"Though delayed for a while and later to market than most Mandriva fans would probably prefer, the new Mandriva Linux 2007 PowerPack Edition is finally here, nearly a year after the previous release. 2007 is typical Mandriva through and through: attractively themed in KDE, easy to install without skipping the technical details, a little bug-ridden here and there, and full of new and interesting software technologies. This release does have its own identity, though; not only has the standard theme been redesigned for the first time in several years, but this is the first Mandriva release to include a legal DVD movie player."

In an attempt to convince The Open Group that they finally want to fully Open Source Motif and CDE Peter Howkins has started a petition to help gauge how much interest there is. CDE, the Common Desktop Enviroment, was the default desktop on several commercial UNIX distributions. Motif is a X Windows widget API used in many programs, including CDE and other projects such as nedit and DDD. Howkins is not going to try to convince anyone to use either of them, but if you use them and would like to see them Open Sourced please sign the petition. For more background information about CDE and this petition visit the petition site or go straight to signing the petition.

Palm has launched a new sibling in its Treo smartphone line today, the Treo 680, using the PalmOS. "For people who are ready to move up to a full-featured mobile phone that includes everything needed to stay organized, Palm today announced the Palm Treo 680 smartphone, a GSM/GPRS/EDGE quad-band world phone. Customers will find the Treo 680 smartphone easy to use, slim and compact, yet packed full of features beyond its stellar phone capability, such as email, web browsing, messaging, multimedia, calendar, contacts and more." No Wifi though. At the same time, Palm OS died.

"The European Commission has taken steps to promote the use of open source systems and software in the public sector. It has selected a consortium led by Unisys Belgium to create and manage the Open Source Observatory and Repository, the company announced. Other members of the consortium are the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology, consultancy GOPA Cartermill, and the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos of Madrid. They will provide an internet service and portal enabling European administrations to centrally store and share the software code of their open source applications and exchange open source knowledge."

Windows XP Embedded SP2 Feature Pack 2007, due to be released on Nov. 1st, will include a redesigned command-line scripting tool. This whitepaper introduces the new tool and gives a few examples of what it can do. XPECMD, as it's called, is said to be a major upgrade to CMI Explorer, the tool that shipped with XPe SP1.

"A desktop full of handy widgets to tell you about what's going on in the world and what's going on around your computer. This is Jackfield. Jackfield is an application for the Gnome desktop that plays host to widgets; small applications to do the things you need. It can run widgets from Apple's Dashboard, will eventually be able to run those from Yahoo's Widget Engine, Microsoft's Gadget Sidebar, and Opera Widgets, and you can write your own."