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Guess why Microsoft suddenly decided it wanted to be more interoperable? It's so it can get customers to quit using Linux and switch to Windows & .NET. Remember when Microsoft told us it was interested in greater interoperability with Linux because their customers were demanding it? That part is true, as I'll show you. But the purpose of developing greater interoperability at the request of Intel, according to this exhibit, was so that Microsoft could get Intel to switch its development environment from Linux to Windows. Intel's Paul Otellini had reportedly asked his people to figure out how to do that.

["..and at Intel, the developer crowd was raised on Unix/Linux. They just don’t WANT to move."..I Love It! - Scott]

Continuing the theme of "KDE Everywhere", recently it was announced by the folks over at TiltOS that KDE applications are now available for download and use. TiltOS provides a repository and an easy to use application manager for the Haiku operating system, which is in turn aims to be an open source implementation of the BeOS operating system.

t was a busy week as controversy continued to rage over the Google-China dust-up and Mozilla released a solid new version of Firefox. But first, Google. Ars sat down with the engineering director of Google's Chrome OS project to talk about the past, present, and future of the project. There's a lot of good detail about the relationship between Chrome and Android, the genesis of Chrome OS, and much more.

his week's news on The H was dominated by repercussions of the targeted attacks on US companies and reports on the holes in Microsoft software that the attackers exploited. Final efforts were made by the 'free MySQL' campaign as the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems approached its conclusion.

Over the past few years more of the Linux graphics stack has moved within the Linux kernel so that there is finally a proper kernel memory management solution for the open-source graphics drivers and to also provide kernel mode-setting. Moving more of the GPU driver code into the kernel DRM results in a more secure environment as the X Server can now run without root access, the start-up process is cleaner and faster with KMS, the performance will ultimately be better with a memory manager, there's more reliable and faster VT switching, suspend and resume is better, and the list of benefits just goes on.

Your editor has just completed an important transition: moving his Internet connectivity from one evil branch of the local telecom duopoly to the other, equally evil branch. This change required the acquisition of a new router; that, in turn, provided the opportunity to play with Linux-based router software, and Tomato in particular. Read on for your editor's impressions of this impressive bit of (mostly) free software.

Sometime in 2010, Google will release Chrome OS, its take on a netbook operating system. It will be far more than just that though. It's an entirely new take on the desktop operating system. While a final version is still months away from release there's already enough of Chrome available that we can begin to see what it's going to look like. For starters, Chrome OS is Linux. To be exact, it owes a lot of its genes to Ubuntu. But, that's all under the surface. You won't need to know a shell command from the GNOME desktop to use it. As a matter of fact, you won't need to know anything about the traditional Linux desktops -- KDE or GNOME -- either. Chrome OS's interface is Google's Chrome browser. If you can use a Web browser, you'll be able to use Chrome OS.

A former co-worker once told me “If you want to learn Debian, install Debian. If you want to learn Fedora, install Fedora. If you want to learn Linux, install Slackware.” The philosophy behind Slackware is to keep the system as UNIX-like as possible. There’s not a lot of automatic configuration and you won’t find many bells and whistles, but you’d be hard set to find a more stable and mature distribution. In fact, Slackware is one of the few distros still in existence from Linux’s early days, right along with Debian, SuSE, and Red Hat. Because of this decision to keep things as UNIX-like as possible, Slackware has a reputation for being somewhat difficult to install and confusing to use. While this has been true for a long time, there have been some great improvements in the past few releases, and now seems like a great time to run a guide on this often misunderstood distribution.

Let's face it. Even though open source conferences, conventions, and projects have seen an increase in the number of female participants, there's a strikingly male majority in the world of free software. While the greater free software community, media outlets, conferences and projects are finding diverse ways to draw women to open source, the GNOME Foundation's Outreach is built on a familiar framework. The approach? Think Google Summer of Code -- complete with internships, mentors, and sponsors -- with an emphasis on team contributions rather than stand-alone projects.

T-Mobile launched an Eric Clapton-backed Fender Limited Edition of its Android-based MyTouch 3G phone. Meanwhile, China-based Hisense announced an HS-E90 Android phone, Motorola is launching an Android app store in China, and Taiwan's Gigabyte is rumored to be releasing an Android handset in Russia, say reports.

In December the U.S. White House set guidelines for an open and transparent administration. The Open Source for America (OSFA) organization is now following up with tips for a governmental move to free software.

Google has confirmed that its upcoming lightweight, browser-centric Chrome OS operating system will include a built-in media player. In an interview with ArsTechnica, Matthew Papakipos, the engineering director for the Chrome OS project, says that the developers are currently working on "integrating a whole media player into Chrome and into Chrome OS".

The second alpha of Ubuntu 10.06 boasts 15-second boot-time, says an industry report. Meanwhile, the Ubuntu project posted a controversial survey about which proprietary apps might be considered for inclusion with the distro, and Canonical announced a support plan for IBM's Ubuntu/Lotus "Smart Work" cloud distribution.

The San Francisco Committee on Information Technology has published a new software evaluation policy that requires departments of the city government to consider open source software solutions alongside proprietary commercial offerings.

Obviously, I've spent a good amount of time trying to think of a suitable intro to this column. But I couldn't find anything appropriate to express my disgust and disappointment at Ubuntu's missed opportunity. So I'll state it plainly – Ubuntu, you got us this far and then, just when it mattered, you blew it for all of us. Unlike many, I'm not ranting about Karmic Koala's technical glitches. In fact, it's still one of the best options for the desktop, and it's technically superior to the new Windows OS that its release coincided with. But this is where it hurts. For the first time ever, the mainstream tech press mentioned an upcoming Linux release in a Windows preview article. And what did Ubuntu do to capitalise on this new-found exposure? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

X@FOSDEM 2011? Forget about it. It is to much disappointment that we have to report this evening that the X@FOSDEM DevRoom will be ending this year, after the X.Org project has consistently held a development room at Europe's largest free software event for years. Two days ago we reported on the sad state of this year's X@FOSDEM schedule. Only half the schedule is filled and there is just two weeks left until the Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting.

Schools should be looking to open source for students, both for lower cost and far greater learning potential, and there are a number of excellent education-oriented Linux distributions. Paul Ferrill takes openSUSE For Schools (Linux For Education) for a spin.

The third day of talks at Camp KDE was somewhat shorter, due to the afternoon Cmake training provided by Marcus Hanwell of Kitware. However, in order to provide complete coverage of the talks for the readers of the dot, summaries of the third day's technical talks are provided within.

Around 75 per cent of Linux developers raked in cash from their code crunching in the past year. It's a figure that in many ways comes as little surprise, given that Linux usage has become so widespread across industries, government and the public sector in recent years.

Bob Sutor, who has served at IBM in one position or another since 1982 but currently holds the title of VP of Open Source and Linux after serving as the VP of Open Source and Standards, has decided to share his thoughts on Linux gaming. Dr. Sutor had drove IBM's adoption of the ODF document format and has many other open-source wins for the company, but on his blog he now begs the question will video games make desktop Linux into a killer consumer platform?