Punters wondering what the RISC OS Open lads are up to may be relieved by the following sliver of news. The project to open source Castle's RISC OS 5 is awaiting the dotting of eyes and crossing of tees on its licensing paperwork, it would appear.

The third NetBSD Hackathon was held on Saturday and Sunday, November 25th and 26th, 2006, where NetBSD users and developers met on IRC to prepare NetBSD for the upcoming re-branching of NetBSD 4.0. Approximately thirty NetBSD developers and more than 140 NetBSD users joined in on the two days, paying particular attention to improving install documentation and ensure build stability. A Wiki page as a TODO list was used for the first time, an approach that is likely to be used in future hackathons. All in all, over 200 bugs have been worked on in those two days and while not all of the critical showstoppers could be fixed, valuable progress was made in identifying root causes.

The One Laptop Per Child project yesterday received its first shipment of the low-cost Linux laptops that are intended for children in emerging-economy nations, project member Chris Blizzard reports on his blog. And it runs Doom.

In a posting to the Hula mailing list, Novell has stated that it is no longer providing full-time developers to work on Hula. Hula was unleashed in February 2005 to much fanfare. Things seem to have been quite recently, despite the news that iFolder and Hula would be combined into something called Maui.

Linux Tech Daily reviews Arch64 and finds it to be a solid and fast system. Arch64 is committed to staying truly 64bit.

Opera Mini 3.0 was released today (get it here). Major new features include camera support, RSS feed reader, SSL and https support, content folding, and speed improvements. Screenshot here. Today we also celebrate here at OSNews the first hits of the Opera-based Wii browser (via a proxy hack to allow generic web browsing) and the Sony PS3 browser. We would be grateful if you could snap a picture of your TV with your gaming console rendering OSNews and send us an email with it or post a link below.

"The recently announced agreement between Microsoft and Novell has resulted in much concern that it could be harmful for Linux and other free software. However, the agreement itself, as well as its timing and comments made by Microsoft executives about it, may actually be a very good thing - and perhaps even worthy of celebration!"

Gnash (open source implementation of Flash) is now working on Haiku. "I've been busy porting the latest Gnash 0.7.2 release to BeOS this weekend. I did start this port as the other version that was apparently ported earlier this year never had a public release. I've achieved a full port that is using the AGG rendering backend and a native BeOS GUI. I also wrote a Firefox plugin based on my SVG plugin. The native BeOS audio handler is yet incomplete, which is the reason why I didn't release anything yet."

The MorphOS Team is pleased to announce that the next public release of MorphOS will support the EFIKA. MorphOS is a lightweight and flexible operating system and EFIKA is a low-power and silent miniature mainboard based on the Freescale PPC5200.

Add some sparkle to your Java applications with Quartz, an open source project that offers an extensive set of job scheduling features. This article introduces the Quartz API, starting with a general overview of the framework and concluding with a series of code examples.

"eWEEK Labs has been testing Microsoft Windows Vista builds for more than three years, and our evaluation of the final code shows that the new operating system is a significant improvement over its predecessor, Windows XP. What's more, with a raft of subsystem and driver model improvements, Microsoft has laid out in Vista a solid foundation for stability and usability gains in future Windows versions. For enterprises running XP on their desktops and notebooks, however, a Vista upgrade is no slam-dunk. While Vista's new UAC facilities can make it easier for companies to appropriately lock down their desktops, for instance, it's quite possible to run a well-managed shop of XP machines, either out of the box or with the aid of lockdown tools."

"Leather, a material that calls to mind, at one extreme, Diana Rigg, tight thigh-length boots, the crack of the whip and, at the other, well-worn sofas, ancient libraries and the air of long-faded wealth. Somewhere in between sits Asus' latest leather-covered laptop, the W6Fp."

"I have an impressive talent for buying laptop computers hostile to Linux. Right now I'm using a Sony Vaio VGN-FS840/W, with more proprietary drivers than you can shake a stick at. It's so bad that even a retail edition of Windows XP won't run on it; you need the OEM Windows. As for Linux drivers, forget it. Sony has more important things to worry about, like recalling millions of inflammable batteries. So naturally, this machine represents quite a challenge for a Linux distro. My personal favourite, SuSE, won't run on it without a tiring vi session, trying to edit xorg.conf to get a screen to appear. But Xandros Home Edition Premium ran fine right out of the box."

"While still far from perfect, Ubuntu 6.10 'Edgy Eft' is both an improvement over the so-called 'long-term support' release and a decent operating system in its own right. It's in a much better place than any other free-of-charge operating system has been before now, but I don't think it'll give any commercial operating systems a run for their money."