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Microsoft may view its legal settlement with TomTom as a patent victory of sorts but it’s a hollow and meaningless win in the eyes of some in the open source community. Open Invention Network CEO Keith Bergelt said the settlement announced yesterday was anticipated and expected and he is “nonplussed” with the result. He said Microsoft’s effort to build a series of tiny “totem” patent cases to create fear, uncertainty and doubt about using Linux is futile. "This [settlement] says nothing about the validity of the patent ..... the community provided support in the best way possible and that support facilitated an interim settlement," he said, adding that the commercial success of mobile Linux will not be derailed by legal posturing. - Paula Rooney, ZDNet

The Gnome Foundation has laid out a roadmap saying it's time to depart from incremental updates. The team said it's realized it's not enough to simply organize a collection of individual sub-projects and that a project-wide roadmap is needed. Gnome is the default environment of Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu, and initially the goal was for a version 2.30.0 - that will now become 3.0 due next March. Responding to growing criticism of Gnome's "lack of vision," the team said its 3.0 release will focus not only on streamlining the platform, but "revamping the user experience."

Free application Portable Ubuntu for Windows runs an entire Linux operating system as a Windows application. As if that weren't cool enough, it's portable, so you can carry it on your thumb drive. Built from the same guts as the andLinux system that lets you seamlessly run Linux apps on your Windows desktop, Portable Ubuntu is a stand-alone package that runs a fairly standard (i.e. orange-colored, GNOME-based) version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. It just doesn't bother creating its own desktop, and puts all its windows inside your Windows, er, windows.

The "Quiet Revolution" continues. While the main media and mainstream tech entities slumber, GNU/Linux is gaining ground. This decade-long struggle is not far from being proclaimed "an overnight success." Here is exactly how it is doing so.

For anyone with an historical perspective about our industry, the demise of Silicon Graphics Inc. is a scary example of the truism that great technology is no insulation from the changing vagaries of the marketplace. (Also, that iffy business decisions don't help.) Still, remembering the heyday of this one-time maker of the absolute coolest workstations on the planet, it's sad to see it acquired for a paltry $25 million.

I've got to hand it to Dmitry Brant, the man writes a mean utility. DiskDigger (free) is more than the usual undelete utility offered gratis as a leader product. It goes "beneath the file system" (Dmitry's line, which I plan to borrow regularly in the future) to recover data on a sector-by-sector basis from hard drives, thumb drives, etc. Think of these sectors as little boxes containing data that are arranged in tracks/circles on your hard drive.

Nearly a year ago Nexuiz 2.4 was released and it offered impressive graphics along with a new menu design, improved networking performance, reduced memory usage, and many other enhancements to this open-source game. The developers behind this first person shooter have now outdone themselves again with the release of Nexuiz 2.5. This latest release of Nexuiz brings even better graphics capabilities along with a new HUD, network communication improvements that cut the bandwidth in half, smarter bots, even better graphics, and several new maps. In total more than 3,000 changes make up Nexuiz 2.5!

Open call for nominations: Whether you’re a systems administrator in a datacenter, a software developer, or just really like to use the latest open devices we want your feedback.

The Hungarian government has announced that it will be modifying procurement rules to allow open source to be used in public sector organisations. Previously, procurement rules had apparently named vendors such as Microsoft and Novell. The new rules, according to Ferenc Baja, deputy minister for information technology, will allocate the same amount of money to acquiring open source products as to proprietary products. The move was announced at a press conference on April 2nd.

John “J5? Palmieri explains how the Fedora community–codename MyFedora–is bringing Fedora users together by integrating self-contained applications into a single framework application. This interface enables Fedora users to see and keep track of what applications other community members are working with.

Following the series like 14 most popular text editors for Linux or 10 file managers for Linux, next is an overview of the best audio players available in Linux. I will only review the GUI players, leaving tools like mp3blaster, mpg123 or ogg123 for some other time. To begin with...

Conficker seems to be the theme of the week. So, with the crisis abated for the moment, I thought this would be a good opportunity to discuss an issue near and dear to my heart – patch management.

For the past month or so I have been reading of the potential acquisition of Sun Microsystems by IBM. I have seen this dubbed as the Blue Sun. After a month of negotations it now looks like this may be a reality. What does the future hold if and when this pushes through? What are we to expect?

Novell's SUSE Linux Desktop 11 promises support, seamless interoperability with Windows networks, an attractive price tag, and a lot of value. Paul Ferrill takes a close look to see if it lives up to its promises.

Last year, Verizon Wireless said the Linux-based LiMo platform would be its preferred phone OS. However, CEO Lowell McAdam recently downplayed that possibility. LiMo will still be a long-term contender for Verizon phones, but it will not be favored over other platforms. Verizon's goal, he said, is to whittle down the number of OSes it supports from eight or nine to three or four.

Tune-in to Frugal Friday's new one-hour format. 30 minutes of news and commentary followed by a 30 minute interview.

Google entered the mobile telephony market with high hopes – now, however, its Director of Mobile Platforms, Andy Rubin, concedes that the company has had a bumpy start. Speaking from Google headquarters in Mountain View, Rubin said the first version of the Android operating system, whose development was spearheaded by Google, was initially a "version 0.8" rather than a full "version 1.0,". The Taiwanese vendor HTC released the G1 smartphone with Android software in the UK in November 2008. The phone is currently available exclusively from T-Mobile. Rubin says that, following several updates, the operating system has become "very solid".

Here's some recent updates for those of you too busy to hit F5 on Freshmeat every 10 seconds. Ardour 2.8 is now available featuring track and bus templates, distributable VST support and AudioUnit state saving -- stuff which has to be cool if you're into digital audio. Gnumeric 1.9.5 brings everyone's favourite non-OOo spreadsheet closer to 2.0 with bugfixes en masse, while HardInfo 0.5 displays a shedload more details about your system, and remains the essential fact-gathering tool when you need to get Linux help. Some more updates after the break.

So the new Sugar on a Stick v0.84 is out and I gave it a try on the XO, installing the suggested Windows XP version.

With its open source operating system, the OpenMoko Project was once the pride of the community. Now, however, development of the new model will cease.