The KDE project released the first alpha version of KDE 4.1 yesterday; the official release date for the final version is late June this year.

After porting its Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) and Workbench developer environment to Sun's multithreading capable UltraSPARC T2 processor, embedded specialist Wind River says that it has laid down the tracks for the development of high-performance network components.

Andrew Morton, the Linux Kernel 2.6 maintainer announced last week at the Embedded Linux Conference in Mountain View that he is looking for an architecture-independent embedded specialist.

The X.org developers are working on moving a less prominent component from userspace to kernel space: mode setting controls.

OpenSuse is rapidly approaching the next version of the free Linux distribution with the release of the first beta version. According to the roadmap the final version of OpenSuse 11.0 will be released June 19.

Linus Torvalds has released the new 2.6.25 kernel just slightly behind schedule. Besides improvements to the CFS scheduler and a plethora of new drivers, the kernel also introduces a political aspect: it debars non-GPLd USB drivers.

The Fedora developers have released a preview of the next version of the Fedora 9 Linux distribution; this is the most important release en route to the final version, they say.

The Helix developers have announced version 11 of Helix Player and Realplayer for Linux.

The Open Office project has just announced that the latest 2.4 version of the free office suite removes a number of security issues.

The Open Source MySQL database, which is now maintained by Sun Microsystems after Sun's acquisition, benefits from a performance boost and easier management following the update to version 5.1.