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USA Today and other major media outlets are starting to suggest that Windows 7 — the successor to Windows Vista — could arrive in time for Christmas 2009. Frankly, that sounds like a holiday nightmare to The VAR Guy.

Current balloting for Debian Lenny's future has led to strife in the organization. Secretary of the free project, Manoj Srivastava, has resigned his position. A possible consequence is that the next version will undergo further delay in its release.

Red Hat is reporting an increase in revenues and income for it third quarter of its fiscal 2009 year. The most interesting part of the Red Hat numbers (for me at least) was the disclosure by CEO Jim Whitehurst that one of the top 25 deals closed by Red Hat during the quarter was one where the user moved from a Free version of Linux to a paid Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. Whitehurst pegged the deal at "6 figures" for a single year - so that means $100,000 plus.

Last week, the Novell-sponsored OpenSUSE project achieved version 11.1 of its community-supported Linux distribution. Because the release includes watershed changes like a new license, new build system, and significant upstream integrations, DesktopLinux collared Community Manager Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier for perspective about what it all means.

Canonical, the parent company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux system, wants to implement a new (and vaguely Mac-ish) method of user notification in Ubuntu's next release. You can check out a demonstration of the new notifications in action at Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth's blog post. As noted by Ars, the goal is to provide a more user-friendly experience for anyone jumping onto Linux, and give the desktop's pings and blips a uniform look and feel, as opposed to the multitude of notification apps and tools that use the free D-Bus protocol in a variety of ways.

With 2008 coming to an end, heise online UK picks what was full of win, who was waiting for the failboat, and who just made us go meh. So in no particular order, here are the Wins, the Fails and the Mehs of Open Source from 2008.

Last week, we launched the Linux Foundation video site. As part of the video site, we will also be holding a Linux video contest that kicks off in January. The contest reaction hasn’t been without controversy. Many emails and articles have asked, “Why are you copying Apple? Linux should be original!” My answer is that I originally thought of this contest while sitting through multiple Apple and Windows ads during a football game. It occurred to me that messages about operating systems are everywhere, but that Linux, by nature of its distributed organization, is not well represented in the video realm.

Microsoft came clean and admitted its SQL Server database software is vulnerable to code injection attacks. It's not a new flaw but the same bug in the database software that emerged around the time of Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday update earlier this month. In an advisory, Redmond's security gnomes confirmed that code has been produced that exploits a security bug affecting Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Windows Internal Database, in certain configurations.

Any .1 release of a Linux distribution is generally meant to fix bugs which were present in the .0 release, not to introduce new features. In this respect, OpenSUSE 11.1 differs sharply from other distributions. And the news is not all good either. Novell acolytes please note, this is NOT a review, just some sundry observations. The cancerous Mono has spread its tentacles further into the GNOME Desktop environment which is present on the GNOME live CD, to the extent that removing mono-core results in the removal of Evolution as well, the default mail program.

OLPC Learning Club DC member Mike Cariaso popped up on my Google Talk one night last week to tell me he had arrived at the Elaine & Nicholas Negropnte School in Reaksmy, Cambodia. This is the school featured in the May 2007 60 Minutes report on OLPC, and where Nicholas Negroponte first tried the one laptop per child idea. Mike is volunteering at the school over the next several months.

Microsoft researcher Don Syme talks about the development of F#, its simplicity when solving complex tasks, the thriving F# community and the future ahead for this fuctional programming language.

In an effort to increase environmental awareness, the Dutch media company Spranq has introduced Ecofont, a perforated font that saves printing ink.

The past year has brought several invasive changes to the Intel Linux graphics stack with the introduction of the Graphics Execution Manager for GPU memory management within the kernel, support for the Direct Rendering Infrastructure 2, and kernel mode-setting finally getting ready to enter the limelight. How though has the work this year affected the overall performance of Intel integrated graphics on Linux? In this article we have run a few benchmarks that show where the driver was at a few months ago and where it is today.

Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced plans to overhaul desktop notifications. The project is part of a broader initiative that the company launched earlier this year to boost the usability of the Linux software ecosystem. Transient visual notifications are employed extensively in desktop applications to provide users with passive updates about application status or system events. Some typical usage scenarios include notifying users when they receive new e-mail, when an instant messaging buddy signs online, or when a CD finishes burning.

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a Fedora 10 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Microsoft has begun to realign its legal department, allowing it to work in collaboration with its engineers so that product teams can have more flexibility with open-source software. The company is evangelizing—internally—that more interoperability can be good for the bottom line. Microsoft's Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy, discussed with SD Times his company's evolution to a pragmatic viewpoint toward open source, and explained why the company is offering its support to some open-source projects that it feels advances its business and technology goals.

One of the most powerful aspects of free software is that its entire approach and mindset is orthogonal to proprietary software. It's not just better, it's profoundly different. That's one of the most important reasons that *everything* Microsoft has thrown against free software has not just failed, but failed dismally. Against that background, I have mixed feelings about the Linux Foundation 60 second video showcase.

Documentation is one area in which free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) is weakest. A project called FLOSS Manuals is trying to remedy this situation. The idea behind project is to create quality, free documentation for free software. FLOSS Manuals is the brainchild of digital artist Adam Hyde

Cornell College is the latest institute of higher education to embrace Ubuntu Server Edition, WorksWithU has learned. It’s not a huge deployment, but Cornell’s targeted Ubuntu use reinforces a growing trend at colleges and universities worldwide. Here's the scoop.

Linux rarely needs to be rebooted. But when it does, it’s often slow to boot. Fortunately, there are ways to speed things up. Some of these methods are not terribly difficult. (although some, unfortunately, are). Let’s take a look.