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You might think that stories of booting any Linux distro in under a second would be good news, but it seems that some still insist that Linux sucks when compared to Windows.

The LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation has endorsed a new Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) industry group established by mobile carriers to devise a common app format. The WAC format will build upon two web-based mobile widget standards: the Open Mobile Terminal Project's BONDI and the Joint Innovation Lab's JIL initiative.

The topic of the difficulties women face in the open source community comes up often. Here at OStatic we've discussed everything from the gender bias and harassment some women say they face, to highlighting the projects that are helping change the way females experience the developer community. A new project has gotten underway recently that aims to foster a healthy and respectful environment between female PHP developers and the PHP community. PHPWomen has teamed up in a partnership program with six open source projects that it feels represents the best the community has to offer in terms of an open, respectful, and friendly community.

Ever wondered how attackers know what ports are open on a system? Or how to find out what services a computer is running without just asking the site admin? You can do all this and more with a handy little tool called Nmap. What is Nmap? Short for "network mapper," nmap is a veritable toolshed of functionality to perform network scans. It can be used for security scans, simply to identify what services a host is running, to "fingerprint" the operating system and applications on a host, the type of firewall a host is using, or to do a quick inventory of a local network. It is, in short, a very good tool to know.

Canonical has revealed the style of the new default theme that will be used in Ubuntu 10.04, the next major version of the popular Linux distribution. In a significant departure from tradition, Ubuntu is shedding its signature brown color scheme and is adopting a new look with a palette that includes orange and an aubergine shade of purple.

Open-source software is one of the great success stories of the past few decades. The Apache HTTP Server is the world's most popular Web server, Linux has more than held its own against Unix and other proprietary operating systems, and Mozilla's Firefox browser has given Microsoft's Internet Explorer strong competition over the years. Could the same philosophy — the free and public dissemination of underlying code and specs, with multiple developers from disparate sources contributing to the design — work for tech gadgets as well? Will we one day commonly use smartphones, netbooks or other gadgets that have been developed under an open-source model, maybe even preferring them over proprietary products like the iPhone?

Recent pulling GRUB2 supporting CSs into xen-3.4-testing.hg immediately makes sense to build xen 3.4.3-2.fc12.src.rpm to be able to set up current version of 3.4.3 Xen Hypervisor on Fedora 12 working pretty smoothly with Libvirt packages ( vs Xen 4.0) and the at same time supporting GRUB2 PV DomUs , say Ubuntu 9.10 Server or Debian Squeeze.

Ubuntuzilla is an APT repository hosting the Mozilla builds of the latest official releases of Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey. This repository should also work on Linux distributions that are derivatives of Ubuntu, and probably also on any Debian derivative.

Steve Ballmer admitted the obvious this week, that Google was the first one to get search right and that most people see no reason to switch to Bing, no matter how good it may (or may not) be. He called it the value of incumbency.

Like we told you a while back (well, actually Mark told you), Ubuntu (hopefully 10.04) will get a new theme:

Vermont has become the latest government to enact an open source software policy, after Secretary of Administration Neale F. Lunderville recently signed a policy developed under state CIO David Tucker's leadership. The policy says the Vermont Department of Information and Innovation and other departments should look at open source solutions as part of the procurement process, and are directed to calculate the total cost of ownership for an open source system, including "fixed costs (direct purchases and licensing) and operational costs for support, testing, upgrades, maintenance and training," as part of the procurement process.

Institutional stock holder/Hedge Fund Elliot Associates wants to buy Novell and take it private. Sean Michael Kerner thinks this is a good idea, and a good deal for Novell.

If you're like most Internet-connected people these days, the amount of information you take in from your favorite news sites, tech blogs, and the like is just staggering. The only way to stay on top of everything is with a solid feed reader to help aggregate everything you want to read. Of course, many folks rely on Google Reader to get the job done but if you're looking for an open source option, here are five of our favorites.

Hedge fund Elliot Associates has made a bid to acquire software vendor Novell. In a public letter to the company's board of directors, the hedge fund offered $5.75 per share (a 49 percent premium), placing Novell's value at $2 billion dollars. Elliot Associates is already one of the largest institutional shareholders of Novell, with roughly 8.5 percent of the company's stock.

One new feature in Ubuntu 10.04 that caught my attention is the “Desktop in the Cloud” project. Until now, most of the attention on cloud technologies has been focused on servers in the cloud. If you wanted to use a desktop environment on EC2, you needed to do quite a bit of tweaking and installing of packages yourself. With the Lucid release, the Ubuntu team is making desktop in the cloud much easier.

Stable kernel update announcements posted on LWN have a certain tendency to be followed by complaints about the amount of information which is made available. It seems that there is a desire for a description of the changes which is more accessible than the patches themselves, and for attention to be drawn to the security-relevant fixes. As an exercise in determining what kind of effort is being asked of the kernel maintainers, your editor decided to make a pass through the proposed 2.6.32.9 update and attempt to describe the impact of each of the changes - all 93 of them. The results can be found below.

As companies like Facebook and Google continue to prove, the benefits of using open source software go well beyond cost-cutting. Open source has evolved into an exceptional way to boost productivity and foster innovation. In fact, open source is quickly becoming an essential element of next-generation Web applications. Whether you run a development team for a Fortune 500 company or a software startup, attending OSBC 2010 will help you leverage open source for your greatest competitive advantage.

Many were sceptical when Google announced that it was launching another mobile platform. After all, some said, there are already multiple offerings out there, and Google had precisely no track record in this sector: surely it was heading for a fall? The launch of the first Android phone, the G1, seemed to confirm these doubts. Although capable enough, it was clearly not going to carry Android through into the mainstream.

My good buddy Preston Gralla would have it that "Windows doesn't just dominate the desktop, but the server market as well." Eh... I don't think so. For proof, Gralla points to the latest IDC (International Data Corporation) Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker. This report covers the worldwide server market's factory revenue. But Gralla and other critics are missing that IDC is not measuring what server operating systems are being used; it's measuring what server operating systems people are buying, and those are bundled with their hardware purchases. Specifically, to quote IDC, the researchers are measuring "server revenue includes components that are typically sold today as a server bundle, including frame or cabinet and all cables, processors, memory, communication boards, and OS."

Almost all systems sold nowadays have at least a dual-core CPU, even triple- or quad-cores are getting cheaper and getting standard in the near future. But how to utilize your shiny x-core to it's full potential, with applications that are only utilizing one core? With Linux, which has strong multitasking capabilities as all unixoid operating systems, there is an easy possibility to parallelize tasks which are normally only using one core of an x-core CPU.