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Sun is set to launch the latest version of OpenSolaris, tuning it for the enterprise with a new support contract, processor support, and networking and storage technology. Sun, which is in the process of being acquired by Oracle, is expected to introduce OpenSolaris 2009.06 on Monday at the CommunityOne developer conference in San Francisco. OpenSolaris is the open source version of Solaris, and previously it has been aimed mainly at developers and as a platform for testing features that will later make their way into Solaris itself.

There's been quite a bit of hubub about the KDE project ever since the 4.0 release last year. Critics have slammed the 4.0 series repeatedly, citing the mentality of "Well, it's not good enough to be a full release.". Between the poor publicity, the crashes in Plasma, and the still-developing early features, KDE was definitely not having a good time. Developer blogs were plastered with hateful comments, and one of my favorite devs Aaron Seigo had to temporarily shut down his blog. However, for all the bad rap that the 4.0 series received, KDE has grown wonderfully.

Red Hat has opened Sun Microsystems' annual week of Java activities with an application server strategy targeting fellow open-sourcer SpringSource. The company, which made its name in the Linux business, has added a third server to its JBoss application server and middleware family targeting what it called "mid-sized" workloads. JBoss Enterprise Web Platform slots between Red Hat's existing JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and the Enterprise Web Server, while retaining the enterprise-edition's clustering, caching, persistence, and security the company said Monday.

In my last article about Xorg, I touched upon several points that have been in a state of continual flux in Xorg. Here’s a follow-up on that article, as it seems to have generated quite a lot of interest. However, I didn’t expand much on some features and their implications, so I will do so here. I will, also, touch upon a few improvements other than pure graphics. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the development version 1.9.28

• Partitions: Better detection and listing of the partitions for the live mode and the installer. If you encounter any problem since this version of Elive, please report it!.
• Raid: Now the fake-hardware (featured by the motherboard Bios) RAID disks are supported (thanks to the help and tests of watchwolf). A small help about RAID (software mode) is added in the installer describing how to install Elive on raid devices.
• Macbooks: We have switched from Lilo to Grub, in the previous versions of Elive you saw that sometimes the system doesn't boot anymore after running the fine-tune step because of some problems with lilo. This is now solved by using grub.
• Installer: The development is now all concentrated on the installer, with a large number of minor bugfixes and features.

An ASUS Eee PC prototype with a Snapdragon chip-set and running the open source Android operating system has been sighted at Computex Taipei, the Taiwan trade show. Qualcomm refers to designs using the ARM based Snapdragon chip-set as 'smartbooks' and expects to see Snapdragon based smartbook devices available in Autumn 2009. The chip-set/smartbook specification lists 3G connectivity, Wi-Fi, 3D graphics, Bluetooth and GPS among its defining features.

grml is a Debian-based Live-CD. It includes a collection of GNU/Linux software especially for system administrators and users of texttools. grml provides automatic hardware detection. You can use grml for example as a rescue system, for analyzing systems/networks or as a working environment. It is not necessary to install anything to a harddisk, you don't even need a harddisk to run it, unless you want to. Due to on-the-fly decompression grml includes more than 2GB of software and documentation on the CD.

I suspect that Windows is slowly killing the netbook concept. I realized this when I walked into a big computer shop and saw the following sign beside the Netbooks aisle: please note that these computer have reduced functionality and will not run games. After investigation it seems that the sign was put there by the salesmen because...

iPhone, BlackBerry, Symbian, WinMo, Android -- the world is awash in smartphone platforms, and this fragmented landscape is a pain for developers, who have to build an app four or five times in order to reach all users, as well as enterprises, which have to pay for the work. However, if the mobile browser world were to rally around WebKit, could it be the answer to simplified mobile development?

The OpenStreentMap Project has announced that it now has translations in German and partially in French on its main OpenStreetMap site. The project, run by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, is an open source project that is building free online maps, not based on any copyright or licensed map data. The project was started in August of 2004 and has become increasingly popular.

Welcome to OpenOffice.org, the world-class office suite that’s also free and open source. This is your new-user orientation. Read on to discover support, tutorials, community insights, templates, clip art, extensions, and blogs.

It has only been one week since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 Alpha 2, but we happen to be ahead of schedule on the third (and possibly the final) alpha release for 2.0 Sandtorg. In the past eight days there has actually been a very large number of changes to the Phoronix Test Suite, both to pts-core and the included test profiles and suites.

The Gimp FX Foundry SourceForce project made it its assignment to provide scripts for porting into the current GIMP or allow creating them from scratch. The scripts allow GIMP graphics to be endowed with special effects, such as blurring or distorting them in certain ways. The Foundry now provides 117 new scripts for GIMP 2.6 that are not part of the graphic software's standard installation.

The Eclipse Foundation, a not-for-profit, member supported corporation that hosts the Eclipse projects, recently announced the Eclipse Community Survey 2009 in The Open Source Developer Report. According to the report, Linux has become the most common deployment platform for the developer community. There is a shift from the Microsoft Windows to Linux and Mac OSX for their desktop development operating system.

An article in the Wall Street Journal says that European Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes is considering imposing tighter regulations on Microsoft. It says the company could be compelled to package browsers that compete with Internet Explorer, with its Windows operating system. Jonathan Todd, a Commission spokesman, had stated similar considerations publicly in February. A response from Microsoft was still being considered at that time, but it evidently made no impression on Commissioner Kroes.

Linux has, in some ways, always been a bit politicized in the sense that there are true believers among Linux users and developers that all software should be truly free. When I say free, I mean free as in free to use and share with others without any restrictions on that usage or sharing. gNewSense Linux is a distribution that is strongly devoted to those ideals.

Netbooks made with the processors required to run Google's Android software will be on show at Computex Taipei 2009 this week from at least five or six companies, an executive from Arm Holdings said Monday. The company does not expect to take a significant share of the central processing share of the netbook market this year, but growing interest in its processing cores should lead to greater gains next year.

Qualcomm said Sunday night that it has persuaded a number of Taiwan ODMs to at least show off netbooks, which it calls "smartbooks," that use its Snapdragon microprocessor. ASUS, Compal, Foxconn, High Tech Computer (HTC), Inventec, Toshiba and Wistron are among the ODMs showing off wares at the Computex Taipei show, the company said.

As we reported last week, the release of OpenSolaris 2009.06 would come on Monday, and sure enough, it has been released by Sun Microsystems. The OpenSolaris 2009.06 release presents network virtualization support with Crossbow, SPARC support, Intel Xeon 5500 series hardware support, MySQL and PHP DTrace probes, improved usability with its package management system, and much more.

Sun is giving opensolaris a major overhaul in the new 2009.06 release, the new release includes enhanced networking, virtualization and storage capabilities for the open source operating system. "This is really a transparent development step toward the next generation of the Solaris platform," Dan Roberts, director of product management datacenter software marketing at Sun, told InternetNews.com. "Initially, OpenSolaris had a developer-and desktop-centric flavor, but in this release we've moved from just desktop and developer to a datacenter-capable mission-critical operating system."