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What's better than helping to fund Linux kernel development? Getting additional benefits, that's what.

Christian Schaller's Transmageddon and Daniel Taylor's Arista are both easy-to-use video file conversion tools for GNOME, but they share more than just a vision for simple file transcoding. Rather than competing head-on (or attempting a merge), the two developers are collaborating in the middle; sharing information and utilizing the similar aims of their projects to strengthen the underlying GStreamer multimedia framework on which both code bases depend.

It is bad enough that the bad guys constantly try and phish your financial data via email and fake websites, now cash machines are getting in on the act - thanks to Windows XP.

As they make software and hardware purchases, governments are creatures of habit. They form long relationships with IT vendors and stick with them so they can keep their IT systems running with minimal interruptions. And while new technologies might be intriguing, governments often shy away from major IT changes because they have little willingness to take even the slightest risks of introducing a glitch into their infrastructures. So they stay with the companies and technologies they know as they undergo their traditional Request for Proposal (RFP) contract bidding and acquisition procedures.

Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer at AT&T subsidiary Bell Laboratories, saw the month-long departure of his wife and young son as an opportunity to put his ideas for a new operating system into practice. He wrote the first version of Unix in assembly language for a wimpy Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) PDP-7 minicomputer, spending one week each on the operating system, a shell, an editor and an assembler.

Data storage specialist SanDisk announced at Computex the redesign of its solid state drives. The flash memory is intended to be quicker and more precise than the first generation.

KDE 4 creator Matthias Ettrich, envisaged a Unix desktop with a common look and feel. KDE 4 has been released for over a year now, has it met this goal?

Security specialist Jacques Copeau has analysed a number of well-known PHP applications for susceptibility to the MIME sniffing issue in Internet Explorer. This "protective" feature, originally introduced as a security measure in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, can in fact cause the browser to treat an image as HTML and execute embedded scripts.

The Hymera desktop team has announced the release of Hymera 20090601, a new Italian desktop Linux distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux: "Hymera Open 20090601 has been released for download. The most important changes and improvements are as follows: new Linux kernel 2.6.29.3; new modules for identifying graphics cards and wireless network cards; fixed bug in Hymera video switch; fixed bug GNOME settings daemon; latest ATI and NVIDIA drivers; update of open-source ATI drivers; update of open-source NVIDIA drivers; default file system - ext4; improved system's boot speed."

Google Squared and Wolfram Alpha both aim to organize the chaos of information, but go about it in very different ways.

IPplan is a free opensource IP Address management application. IPPlan is a web based IP address management software and tracking tool simplifying the administration of your IP address space. IPplan goes beyond IP address management including DNS administration, configuration file management, circuit management and storing of hardware information.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers that I am heartily encouraged by this small snippet of news I picked up via Twitter this afternoon (thanks Roy)

After 5 months of hard work the Amarok team is proud to announce the next major release, Amarok 2.1, codenamed "Let There Be Light". Since the release of 2.0 we have gotten a lot of feedback and have already integrated some of it in 2.0.1 and 2.0.2. This new release includes a new look, many improvements, new features and brings back old favorites.

KDE Community Ships Fourth Translation and Service Release of the 4.2 Free Desktop, Containing Numerous Bugfixes, Performance Improvements and Translation Updates

Linux is easy to customize, is stable, malware-resistant, lightweight, and both user- and developer-friendly. So why do OEM Linux netbook implementations suck so badly? Matt Hartley analyzes the exploding netbook market, and why Linux is struggling to gain traction.

From the outside (and often times from within, too), the success of healthy open source projects defies all logic. Scores of individuals from all over the world, all of whom have different skill levels, use cases, experience, native languages, and time zones, collaborate together in order to help make a project succeed. How is it that all of this chaos comes together and creates something wonderful and useful? What lessons can be taken from how open source projects work and applied to our practical, daily lives and organizations?

milax Alexander Eremin has announced the release of MilaX 0.4, a mini-distribution and live CD with a graphical desktop, based on OpenSolaris: "MilaX 0.4 released. Based on OpenSolaris snv114. JWM replaced with FVWM with modified theme from Kamil Michalak: thumbnailing of minimized windows, full screen console (urxvt), system monitor - Conky, simple configuration editor menu - Vim, bottom panel - wbar. Removed fbxkb, added urxvt as basic terminal, PCMan file manager, Geany, tsclient, GVim, eboard (chess) with crafty engine. Partitioning now supported in 'zfsinstall' script. Version 0.4 requires at least 256 MB RAM and a Pentium or Celeron to boot into a X Window desktop. 128 MB RAM is sufficient for booting into command-line mode. MilaX is a fast distribution (about 20 seconds from GRUB to fully functional desktop after ZFS installation).

LinuxCertified,Inc. a leading provider of Linux training, will offer weekend Linux system administration bootcamp on June 20th - 21st, 2009 in South Bay (CA). This workshop is designed for busy information technology professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux administration areas.

I have used Amarok for over 3 years I think, but since Jaunty and Amarok 2 (I did use Amarok 1.4 again but it didn't worked like it should anymore and also no development made me look for something else), I decided to look for another music player. And I'm very picky when it comes to music players, so I tested: Rythmbox (obviously, it comes with Ubuntu), Jajuk, aTunes, the new Exaile and Banshee, Songbird, Guayadeque and GMusicBrowser.

Canonical (Ubuntu), Xandros, Linpus, and Red Flag announced they will deliver versions of their Linux distributions based on the open source Moblin v2 stack and application framework for Intel Atom-based netbooks. Novell, meanwhile, demonstrated its previously announced Moblin v2 version of SUSE Linux on Acer and MSI netbooks.