come to a halt. The #autopackage channel on irc.oftc.net sits vacant most days, the developer blogs cover almost anything except the project, and commits to the source code repository have become rare. Formally, the project is still alive, but the major contributors all agree that it is faltering. So what happened?

The 3GSM convention was kicked off in Barcelona this year with some pretty cool products: the HP iPAQ 510 Voice Messenger (review), Toshiba's G900 and E01 with WinMob 6, Nokia's E61i and E65, Nokia's N77 with DVB-H mobile TV, Nokia's 6110 quad-band HSDPA GPS navigator, Motorola's MotoRIZR Z8 (video) that uses a non-touchscreen version of UIQ 3.0 and the L9 among others, the Neonode N2, the RIM BlackBerry 8800 (with possibly WiFi in it, unannounced feature), Samsung's 10 new cellphones including the touchscreen ones (specs) and a Symbian-based one, a Windows Mobile 6 video and lastly, a review of the highest-end Nokia Pro handset, the E90.

"In the first head-to-head comparison of trying to accomplish a task with Mac OS and Vista in this series, the new Windows operating system fell flat on its face. Migrating from an XP installation was halted by repeated failures of the Windows Easy Transfer application when used with a network connection and a so-called Easy Transfer Cable. I finally gave up and used Lenovo's System Migration Assistant."

If you've got Solaris with telnet running, you could be in for a big surprise. There is a fairly trivial Solaris telnet 0-day exploit in the wild . "This was posted to Full-Disclosure. Remote root exploit in the Solaris 10/11 telnet daemon. It doesn't require any skill, any exploit knowledge, and can be scripted for mass attacks. Basically if you pass a '-fusername' as an argument to the –l option you get full access to the OS as the user specified. In my example I do it as bin but it worked for regular users, just not for root. This combined with a reliable local privilege escalation exploit would be devastating. Expect mass scanning and possibly the widespread exploitation of this vulnerability."

"There's a new way to enhance your cache in Vista - simply plug in your Flash memory stick. But how much performance gain can you really expect? TG Daily ran an average PC through a benchmark parcours and discovered that the old rules still apply: There is no substitute for an adequate amount of system memory. Period."

LWN has a writeup sumarizing a talk from Keith Packard. RandR 1.2 with much improved handling of multiple input devices, improved EXA, libX11 with XCB support, OpenGL 2.0 support in Mesa, are some of the topics touched.

Novell and Intel Corporation today announced the availability of paravirtualized network and block device drivers that will allow Windows 2000/2003/XP to run unmodified in Xen on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell, operating on Intel-based server platforms featuring Intel Virtualization Technology.

"Ten years ago to this very week, Steve Jobs killed Apple. Or he began to take apart many of the projects and organization that many inside and outside the company thought of as Apple's value to the computing industry. This event was the announcement of the company's infamous spring 1997 reorganization, which continued step-by-step throughout the spring. For the company's long-suffering developers and ISVs, push came to shove at the annual WWDC, where Steve Jobs revealed his plans for Apple's future direction. Today, with the iPod-influenced haze over of recent Apple history as well as the success of Apple's retail strategy and the Intel-Macintosh transition, we forget that some of that 'future' talked up in 1997 never happened."

Haiku has a booth at SCaLE 5x and here is a report of day one: "SCaLE 5x started this morning and it has been a lot of fun so far. Axel, Michael (Phipps), Jorge (Mare) and myself (BGA) came down to the exhibit floor early this morning to setup the booth in advance of the opening. We have a 10x10 booth with a table and a couple of chairs, so we setup a small form factor desktop PC hooked up to a 20 inch LCD monitor, and a couple of laptops, an IBM running Haiku natively, and a MacBook Pro running Haiku inside Parallels. We are still waiting for an additional PC and a projector that did not make in time, as Michael's luggage was sent to the wrong destination."

Microsoft has long held a skeptical view of open source, but the Redmond-based software company is trying to change some of those attitudes with the establishment of officelabs. officelabs is a new internal start-up that is attempting to use some of the methodologies of open-source software development to invigorate the company and generate excitement about new Microsoft products. Specifically, the people behind officelabs want to adopt the 'release early, release often' approach that has worked well for open-source projects such as Linux and Firefox.

Minnesota and Texas may become the next US states to adopt the OpenDocument Format as the required standard for their agencies, thanks to two state bills currently up for vote. The Minnesota Preservation of State Documents Act, if passed, would require that all documents 'including text, spreadsheets and presentations' of the state be created in ODF. The XML-based document format is a rival to Microsoft's Office technology.

US sales of computers carrying Microsoft's new operating system Vista soared in the week after it was launched, defying the expectations of analysts who gave Vista lackluster reviews. Personal computer sales for the week following Vista's debut to succeed Microsoft's Windows XP in January were 67 percent higher than those in the same week in 2006, and nearly triple those of the preceding week, according to Current Analysis.