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Google has released the 0.9 SDK Beta and admits that its ambitious project to produce the first complete, open, and free mobile platform is "converging on a final Android 1.0" release. It has also taken the bold step of posting an open letter to the security community which, in effect, invites them to hack the Android...

Some cloud computing vendors, such as 3tera and Nirvani, push their own proprietary platforms and tools, which forces adopters to limit their options and work in a restricted or closed architecture. When these established vendors say cloud, they mean their cloud. As a result, Web developers may believe that, in order to use cloud computing, they must accept limitations in the way they write and build their applications. But that view is a misconception; open standards for cloud computing are already in place and are being tweaked. This does not mean that a single cloud computing platform is universally available. But just as some vendors have developed their own proprietary platforms for working in the clouds, so have various open source companies and communities.

What does the future hold for Linux development at Red Hat? A look at some of the new features coming in the Fedora 10 Linux distribution release might yield some clues. Currently in early development with a feature freeze scheduled for the end of August, Fedora 10 includes a host of improvements that aim to improve audio, packaging, networking and security features.

Linux has no shortage of audio and video players, but if you want to devote you whole system to multimedia use, you need the Xbox Media Center (XBMC). Although initially designed for the Xbox gaming console, XBMC has been ported to other platforms. The Linux port of XBMC that I use is quite usable, especially for video playback, despite the fact that not all XBMC features have yet been ported. XBMC began life as the Xbox Media Player with its first open source release in 2002 before growing into an all-in-one media center app in 2004. The developers began porting the media center to Linux only last year. Currently precompiled binaries are available for various Ubuntu releases. If you don't use Ubuntu, you can also compile XBMC from source.

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, is now a member of the Linux Foundation (LF). The foundation, a nonprofit organization supporting the accelerated growth of Linux, announced Canonical's membership on Tuesday. Ubuntu community members have been active participants in a variety of workgroups at LF, including the Linux Standard Base, Desktop Architects and Driver Backporting groups. In addition, Canonical supports a range of other open source projects including Bazaar, Storm and Upstart.

Google is finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel with its long-awaited and much-hyped Android phone platform. This week has seen two significant developments: the first Android-powered device officially being approved by the FCC, and the beta version of the Android software development kit being released by Google.

A federal judge has lifted a gag order on three MIT students who were barred from talking publicly about security flaws they discovered in the MBTA's automated fare system, even as a lawyer for the transit agency acknowledged the CharlieTicket system has security flaws.

Scalix collaboration platform, with its latest release version 11.4, aims to be a good alternative to Microsoft Exchange. Based on the HP OpenMail platform, discontinued by Hewlett-Packard in 2001, it has been further developed by Scalix and now acts as an enterprise email and group calendar server with the option of integrating systems like ERP, CRM, and billing into the Scalix system using its open API. It is compatible with most LDAP authentication mechanisms, such as those in Windows Active Directory, Novell eDirectory, and Red Hat Directory Server. The most prominent feature of Scalix is its Exchange compatibility; you can use an Outlook client to access the Scalix platform.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a standard-based middleware architecture that allows pluggable components to communicate with each other via a messaging system. In this article by David Salter, we will see in brief, the components inside the ESB architecture and how they communicate with each other. We will also look at how NetBeans SOA pack integrates with OpenESB and the various functionalities it offers with regards to the ESB.

The Mozilla Foundation has named Mark Surman as its new Executive Director effective September 22. Surman is currently serving as an Open Philanthropy Fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation.

The majority of servers supporting the Fedora Linux distribution were back online on Tuesday following a mystery disruption. Last Thursday (14 August) Fedora project leader Paul Frields took the unusual step of advising users not to download or update their software, as a precaution while the Fedora team responded to an unspecified issue. He warned ahead of time that service outages were likely.

Vista’s death march picked up some pace yesterday, after a metrics researcher revealed that nearly 35 per cent of PCs built to run the Windows operating system have been downgraded to XP. In a survey of more than 3,000 computers, performance testing software developer Devil Mountain Software estimated that more than one in three new machines had either been downgraded by vendors such as Dell, or by customers once they bought the PC.

A new netbook for European schools runs Linux on a Chinese-designed processor. With a generous 10-inch, 1024×600 display, the 2.4-pound Emtec Gdium boots Mandriva Linux from removable USB flash keys, running it in 512MB of DDR2 RAM on a 900MHz Loongson-2F processor made by STMicroelectronics (ST).

It has been a few weeks since NVIDIA last pushed out a Linux display driver update, but this morning already they have pushed out a new update. The just-released NVIDIA 177.67 display driver doesn't introduce OpenGL 3.0 support or any other major features, but it does look to resolve a number of bugs, provide improvements to the Render extension, add official support to the GeForce GTX 260/280 graphics cards, and a number of other improvements.

T-Mobile has admitted it'll be launching an Android phone this year, and with Google finally allowing developers access to version 0.9, we'll soon see if the Android has managed the finesse of an iPhone with Nokia-grade functionality. Version 0.9 of Google's platform is now available for download, with a redesigned user interface and some significant improvements in functionality, as well as lots of eye-candy to seduce the iPhone crowd. But Google's revolutionary platform is still lacking some of the features we've come to expect of a smartphone, including hardware on which to run it.

This guide explains how you can create advanced virtual hosts on a lighttpd web server on Debian Etch that are stored in a MySQL database. The method described here does not use the lighttpd mod_mysql_vhost module, and unlike mod_mysql_vhost (which allows you to store only the hostname and document root of a vhost in a database), this method allows to store individual configuration directives for each vhost in the MySQL database.

How does OpenSolaris, Sun's effort to free its big-iron OS, fare from a Linux user's point of view? Is it merely a passable curiosity right now, or is it truly worth installing? Linux Format takes OpenSolaris for a test drive, examining the similarities and differences between the OS and a typical Linux distro. If you want to sample the mighty ZFS filesystem, OpenSolaris is definitely the way to go.

Buoyed by a court ruling and prospects for new mobile phone products, The SCO Group says it is on track for a Phoenix-like rebirth. The company believes those two factors have finally given it the breathing room to emerge from bankruptcy and continue its traditional computer server business, as well as market promising new mobile products and pursue its high-profile legal battles.

A shift from multi-core power-gobbling monsters toward whisper-quiet systems with single-digit power consumption is rippling through the desktop market. This trend plays right into the hands of a Paris-based company called Linutop, which offers a miniature Linux-based desktop system. The latest version of the machine appeals to customers who are in the market for a machine with green credentials and low maintenance costs. After testing one myself, I found the tiny desktop has a lot going for it.

Over the last couple day's I have been working on the Bordeaux for FreeBSD 7 port. We now have everything compiling and running but a lot more testing needs to be done before it's ready for a final release. Internet Explorer, Steam and Office 2003 are the only applications ive gotten around to testing thus far. The good news is everything that I have tested works fairly well on FreeBSD.