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The VAR Guy is packing his bags and plans to attend Ubuntu LIVE July 22 in Portland, Oregon. While prepping for the event, he spotted four key developments in the Linux market — including a possible surprise announcement from Hewlett-Packard Co. Here’s the rundown.

Microsoft and Red Hat are no closer to a deal involving intellectual property cooperation, Microsoft has confirmed. This effectively puts to rest—for now—the speculation that the rival operating system vendors might actually be talking about a deal that includes some kind of intellectual property provision and/or patent covenant. Paul Cormier, Red Hat's executive vice president of engineering, told eWEEK that the company is still willing to work with the Redmond, Wash., software maker on the interoperability front, but that it wants to limit those talks to pure interoperability between Windows and Red Hat Linux, with the goal of solving real customer problems.

For average hackers in their cubicles, the relation between environmental and free software issues may seem remote but the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) is working to connect the dots. Since adopting a motion in favor of free and open source software (FOSS) in 2005, party members have not only spoken frequently in favor of FOSS, but also on related issues, such as software patents and lockdown technologies in Vista.

The Forum Nokia Open C Challenge, which offers $20,000 in prizes for the best application developed using Nokia's Open C libraries for Series 60 programming, along with POSIX for the Symbian bits, is now open to registrations. Porting of existing applications is encouraged, as is developing something completely new. The best submission gets $10,000 with three runners up receiving $5,000, $3,000 and $2,000 respectively.

[Strictly speaking, the challenge isn't just for open source apps, but Nokia's libraries can be used in open source projects. — Sander]

Capturing developers' hearts and minds. I'm just contemplating my notes from a roundtable hosted by Trolltech product director Naren Karattup, entitled Unleashing the creative power of the developer — you unleash wild animals, don't you? I think I'm bit nervous. What's interesting about Trolltech, apart from its cross-platform development tools, is its dual-licensing approach to open source software development.

Maxemum TV-Guide is a KDE TV-guide. It is developed in C++, based on QT/KDE and uses XMLTV as it’s back end to grab listings. At present there are backends grabbing TV listings for Australia, Belgium and Luxemburg, Brazil, Britain and Ireland, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary and Romania, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, North America, Norway, Portugal, Reunion Island (France), South Africa, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

A recent blog post entitled “Confessions of a Linux Fan” has provoked some discussion in the Linux community. In it, the author lists 10 things (10 seems to be the preferred number of these kinds of posts) that new Linux users should be aware of. Though the author claims to be a Linux enthusiast, the 10 observations are actually just re-wordings of many of the classic arguments against using Linux. What I find most damaging about this blog post is, however, that his underlying premise seems to be that we're not being honest with potential Linux users. I think all real Linux enthusiasts are being honest with potential users. But the truth is that the disinformation you see out there about Linux. What I want to do here is put some of the oft-repeated "facts" about Linux in perspective.

This tutorial shows how you can enable Beryl on a PCLinuxOS 2007 desktop (the system must have a 3D-capable graphics card). With Beryl you can make your desktop use beautiful 3D effects like wobbly windows or a desktop cube. I have tried this on my 3-year old HP Pavilion zt3000 notebook which has an ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 graphic card, and it works really good there.

2007 Open Source CMS Award Launched with $20,000 Prize Fund

This time of year, I make my rounds with the OEMs and get to chat with a number of executives. Several things have floated to the top, but the one I’d like to chat about right now is the comment that Linux demand and interest in open source in general has dropped off sharply. I think this is because a lot of FOSS folks saw open source and related initiatives as an end and not a means to an end. The result IT departments wanted and the result FOSS wanted were two different things.

[It's a high FUD week this week. If you read between the lines you can clearly see why Enderle has such a disdain for FOSS: Before FOSS the IT industry made millionaires of common folk. FOSS commoditized the industry. I guess Enderle missed the money train and now he's out to make FOSS pay for it. — Sander]

In the last two months I've been traveling a lot. During the same period my main desktop computer went belly up. I would have been in trouble without rsync at my disposal -- but thanks to my regular use of this utility, my data (or most of it, anyway) was already copied offsite just waiting to be used. It takes a little time to become familiar with rsync, but once you are, you should be able to handle most of your backup needs with just a short script.

In May this year Microsoft's Bill Gates showed off his expensive touch-sensitive table called Surface. Now the Linux world has a similar project under development and has released videos of it in action. Although still in the early days of development, MPX or Multi-Pointer X, is a modification of the X Windows Server that allows multiple input devices to be used at the same time.

These days, it seems like OS transparency is more necessary than ever before. Luckily, there are plenty of great virtualization options to choose from when you need to run another OS, without actually having to install it along side your existing operating system. Today, we examine each of these options and review their abilities in a rapid fire round.

It may not be as fancy-schmancy as Microsoft Surface or Jeff Han's demos but these videos of a Linux-based MPX multi-touch table shows that things are moving full speed ahead in the land of the free penguins. We talked with developer Peter Hutterer, who gave us his insight on the project, the iPhone and the ongoing multi-touch craze.

Our story last week about the paucity of Linux pre-installed machines available in New Zealand hit a nerve and elicited a flurry of comments from readers. But it seems that's not exactly the case. Lenovo's Australian and New Zealand communications head Heather Jones contacted m-net to straighten out our misunderstanding. She said that the new T61p ThinkPad will be available in New Zealand with Linux, but only if it is requested.

Some time ago we criticized the ISO in a series of posts. The closer you look at it, the more justified our suspicions seem. A Groklaw member points to some items in Portugese, then providing translations and explanation. On the face of it, some iffy thing — or shall we call it “corruption” — can easily be spotted. Portugal’s ISO says there is not enough space for IBM & Sun in the meeting room. And the ISO committee is, surprisingly, chaired by Miguel Sales Dias, from Microsoft.

Intellectual property may be off the table, for now, but it sure seems like Red Hat and Microsoft are still dancing around coming to some kind of partnership relationship. In a recent eWEEK news story by Peter Galli, Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's vice president of intellectual property and licensing, said, "Red Hat and Microsoft have previously had conversations about interoperability, but none of our recent conversations have included discussions about intellectual property cooperation." Ah! Notice the start of the last phrase, "none of our recent conversations." So, they are still talking.

BlueWhite64 Linux v12.0, featuring a 2.6.21.5 Linux kernel with IA32-emulation, has been released on live CD and DVD ISOs. The distribution is aimed at pure 64-bit AMD64 Athlon, Opteron, Sempron, Turion, and Intel EM64T processors in desktops and servers.

"Since many alternative approaches to hibernation are now being considered and discussed," Rafael Wysocki began on the lkml, "I thought it might be a good idea to list some things that in my not so humble opinion should be taken care of by any hibernation framework. They are listed below, not in any particular order, because I think they all are important."