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While the current beta edition of Chrome currently runs on Windows only, open source developers -- including some from Mozilla -- are now working on getting Google's new browser to operate on Linux and Mac, too. The developers' site for Chromium, an open source project rolled out by Google at the time of its launch of the Chrome browser, also contains build instructions for Windows, Linux, and Mac. There, in addition to making the source code for Chrome available under a BSD license, Google explains how to submit patches and submit bug reports. The source code for Chrome's high-performance V8 JavaScript engine is also downloadable.

Reports are swirling that Lenovo is moving away from Novell SUSE Linux on ThinkPads. But Novell and Lenovo have their own views to share.

In the first week of September 2006, the European Commission signed an agreement to fund a 30 month research project which aims to develop an open-source software system, seamlessly integrated in a software development environment for enabling decentralised, personalised and context-aware knowledge sharing. The Consortium that will carry out the research and development work, consists of Planet AE, Forschungszentrum Informatik an der Universität Karlsruhe, Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, National Technical University of Athens, Technische Universität München, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CIM College d.o.o, Intrasoft International S.A., Linux Industrial Association (LIPSZ Hungary), THALES Research and Technology France, TXT e-solutions S.p.A.

The open source arena never fails to surprise when it comes to offbeat implementations of community-produced technologies. Put together enough eyeballs and collaboration, and unusual inventions will ensue. We've covered several examples of this phenomenon on OStatic, including open source efforts completely outside the software arena. In this post, you'll find six unusual open source efforts worthy of Rube Goldberg.

Wine 1.1.4 went public only two weeks after the earlier version 1.1.3 and, along with fixed bugs, provides better support for the new Chrome Google browser. The developers also tout its substantial WinHTTP implementation and improved JavaScript support. A complete list of changes can be found at the WINE HQ website, with binaries for Wine 1.1.4 to follow shortly. The source code can be downloaded from the Sourceforge portal.

Playdeb is a repository for Ubuntu games that makes it easy to install games that are available on getdeb.net. This article shows how you can install games using Playdeb on an Ubuntu 8.04 desktop.

It has been through user experience that many of today's websites and applications even continue to exist! If people ten years ago had seen a warning page when they attempted to visit google.com do you think that would have had a negative impact on the direction google went ? Of course it would have!

Custom Linux provider Xandros will release a free Linux OS called"Freespire 5" during the fourth quarter of 2008. This next version of Freespire will be based on the Debian GNU/Linux"Lenny" release rather than the Ubuntu Linux platform Freespire 4 uses. The move spearheads a new Xandros consolidated desktop strategy following its acquisition in July of Linspire, the developer of the CNR software distribution platform.

The usual practice of configuring your email client to retrieve email from your ISP's servers works well, but not for all situations. Suppose you add a laptop as a compliment to your desktop machine, or you'd occasionally like to use your spouse's computer to read your email -- you can run into problems trying to keep all of your email clients in sync. You can use IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) instead of POP3 (Post Office Protocol), but then you need to store all of your email on your ISP's servers indefinitely, which has its own drawbacks. Here's a way you can set up a single machine on your own network to fetch and store your email and serve it to any number of email clients.

Ubuntu founder and Canonical chief, Mark Shuttleworth, yesterday announced his ambitions for Ubuntu 9.04, now called “Jaunty Jackalope”. In an email to developers last night, Shuttleworth said: “As we approach the launch of Ubuntu 8.10, it’s time to create space for future plans, and so I’m writing to introduce you to The Jaunty Jackalope.”

The folks at One Laptop Per Child got back to me with a statement following my recent blog post on its plans to sell through online commerce giant, Amazon. It was tough to get many details on this story because the only information came from a news items briefly quoting an OLPC team member who blabbed prematurely about the Amazon deal. An OLPC spokesperson told me the group didn’t issue a press release because Amazon doesn’t announce things until they’re available at their online storefront.

A posting to the Google Groups Chrome support forum has announced the availability of an update to the Chrome browser. According to the poster, the Chrome 0.2.149.27 update fixes 'confirmed security vulnerabilities' although despite requests from users in the forum declined to expand upon what these might be. However, a little digging revealed that it is likely to be the buffer overflow problem that was identified by a Vietnamese security researcher on September 5th.

On August 22, the Fedora Project released an "infrastructure report" confirming what most observers had, by then, suspected: the project had suffered a major security breach. The attacker got as far as a system used to sign packages distributed by Fedora. That, of course, is something close to a worst-case scenario: if an intruder has control over such a system, it's a relatively small step to capture the package signing key and the passphrase used to employ that key. And those, in turn, could be used to create hostile packages which would be accepted as genuine by Fedora installations worldwide.

Here's another topic that relates to our larger series on number pools and guaranteed combinations within fixed lists while still being worthy of having its own post. Regular expression matching with Perl for Linux or Unix is fairly simple at its most basic (as are most implementations of regular expression matching). Taken to its most remedial level, you can use a regular expression as a poor man's "grep" (and, oddly enough, the "re" in grep actually stands for regular expression). Although this use of regular expression pattern matching does have its place, it doesn't really merit use outside of tools designed to apply it in that manner and will suck all the joy right out of creating your own regular expressions.

Amid all the hype about Microsoft's virtualization strategy, some pundits are starting to wonder if VMware has replaced Linux as the biggest threat to Microsoft. The VAR Guy sure thinks so.

In many cases, adding a graphical interface to Python scripts means getting your hands dirty with TKinter or other GUI programming kits. This exercise is usually reserved for users who have already acquired decent Python programming skills, as it requires some serious code wizardry. Thankfully, the EasyGui module allows you to add some GUI goodness to your Python scripts without going through coding rigmarole. Using EasyGui, you can add visual elements with just a few lines of code.

The Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has upgraded its India-focused GNU Linux distribution. Version 3.0 of Bharat Operating Systems Solutions (BOSS) Linux adds GNOME and KDE desktop environments, Bluetooth support, and support for 18 Indian languages, says C-DAC.

Microsoft's new Windows ad, featuring Jerry Seinfeld, is outdated and not very funny -- but it's highly revealing of all that's wrong out there in Redmond. The background: Windows is losing market share to Apple's Mac OS and even Linux. And Vista, the latest version, has been a big fat dud. Businesses have shunned it outright, and many consumers find it unintuitive and difficult to use. So, Microsoft hired "award winning" agency Crispin, Porter + Bogusky -- at a reported cost of $300 million -- to give Vista, and the Windows franchise in general, an image makeover. The Seinfeld ad debuted Thursday and it's the first piece of an integrated marketing campaign covering TV, the Web, and point-of-sale outlets.

With Labour Day past, we back in the season of slide shows -- million of them daily in both academia and business. For over a decade now, slide shows have become an accepted prop for public speaking, regardless of whether they are useful or well-designed, and the trend shows no sign of slowing. You can, of course, just acquiesce and accept that as soon as you click to the first slide, most of your audience will sigh deeply and sit back low in their chairs. But, if you really want to make slide shows work for you, you'll think before opening up the Impress wizard.

Barton George, one of the best-known open source evangelists at Sun Microsystems, has left the company. Here's why Ubuntu Linux fans (in particular) should care, according to The VAR Guy.