The conflict continues between software giant Microsoft and the open source community. Lawyers for Microsoft say the Linux kernel violates 42 patents, the Linux GUI another 65 while Open Office infringes upon 68 of its patents. Email programs as well as other various software rounds out a grand total of 235. Microsoft has yet to seek royalties from these alleged infractions and would face tough opposition from the open source community.

On May 11, the KDE Community released the first alpha of KDE 4.0 aka "Knut" - which will boast a completely renovated desktop appearance. This release is a basis for the integration of powerful new technologies that will be included in KDE 4.0. This early alpha version reveals new visual appearance based on the Oxygen theme, improved hardware and multimedia integration (through Solid and Phonon), and new applications such as the file manager - Dolphin and the document viewer Okular. More information such as screenshots and installation instructions can be found in the KDE 4.0-alpha1 Visual Guide. The KDE team will release KDE 4.0 RC1 (release candidate 1) on Sep. 25, followed quickly by RC2 on Oct. 9. The final test releases of KDE 4.0 will appear on Oct. 23, 2007.

It's been no secret that Dell has been planning to offer Linux as an option of some of its PCs to please customers, but until now there's been no strong indication of which distribution it is likely to choose. Red Hat and SUSE were strong contenders because Dell already certifies some of its models to work with those distributions, but now it seems the PC manufacturer has opted to go with Ubuntu Linux. 'Feisty Fawn' (the newest version of Ubuntu) should be available to Dell customers from the end of May on both desktop and notebook models, although Dell has not specified which systems will and won't offer Linux as an extra. Buyers will also be able to chose to purchase optional support if they wish, although Dell has not revealed whether Linux itself will be free or require a charge (it is possible the basic models will be shipped with Ubuntu by default and customers may have to pay to upgrade to Windows).

NVIDIA has released new beta 100.14.03 Linux driver that adds support for the newer GeForce 8 series graphics cards. Specifically, the NVIDIA 100.14.03 display driver adds official support for the GeForce 8600GTS, 8600GT, 8500GT, 8400GS, and the 8300GS. Download the new Linux 100.14.03 driver from here.

As I don't use Linux at all I found this article to be pretty informative for the penguin people among us. Its all about overclocking graphics cards with ATI chips and the new tool the people at Phoronix are using: ATIpower. It is compatible to the X1000 chip family where the older Rovclock still capitulates.

Edinburgh, UK (PRWEB) March 29, 2007 -- The OpenOffice.org Community announce the release of OpenOffice.org 2.2, the latest version of the leading open-source office suite. With upgrades to its word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, and database software, the free software package provides a real alternative to Microsoft's recently-released Office 2007 product - and an easier upgrade path for existing Microsoft Office users. OpenOffice.org 2.2 also protects users from newly discovered vulnerabilities, where users' PCs could be open to attack if they opened documents from, or accessed web sites set up by, malicious individuals.

After a months long survey Dell finally came up with a great solution. As this survey revealed more than 70% of the participants would use Linux as their OS of choice. Now Dell expands its Linux factory installed options to selected desktop and notebook systems. What systems exactly this will include is unclear, Dell will provide an update with detailed information in the coming weeks.
If you look for more information regarding Dell and Linux I suggest you look at Dell's Direct2Dell Linux Website.

Linux/Unix (*nix) users have probably heard all about Gnome by now. Gnome is a window manager for the X Window system. Window managers allow *nix users that would otherwise be looking at command line or the rather bland X Windows system to use something much more elegant, which may even surpass Windows or Macintosh's various window managers in functionality, efficiency, and beauty. Back to Gnome. The makers of Gnome have ensured that they would stay on a timetable for releases, and 2.18 rolled out just in time. Gnome 2.18 adds a laptop power manager for mobile users, improves window managing between two windows, and vastly improves security. If you're really interested in all the changes from the previous version of Gnome, you can read the full release notes here.

Those of you using *nix (such as the techPowerUp! FreeBSD club) who enjoy the clean Gnome environment can download the latest version here.

Recently, it seems like everyone is trying to make their computers boot as fast as possible. For a while, it looked like a flash-based drive would be the best way to do this, considering the 30-second boot time everyone with a Gigabyte iRam card claims to have. However, it seems like Linux is the best way to go for booting AQAP (As Quick As Possible). Since AMD released the BIOS for the Gigabyte M57SLI-S4, Linux lovers everywhere have tried to see how fast they can boot it. Somehow, a user has managed to fit a copy of Linux, a kernel, X server (with Matchbox window manager), and a program or two into the tiny 2Mb BIOS. The result? An incredible 8 second boot time.

For anyone who hasn't heard of the ReactOS project, it is a version of Linux that undertakes the extraordinary task of running Windows XP programs using Windows XP drivers....natively. This project isn't exactly new, which is probably why we haven't been hearing much about this. The jump to version 0.3.1 does a lot of things, such as a rebuild of the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer). The HAL handles communication between hardware, software, and the kernel of the operating system. You can read the full list of updates here.

Anyone who'd like to try ReactOS can download it off of thier homepage.

After high demand for custom computers with Linux installed, Hewlett-Packard is considering a similar approach to Dell with the open source operating system. The company may soon start selling factory built systems (not customised PCs like Dell) with Linux pre-installed, although it wasn't completely clear about the matter. A few of HP's notebooks are already certified to work with Red Hat and SUSE - it even used to ship Linux systems a few years back, but these were unsuccessful HP decided to discontinue them. HP's worldwide director of open source and Linux marketing said "We are in a massive deal right now for ... multi-thousands of units of a desktop opportunity for Linux. That's an indicator." However, so far there is no information about which distribution would be used, nor which systems Linux would be offered with. This increased consumer interest in Linux could soon see other big-name OEMs provide the free OS with their systems if HP and Dell are successful.

KDE, or "K" for short, is a windows manager for the X window system in *nix. Without window managers like KDE or Gnome, the *nix GUI would be rather bleak. KDE is currently developing the next version of it's software, KDE 4. In this version, there will be a multi-lingual spell checker built into the window manager. There will also be much better support for hardware, and a gigantic tweak of the software that allows for interoperability between a Windows/Mac system and a *nix system. There is also "Dolphin", the new file manager. You can get more details of KDE4 off of dot.kde.org.

After conducting a survey to find out what consumers wanted, desktop and notebook builder Dell has announced that it is planning a new line of computers which have the option of pre-installed Linux. Until now, Dell hasn't been overly keen to provide the open source operating system, opting instead to persuade users towards Windows. However, this new line of user-ready certified desktops and laptops could encourage people buying a new computer to give Linux a try, with SUSE Linux being made available on a number of OptiPlex and Precision desktops, along with Latitude notebooks. The company may eventually choose to expand its range of Linux machines and even offer more distributions, but at present it is only working with Novell.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE. This release continues the development of the 6-STABLE branch providing performance and stability improvements, many bug fixes and new features. You can read the full release notes here.

FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE is now available for the alpha, amd64, i386, ia64, pc98, powerpc, and sparc64 architectures. It can be installed from bootable ISO images or over the network; the required files can be downloaded via FTP or BitTorrent as described in the sections below. While some of the smaller FTP mirrors may not carry all architectures, they will all generally contain the more common ones, such as i386 and amd64. You can upgrade FreeBSD here, or choose to download the latest release via bittorent or an FTP mirror.

There was a big surprise at the 23rd Chaos Computer Conference. A masked hacker demonstrated an Xbox 360 running a Linux and Mac OS logo on the console, followed by the phrase "coming soon". He used a copy of the King Kong game and a PCB plugged into a notebook to place the logos of the two operating systems on the Xbox 360. While giving the demonstration, the hacker did not say a single word. You can watch the YouTube videos here and here.