In China, the world's largest mobile phone market, smartphone sales for Q3 grew 11.3 percent quarter-over-quarter, reports CCID Consulting. However, Linux's share of the market declined, largely due to weakening volumes for Motorola smartphones, the Hong Kong-based market research firm reported.

While announcing open-source-based virtualization and a Solaris server partnership with Dell on Wednesday, Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz told Oracle's OpenWorld that Sun was "one of the first" in the industry to deliver a virtual machine - the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

While today's market for IT administrators is tight, the demand for Linux experts continues to increase, according to Brent Marinaccio, HotLinuxJobs.com's open source recruiting director. He sees great opportunities for success in the Linux professional market.

Gregory Ray, lead organizer of LivingArcana.com announced today that he has hired the Brazilian programmer, Gutemberg Ribeiro, of “Conceptus” an open source game engine, to port his engine over to Apple’s iPhone platform. The port of the game engine will remain open source and will be available under LGPL license to allow true 3D game development on the iPhone.

DingCheng Electronics has announced a GPS-enabled PC that fits "double DIN" stereo bays. The CarPC 102 has a 4x45W amp, and runs Red Flag Linux or Windows on a 1.1GHz Pentium M processor, with 256MB RAM, 40GB hard drive, DVD/CD-RW drive, and 7-inch WXGA touchscreen display.

Creating modern digital visual effects in movies is not an easy process. The job falls on clusters of computers called "render farms." Terra Soft, developer of the Yellow Dog Linux distro, says its new offering, Y-Film, is designed to significantly streamline the task, bringing a more efficient process to large studios and putting glossy effects within easier reach of smaller ones.

DRM-free music sells at a much higher rate online than protected music, according to UK-based digital music store 7 Digital. In fact, customers buy it four times as often as they do DRMed music. As a result, almost 80 percent of the store's sales are of DRM-free content.