Linux distributors Mandriva and Turbolinux have announced a development partnership resulting in the creation of a joint development lab, Manbo Labs, which will maintain a common base system to be shared between the two distributions. Work has been underway since October, and the common system will be used in future releases from both companies, including the forthcoming Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring.

Despite TurboLinux having an agreement with Microsoft regarding the use of some of its proprietary technology, this partnership has no implications in that area, and Mandriva's position on the issue of Microsoft technology remains unchanged from that expressed by Mandriva's CEO in his famous "We will not go to Canossa" post.

Linux Journal recently caught up with Mandriva CEO, François Bancilhon, to find out more about a recently announced partnership between Mandriva of France and Turbolinux of Japan.

Cliff Miller from TurboLinux is now at DeviceVM; a snapshot of what TurboLinux is currently up to

It’s been a while since Microsoft signed up any more Linux distro vendors to participate as patent-protection partners. But on October 22, the Redmondians announced they’ve added TurboLinux to the fold.

Though Linux in the mainstream has come a long way over the past few years, there is still this stigma of being difficult to install and use. The TurboLinux Wizpy is trying to sway consumer perception with the introduction of a pocket-sized multimedia player that contains a bootable version of TurboLinux operating system.

On the Mandriva Cooker mailinglist there was the following request based on my earlier article that made the case that Mandriva and TurboLinux might be next to partner with Microsoft.

It is a speculation, but I think that it would be good to get a clear statement from the management on where Mandriva stands, especially regarding the alleged Microsoft patents.

Terracotta and Eucalyptus Systems, both open source startups, have announced a new joint partnership. According to the companies, which specialise in scalability for Java applications and the private cloud platform, the partnership will "provide enterprises with an open source solution that maximizes data scalability and application performance in a private cloud environment".

"TurboLinux has joined the Microsoft-funded but community-led Open XML-ODF (Open Document Format) translator project. Microsoft is enlisting Linux distributor TurboLinux to help translate documents between Open XML and ODF file formats for Japanese and Chinese users."

Mandriva and Precedent Technologies ("PTech"), announce a new partnership, working together on the release in September in the United States of a new low-cost desktop, with Intel Atom CPUs and Mandriva Linux preinstalled on these machines.