Five years after the concept was first proposed, the so-called $100 laptop is poised to go into mass production.

Hardware suppliers have been given the green light to ramp-up production of all of the components needed to build millions of the low-cost machines.

As a bit of a follow-up to my recent editorial about the different operating systems battling it out, a few readers made comments about Ubuntu and Windows and, essentially, that I was giving Windows a little too much credit. So, I thought I would write another one here specifically to address the issue of Linux actually replacing Windows. Can it?

There have been a lot of positive things going on in the Ubuntu space, but there has been at least one change where a Ubuntu consumer has returned to good old Debian - one of the first adopters, SimplyMEPIS. Warren Woodford found that the LTS version, 6.06 of Ubuntu, upon which SimplyMEPIS has been based since V6.0, receives security updates but otherwise few, if any, new packages.

A thought struck me this morning: would you really want your database/application server/office productivity suite/etc. developer to also be the author of your operating system? On one level, the answer is an easy 'yes': tighter integration between the OS and the applications that run on it is a good thing.

Yes this is a challenge, you know those extra nice pictures you took last time you went on a photo conquest that looks so sweet as your wallpaper? yes?
Well then please share them will the entire world in the great KDE 4.0 Wallpaper Contest.

"Predictably, it seems that Dell is dropping Ubuntu PC prices which at first pass would seem like fantastic news. But then you have to couple this fact with the realization that they are not exactly promoting their provided Ubuntu PCs."

Linus Torvalds, creator and maintainer of the Linux operating system kernel, has reacted angrily to suggestions that the kernel's development process is skewed in a way that prevents improvements on the desktop.