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One of the cornerstones of the landmark interoperability deal between Novell and Microsoft was, and is, virtualization. Two years after they struck their agreement, Microsoft and Novell have extended their partnership. The partners are now finally rolling out a supported Linux on a Windows virtualization solution.

Lenovo Group Ltd. is cutting back on sales of desktops and laptop systems with the Linux operating system pre-installed. The PC maker said yesterday that it will no longer take online orders for computers pre-loaded with any flavor of Linux. Ray Gorman, a spokesman for the company, said that it will continue offering such machines only through its own or partner direct sales teams.

Elisa is an open source cross-platform media center connecting the Internet to an all-in-one media player. While primary development and deployment platform is GNU/Linux and Unix operating systems, elisa also currently support Microsoft Windows. Elisa runs on top of the GStreamer multimedia framework. In addition to personal video recorder functionality (PVR) and Music Jukebox support, Elisa will also interoperate with devices following the DLNA standard like Intel’s ViiV systems.

Canonical, the corporate backer of Ubuntu Linux, is hiring a team of designers and developers to make desktop open source software easier and more appealing to use. Canonical head and Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth, said in a blog post yesterday that the company plans to hire a team of designers and user interface experts to contribute to not only Ubuntu’s usability but also to other upstream open source applications.

Find out about the recent updates made to the Post-Link Optimization for Linux on POWER, also known as FDPR-Pro. This technology is a performance-tuning utility used to improve the execution time and the real memory utilization of user-level application programs, based on their run-time profiles.

Sun released the code for its open source server-virtualization software Wednesday, and will make a commercial version of the xVM Server available next month. xVM Server can virtualize Windows, Linux and Sun's own Solaris operating system on x86 hardware from such vendors as Sun, HP, IBM and Dell, says Steve Wilson, Sun's xVM vice president. Previously, Sun's server-virtualization strategy focused on its own operating system and the Sparc chipset, he says.

Imagine a world without Linux. There'd be no cute Tux penguin or any notion of software freedom day. Netbooks would not have come about. But more strikingly, there wouldn't be the modern powerful tools that Windows systems administrators have come to love. That's right; Linux is keeping Microsoft honest and I'm going to expose the new Windows Small Business Server for what it is, along with those who resell it.

Pentaho, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced the availability of Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) support, integrated with Pentaho’s Data Integration and Data Mining modules. PMML support from Pentaho can provide interoperability or migration alternatives for end user organizations that have traditionally been subject to the extremely high acquisition and maintenance costs of traditional, proprietary analytical and data mining platforms from companies like SAS Institute, SPSS, and Microstrategy. Now those organizations can take advantage of the cost benefits of commercial open source BI from Pentaho, while reusing their existing investments and providing continuity in their deployments.

Where will your next Desktop Operating System be located? This article analyzes the Qumranet acquisition by Red Hat for an answer.

In part two of this series, Akkana Peck takes us on a solar system tour via XEphem. We'll visit the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and learn how to get detailed information on thousands of far-away objects, and travel in time, both past and future.

Tim Berners-Lee, the British-born inventor of the World Wide Web, says he doesn't like to express preferences among Web browsers. But he does have an issue with one of them: Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Berners-Lee, director of the standard-setting World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, said in an interview this week that Internet Explorer is falling behind other browsers in the way it handles an important graphics feature.

Windows Vista suffers from 10 key technical and marketing challenges. But the biggest challenge of all is summarized perfectly in this cartoon, reports The VAR Guy.

Practically everyone, it seems, is celebrating GNU's 25th birthday - and rightly so. But they are celebrating it for the wrong reason: GNU's achievement is far greater than simply kick-starting the free software movement.

Red Flag is China's biggest Linux supplier. The Red Flag Linux distribution is based on Red Hat Linux. Red Flag recently announced the release of a beta edition of Red Flag Linux 7, called "Olympic Edition." While it contains the expected bugs of a beta system, it also gives us an opportunity to preview the next release of Red Flag. What I saw didn't blow me away.

For years there have been those that have accused Ubuntu of not contributing enough to the upstream development of Linux. Mark Shuttleworth founder and leader of Ubuntu is tired of the criticism and is now putting more of his money and resources into upstream development

Lenovo caused a small furor when it announced that it was no longer selling Linux on Thinkpads to us unwashed masses. Though it was news to me that they had ever started...Remember Dell's first few insincere forays into the Linux desktop market, where you had to have the cunning and skills of a Yeti hunter to find Linux boxes on Dell.com? Lenovo was even worse- I never did find their alleged Linux offerings."

Loosely speaking, in software terms, a wrapper is something that provides an alternate interface to another object. SMPlayer is an advanced multimedia player wrapped around MPlayer that provides a friendlier and more powerful front end to the underlying application. SMPlayer can play practically anything -- you can watch DVDs and VCDs, stream videos from a URL, or play audio CDs or MP3s. SMPlayer version 0.6.2 was released last month, and is licensed under the GPLv2. It is written using the Qt libraries (as most of KDE is; this practically ensures good integration with the KDE desktop) and thus can be used not only under Linux, but with Windows too.

Lenovo clarifies its desktop Linux strategy, and reveals plans for Netbook sub-notebooks with Linux preinstalled. Netbooks are now the hot PC platform, and most Netbook vendors are betting on Linux. Here's why.

This article intends to select and briefly review 8 of the most useful applications which come by default with Kubuntu 8.04 'Hardy Heron' (the LTS release which comes with KDE 3.5.9), as included on the Live CD. Screenshots included.

After 10 years in Portland, Oregon, OSCON - O'Reilly's Open Source Conference is moving in 2009 to the San Franciso Bay area. I was just at OSCON this past August in Portland and it's somewhat sad to think that it was the last OSCON to be held in Portland.