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Google has given Microsoft a virtual bear hug, lauding the Redmond software giant for finally joining the push for a new-age HTML. In early August, Internet Explorer product manager Adrian Bateman suddenly appeared on a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) mailing list dedicated to the still-gestating HTML 5 standard, and this simple gesture has sparked a rare moment of Redmond love inside the Mountain View Chocolate Factory.

After a year's development, a new, stable version 3.0 of Google's open source Chrome browser is now available. Developers promise "significant speed improvements," although current beneficiaries are Windows Vista and XP users only.

Perhaps they are concerned about staying in Microsoft’s good graces, they have been slow about adopting Linux as an alternative on the computers that they sell to the public. But their has been some progress.

Linux on one side. Windows on the other. Draw your swords and CHARGE!

Today Nokia employee Thomas Zander announced in his blog that Nokia will be using KOffice as a base for the office file viewer in Maemo 5. He also sent an email to the KOffice mailing list giving some more details about how this came to be.

A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu development team unleashed the sixth and last alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) operating system, due for release in late October this year.

Developer Matthew Dillon has announced the release of version 2.4 of DragonFly BSD, originally created as a fork from FreeBSD 4.x. The major release includes several bug fixes, performance improvements and a new 64-bit port.

While I've known about the free, open-source desktop publishing application Scribus, until I happened across this article today I didn't know that Scribus is a cross-platform program that runs not just in Linux/Unix but also on computers using the Macintosh OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems. That raises my opinion of Scribus immediately. I strive to use as many cross-platform applications as possible because of the flexibility they afford me across the many operating systems I run.

Quarterly reports are the stuff of business. In most people's minds, they are as far from the spirit of free and open source software (FOSS) as anyone can imagine. All the same, as non-profit organizations, many FOSS projects issue them. And while your first reaction may be to avoid quarterly reports, they can give some insights into projects, especially if you read between the lines.

A group of SUSE Linux users put plans in motion last week to create a free, community-managed server distribution that maintains compatibility with Novell's enterprise offerings, but guarantees the long-term-support not provided by openSUSE. The result, said organizers, would be similar to the relationship between CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and would ultimately be beneficial to Novell. There are numerous practical difficulties to be overcome in the creation of this distribution, though, and the form that this distribution might take is not yet clear.

The OSGi Alliance has released version 4.2 of the OSGi (Open Service Gateway initiative) specification. OSGi is a Java component technology which serves as a basis for development environments like Eclipse. The OSGi components, called bundles, export code and services to others. They can be installed and exchanged individually at runtime. As a result, OSGi allows software modules to be dynamically discovered at runtime. The platform requires a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and provides a JVM-based OSGi framework.

If you're a Vonage user and you'd like to keep tabs on your bill as the month progresses, the script described here can help. The script uses curl to login to your Vonage account and download the web page with your current balance. The balance is then extracted using grep and sed.

But it has some quirks that some days make me want to slap Firefox silly, like when it crashes and there are multiple Firefox windows open, all of them vanish. This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder if Firefox isn't just a little too Windows-happy.

In part one of this series we looked at the basic building blocks needed to put together your very own high-end Linux workstation. This time Paul Ferrill finishes the actual hardware assembly, encounters Windows-required-for-BIOS-update follies, and starts to gaze towards putting some software on this beast.

Now this is good tech news in its purest form: After eight years of development, a new operating system called Haiku has been released in alpha form. It’s an open-source reconstruction of BeOS, the mean, lean, multimedia-savvy OS which I really liked when I reviewed it for PC World, um, eleven years ago. (If I recall correctly, I compared it with Windows 98 and an early version of Red Hat Linux.) It’s certainly a happier development than we’re accustomed to hearing about BeOS, a product which failed to become the next-generation Mac OS back in the 1990s and was then sold to Palm for a measly $11 million, whereupon it pretty much vanished except for the occasional legal aftershock.

A comment in one of my "backup" blogs (i.e. little used and just sitting there ... waiting) alerted me to a new blog, Tropic of Vector, which chronicles one guy's effort to find the right operating system for a Pentium III-era laptop. After trying everything from Xubuntu down to Puppy and Damn Small Linux, he settled on Vector Linux Light, which aims to make the already resource-sparing Vector Linux run even better with slower CPUs and smaller memory footprints.

Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning, or WebDAV, WebDAV is a protocol that allows for convenient mounting of a remote server on your desktop for easy file access. Once setup, using it is as simple as any other drag and drop navigation on your desktop. In this how to we will show you how to install webDAV on ubuntu 9.04

Microsoft's Zune HD might not be a serious iPod Touch challenger, but it's a huge leap forward from the original Zunes. That's why including pre-roll ads in front of their free apps makes so little sense.

Building your own corporate phone system using the Asterisk open source telephony suite could result in massive cost savings for your company, and setting up a test box to hone your Asterisk skills costs nothing but time. Paul Rubens gets you started on this sophisticated open source iPBX.

Open Source events tend to be rather spread out across the year. linux.conf.au starts things off in January, followed by Linux Journal staff favorite Penguicon in May, two of the major yearly conferences in July, the Linux Symposium and O'Reilly's OSCON, the new but integral Linux Plumber's Conference in September, and wrapping it all up, the Linux Congress in October. Added to that, just days from now, is the inaugural LinuxCon and the Geek High Holy Day, Software Freedom Day.