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Nokia has announced the availability of Qt 4.6, a new version of the popular open source software development toolkit. It introduces official support for Symbian S60 and Nokia's Linux-based Maemo platform.

What are the defining features of Ubuntu? Or Mandriva? Or openSUSE? What are the features born to illuminate point-of-sale material and slideshows the world over? What’s the ‘killer app’ that’s going to get the world excited about Linux?

Apple is making a lot of money these days. The more money it makes, the greater the contempt for its customers it seems to display. A critical bug recently discovered in FreeBSD, and the speed with which this bug was resolved, illustrates this rather well. If you use Apple's products in your business, be afraid; be very afraid. Here's how the sorry story unfolds. FreeBSD 8.0 was released last week, and the latest version of the UNIX-like OS was generally received with approval. FreeBSD enjoys a good reputation with its followers, and many OSes and products contain code based on or borrowed from the OS, including Juniper routers, and — ironically, as we shall see — Mac OS X.

"White space" networking, which will use unused TV spectrum to deliver broadband services, has moved a step closer. Last week, the Federal Communications Commission said it would begin establishing databases that will warn white space devices when existing TV signals are present, according to a story on our sister site eWEEK.

Can we liberate tweeting from Twitter? It's an open question. And it's one that Dave Winer hopes we can answer, in response to his post We need: An open source Twitter shell. He begins, It would do more or less exactly what the twitter.com website does.

At the heart of Cisco's new SMB products is a different approach and a different operating system than that which it has traditionally delivered to big enterprise customers. As opposed to Cisco's own IOS operating system, the open source Linux operating system is the mainstay in the new SMB products

With Red Hat, Novell - and now Intel, thanks to its $884m acquisition of Wind River - all crowding into the real-time Linux space, Concurrent has to keep on its toes and keep its RedHawk Linux, well, current. With RedHawk Linux 5.4, announced Tuesday, Concurrent is slipping into Linux 2.6.31 and offering full compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 update 4. That's because RedHawk is a tweak on Red Hat, adding real-time extensions and other goodies cooked up by Concurrent to make it different from Red Hat's own Enterprise MRG real-time Linux.

Germany's first open source professorship was established at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Firefox is Germany's most used browser, according to online and TV media and a study of Fittkau & Mass, based on a questionnaire of 126,000 internet users. Link leads to the German "Tagesschau" online, Germany's top TV news source.

[Article in German. Recap: FF3 at 44,2%, IE8 25,5%, IE7 11,8% and IE6 7,2% - Sander]

Most people require a little help in managing and organizing their life. Whether we like to admit it or not, most people tend to be disorganized and the reason why we have any semblance of organization is because we have and use tools to help us: pads of paper, PDAs, phones, groupware solutions, and so forth. If you don’t necessarily need a smartphone to keep things under control and a large groupware solution like Zimbra or Outlook is too much organization, there’s a solution called Osmo, which may be the program for you.

I was pleasantly surprised to read that Larry Augustin had been named SugarCRM's full-time CEO. After spending much of the last decade as an investor and board member extraordinaire for many (most?) companies grouped in the commercial open source category, it is good to see Larry back in the CEO saddle. This is a vindication of sorts for Larry and his vision of an open source future. After years of attempting to explain just how ubiquitous open source was going to be, he can now take the reigns of a company at a time when most customers and vendors take as a given that a substantial portion of any solution will consist of open source code. This was not always the case, especially when Larry was still CEO of VA Linux Systems, at the time the premier vendor for servers running Linux.

Google's ChromeOS is making a lot of, ahem, waves. But what is really hiding under its shiny feathers?

ZiiLabs announced a mid-range smartphone development platform supporting its Android and Linux-based "Plaszma" stacks. The Zii Trinity is based on ZiiLabs' dual ARM9-core "ZMS-05" SoC, and provides 1080p video output, OpenGL graphics, HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and a 3.1-inch, 800 x 480 OLED touchscreen, says the Creative Technology subsidiary.

Nokia has released Version 4.6 of its Qt cross-platform application and UI framework. Qt 4.6 includes support for the Symbian platform for the first time, and adds Windows 7, Apple Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard), and the upcoming Maemo 6 to the list of Qt-supported platforms.

How to setup Wireless on Chrome OS. Chrome has recently been open sourced by Google as a developer preview. Its very young, clearly has some issues and needs serious work, however it is usable and lots of people have managed to get it running in a virtual machine or via a USB key.

Over the last few years, system security has gained a lot of momentum and software professionals are focusing heavily on it. Linux is treated as a highly secure operating system, but the reality is that it too has its share of security flaws…

This year with the Phoronix Test Suite we have delivered four major updates to this leading, widely adopted, multi-platform testing software that has brought dozens of new test profiles and literally hundreds of significant changes. These changes ranged from features to autonomously track performance regressions within any code-base, the ability to not only compare frame-rates within OpenGL tests but image quality comparisons too, support for mobile platforms, and so much other major work to further drive automated testing and benchmarking not only on Linux but OpenSolaris, *BSD, and Mac OS X too. In 2009 we also launched PTS Desktop Live, our own operating system for carrying out standardized benchmarks in an easy-to-use and repeatable manner from a live Linux environment, and also Phoromatic, which is designed for the enterprise world and allows the Phoronix Test Suite to be easily deployed across many systems and then managed from a central interface. The year is not over yet, nor is our work on ensuring that the Phoronix Test Suite is the most powerful and robust testing/benchmarking platform. With that said, as of this morning our Phoronix kernel test farm is now alive!

Among the bits of minutiae that I personally find entertaining about the Linux distribution release cycle is how different distros come up with their respective release names. Ubuntu with its 'interesting' animal inspired names like Dapper Drake and Karmic Koala gets its names from it's Dictator-for-Life Mark Shuttleworth. Rival Linux distribution Fedora doesn't have such an autocratic approach to naming. Instead the process (like much of the distro itself) is driven by the community. It's a process that is now gearing up for 2010's Fedora 13 release.

Today, KDE has released a new version of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). This month's edition of KDE SC is a bugfix and translation update to KDE SC 4.3. KDE SC 4.3.4 is a recommended upgrade for everyone running KDE 4.3.3 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. Users around the world will appreciate that KDE SC 4.3.4 is more completely translated. KDE 4 is already translated into more than 50 languages, with more to come.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Linux Mint 8 (Helena) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Linux Mint 8 is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 9.10 that has lots of packages in its repositories (like multimedia codecs, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Skype, Google Earth, etc.) that are relatively hard to install on other distributions; it therefore provides a user-friendly desktop experience even for Linux newbies.