The One Laptop Per Child project's onsite supervisor, Mark Foster, reported from Shanghai on Sunday that the first 10 prototypes of the Linux-powered OLPC XO-1 are up and running. This marks a key milestone toward an upcoming build of 900 units.

Intel today formally launched its first set of quad-core processors, which officials say should give the chipmaker a comfortable headstart on archrival AMD (AMD quad-core offerings will not be due until the release around mid-2007). A review of one of these quad-cores has also been published.

"Security is the lens through which I always view products like Windows Vista, and in that view it looks good. But there is a bigger picture with Vista for the industry: It's really, really different from previous versions. At many levels it requires a different approach." The Inq took a look at Vista RTM, and they find: "Suffice to say we're impressed. Vista has come a significantly long way since the RC2 build. It's polished, speedy, and looks good on the eye."

One of the things that has been missing on the BeOS platform, either for BeOS, ZETA or Haiku, is pthread, and this was also something that yellowTAB experienced when they were working on a port of OpenOffice. Hence, the development team has released support for phthread. This improvement will be contributed to Haiku as soon as it reaches a more mature state.

"A few months back, LXer reader, cyber_rigger, began compiling a list of vendors who offer GNU/Linux pre-installed. The list quickly grew, even drawing attention from other news outlets. Meanwhile, the LXer team went to work to produce a usable database that anyone can browse and search. We still have one or two features to implement, but users can quickly and easily browse the Pre-Installed Linux Vendor Database of 106 vendors. All vendors in the list offer reasonably-priced desktops and/or notebooks for home and office users, and either offer Linux only, or as an installation option on the system configuration page of their sites."

"Exchange Server 2007 will be released to manufacturing in December and be available to customers within a number of days after that, Microsoft officials have confirmed. The formal announcement of Exchange 2007's RTM date was made in David Lemson's keynote on November 7 at the Exchange Connections conference."

Last week, Microsoft announced that Windows Vista went gold, and was released to manufacturing. The release has been long coming (five years of work) and was surrounded by controversies, rumours of rewrites, and legal threats by Microsoft's competitors. We got our hands on the RTM build (Microsoft Windows 6.0 (Build 6000)), so read on for the first superficial look at Windows Vista Ultimate.

The cat is out of the bag: Java will be released under the GPL. Joshua Marinacci writes: "I think it makes a lot of sense because it protects Sun's interest in preventing forks and also the community's interest in knowing that Java will forever be available in the public sphere. The GPL has always provided an option to fork just in case someone takes the code in a bad direction. Historically having this option available ensures that it never needs to actually be used, letting the community grow and thrive."

"The Samba Team disapproves strongly of the actions taken by Novell on November 2nd. One of the fundamental differences between the proprietary software world and the free software world is that the proprietary software world divides users by forcing them to agree to coercive licensing agreements which restrict their rights to share with each other, whereas the free software world encourages users to unite and share the benefits of the software. The patent agreement struck between Novell and Microsoft is a divisive agreement. It deals with users and creators of free software differently depending on their 'commercial' versus 'non-commercial' status, and deals with them differently depending on whether they obtained their free software directly from Novell or from someone else. The goals of the Free Software community and the GNU GPL allow for no such distinctions."

Ubuntu developers and other interested parties from all over the world have swarmed to Google's offices in Mountain View this week for the Ubuntu Developer Summit to plan out the next release of Ubuntu. In total, about 140 people have registered for the summit. According to Jane Silber, Canonical's COO, only 30 of the attendees are actually employed by Canonical, the company that sponsors Ubuntu. The remainder of the participants include members of the Ubuntu community, representatives of upstream projects, and other parties who have an interest in how Ubuntu is developed.

RISCOS Ltd have called for coders and beta testers to step forward and contribute to the company's flavour of RISC OS. Users were also welcomed to pitch ideas and feature suggestions - provided they weren't web browser-related. The company said this weekend it was 'looking at ways of increasing the involvement of users in the future development of RISC OS Select'. While it's not quite the same as Castle's plans with RISC OS Open, ROL have previously drawn upon a close circle of third party programmers to top up its features list, rewarding them with beta and alpha test builds of RISC OS and free Select subscriptions.

AMD has stopped its work on the Personal Internet Communicator project after nearly two years of planning and development. The PIC was announced in late 2004 as a USD 250 headless computer, sporting a Geode x86 processor, 128MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive. PIC was designed for 'emerging markets' where the cost of computer hardware is seen as prohibitively high.

The European division of the Free Software Foundation has published a side-by-side comparison of the two drafts of the upcoming third revision of the GPL. All the removed or added lines are clearly marked.

"Opera Software chief Jon S. von Tetzchner's Web browser, popular with many hardcore computer users, hasn't taken over the industry. The Norwegian company's browser has been around for 12 years but has just 1.5% of the market. Compared to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, or even Mozilla's Firefox, it barely qualifies as an also-ran. But unlike its competitors Microsoft and Mozilla, Opera is focusing a lot of attention on noncomputer devices: mobile phones, videogame consoles or just about anything else you can stick a screen on."