Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 3 has been released. Kubuntu and Edubuntu versions are available as well. There's a list of changes in Ubuntu as well as Kubuntu. Final is expected to be released in April.

In preparation to hist talk at the upcoming FOSDEM conference in Brussels, ReactOS project leader Aleksey Bragin in an interview details the code audit that the project is going trough, and reveals the intellectual property minefield that such a large reverse engineered OS brings. "I can't stress this enough: up to now, no suspicious or illegal code has been found during the audit. Buggy code - yes, this was either fixed or rewritten. Also, another part which is sometimes speculated about - that the remaining 3% of the unaudited codebase is illegal - this is completely wrong."

"As Vista’s deployment ramps up, news has begun to circulate that its highly regarded Protected Media Path has been defeated. The Protected Media Path is an array of Digital Rights Management technologies that allows 'premium content' to be 'enjoyed' by the consumer. The individual that has been labeled responsible for this feat is Alex Ionescu. Alex Ionescu is highly experienced and talented programmer whose primary work concentrates on the community-based ReactOS project. ReactOS is an open source operating system based on the Windows architecture. To get a better understanding of his work, Slyck.com interviewed Alex who dispelled many of the myths surrounding his work, while also providing insight into his accomplishments."

When Novell and Microsoft announced their unlikely partnership, a part of the arrangement that got little attention at the time was that they'd create a joint research facility, where both company's technical experts would collaborate on new joint software solutions. Now, they're staffing up.

"I find Debian an outstanding distro for server needs with its latest version Etch nearly been released as of the day I'm writing this. Java 6 isn't available from its repositories and I doubt it would for Etch. So it's time to grab the situation into your hands and install it manually."

Jim Allchin, who officially quit Microsoft after 17 years of service Wednesday, posted on the Windows Vista Blog about how he thinks his day will look in the near future. "3:15 PM: Went to drive the afternoon carpool run. Spent 20 minutes waiting in line behind other parents whose kids weren't even outside yet. Need to write paper about Next Generation Carpool Queuing solution (NGCQ) that integrates Windows Live Presence with the driveway scheduler. Must get appointment with school principal when it's done."

The Inq reviews Office 2007, and concludes: "It's hard to define, but the new office suite feels good and is comfortable to use. That said if your requirements don't stretch beyond the normal usage of the odd letter, a spreadsheet to balance your budget and some email then there isn't a lot to recommend forking over cash for Office 2007, when there are several free options out there are increasingly attractive and compatible with Office documents."

"Fedora 7 Test 1 has been released today. For this particular release, we only did a Desktop spin of the package collection. We are still fine tuning targetted spins of the collection as part of the merger of Core and Extras. We also produced a LiveCD that has the ability to install to your harddrive."

"I'd like to connect the dots between Apple's iPhone graphics, OS X, LLVM, and the ARM architecture, and what it means for compilers, interpreters, high-performance embedded software systems, specifically in graphics and bytecode engines."

"Quite some time ago I was searching for the possibility to have a server side storage for documents, and to work on them together with others. Sure, in principal you can realize that with KOffice and kparts where you access and store all data over ssh on a server. But first of all that is not supported by OpenOffice, and it would be cool to have this also with some kind of web interface to check the versions of the documents, etc. So I continued my search - and found PengYou."

"I had the opportunity to speak with several KDE developers recently. Benjamin Reed, Jaroslaw Staniek and Ralf Habacker are several of the many talented developers working on porting KDE to Mac and Windows respectively. They explain in detail what's involved in making KDE and its myriad of applications boot under Mac and Windows."

"The Fiduciary Licence Agreement is a copyright assignment that allows Free Software projects to bundle their copyright in a single organisation or person. This enables projects to ensure their legal maintainability, including important issues such as preserving the ability to relicense and certainty to have sufficient rights to enforce licences in court. The assigning party does not lose their ability to use their code either, as the FLA ensures a re-transferral of unlimited usage/single exploitation rights back to the author."

After 17 years with the company, Jim Allchin retired from Microsoft as of Jan. 30, 2007 – the day on which Microsoft officially released the Windows Vista operating system to consumers. James (Jim) Allchin served as co-president of Microsoft's Platforms & Services Division from September 2005 until his retirement. In that position, Allchin shared overall responsibility with Kevin Johnson for the division of the company that includes the Windows and Windows Live Group, Windows Live Platform Group, Online Business Group, Market Expansion Group, Core Operating System Division, Windows Client Marketing Group, Developer and Platform Evangelism Group, and the Server and Tools Business Group.

"Microsoft's decision to incorporate Tablet PC features and functionality into the Windows Vista operating system is one that eWEEK Labs believes will help to convert Tablet PC skeptics. We installed the operating system on two Tablet PCs - Lenovo's ThinkPad X60 Tablet and Fujitsu's LifeBook T4215 - and found that Microsoft has delivered a much more practical and smoother tablet experience in Vista." Microsoft also released an upgrade to its 'Origami' version of Windows.