"Portland is a new open source project that promises to simplify the deployment and commercialization of Linux applications by helping them run on multiple desktop environments, including Gnome and KDE. Although still young, Portland is available today, and it looks to be improving rapidly. Get started using the XdgUtils toolset in Portland 1.0."

After helping develop the Xerox Alto's Bravo word processor and leading Microsoft Office development for years, Charles Simonyi left Microsoft in 2002 to found his own company, Intentional Software. His company's novel goal: to ease software-development headaches by abstracting the software's requirements away from the code itself, similar to the way that WYSIWYG word processors abstract the document from the formatting tags that underlie it. "Software as we know it is the bottleneck on the digital horn of plenty," he says. "It takes up tremendous resources in talent and time. It's disappointing and hard to change. It blocks innovation in many organizations." Code should be abstracted into models that are easier for end customers to visualize and to modify, he argues. This article, written by Dreaming in Code author Scott Rosenberg, provides an overview of Simonyi's life, ideas, and current initiatives.

This is a response to the first part of the word processor review recently featured on donationcoder.com. I have WordPerfect Office X3, OpenOffice.org 2.1, and MS Office 2003 all installed on my computer, and the article stirred up some of the opinions that have gradually come to settle in the depths of my mind. So here are my thoughts.

Michael Dell offered up some harsh advice a decade ago on how to fix struggling Apple Computer, words that now provide an ironic sting for the newly minted CEO of his own slumping company. "What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders," he said at a technology conference in the fall of 1997. Of course, Apple's investors and Chief Executive Steve Jobs have gotten the last laugh. Back then, Jobs had just returned to lead the company he had founded, beginning what would become an exceptional transformation. Dell, on the other hand, has watched its business go the other way, and Michael Dell has been recalled to the helm to get it back on track.

This week FSF Europe announced the release of its Fiduciary License Agreement, a form of copyright assignment in which a free software project can place its collective copyright under the control of a single organization or trustee. The agreement is designed to reduce the problems in managing copyrights in large projects, and to reconcile differences in copyright worldwide. However, exactly how important, useful, or necessary the FLA is depends upon whom you talk to in the free software community. To some extent, FSFE even seems to be operating contrary to the advice of the original Free Software Foundation in the US.

"Many a geek was excited when Nokia announced the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet in late 2005. Its form factor, functionality, and price indicated to me that my dream device had arrived. When I finally purchased one and reviewed it, my dreams were dashed. While attractive, the Nokia 770 was underpowered, leading to sluggish performance. The menu navigation was not thought out well, and some of the applications felt unfinished. With little advance notice, Nokia released the 770's successor at the beginning of 2007, the Nokia N800. Is it powerful enough to rekindle the fires of gadget lust or will it be another heartbreaker?"

"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."

"Zumastor is a community project started by Google members to bring enterprise storage features to Linux. Currently, we offer a ready-to-use network storage server with enterprise features such as online volume backup, multiple volume snapshots, remote volume replication, integration with Kerberized CITI NFS and Samba, all wrapped up with a nice, easy management interface. As a subproject we offer the ddsnap virtual snapshot Linux kernel extension, which adds multiple snapshot and remote replication capability to Linux filesystems in general."

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.

After weeks of hard work, I would like to introduce you to version 1.0 of the "OSNews Style Guide: Rules and Guidelines for Publishing and Participating on OSNews" . Read on for some small notes on what this actually means.

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."

Microsoft has sold more certificates for Novell Linux software and support in the three months since the deal was signed than it anticipated, according to a company representative. The software giant initially laid plans for up to 70000 certificates in the first year. In the first three months, it has already sold more than 35000. Microsoft lawyer Brad Smith is also looking for pacts with other companies that distribute Linux or use it in their products.

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.

"A month ago ReactOS project announced a fundraising campaign aimed to gather money to support our operation - servers, exhibitions, promotions, spread the word, etc. Today I am very glad to say that this fundraising campaign did not only meet the required value of 4000 euro, but also outperformed and we gathered a total of 4450 EUR!"