The new Debian "Etch and a half" sub-project is looking to improve hardware compatibility with kernel updates and drivers for Debian 4.0 Linux.

The Finnish cellphone manufacturer Nokia is looking to acquire the Norwegian software enterprise Trolltech for around 104 million euros.

Hewlett-Packard has launched a project dubbed FOSSology to investigate and monitor the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in the enterprise.

The annual developers’ conference FOSDEM will take place in Brussels on February 23 and 24, 2008. As a teaser, organizers of the open-source event have now placed interviews with some of the speakers online.

Microsoft has announced it wants to simplify access to technical documentation for older Office formats, and initiate an open-source project to replicate the binary formats in Open XML.

The Freedom Task Force (FTF) has received a further 12 months’ financial backing from the Dutch NL-Net Internet foundation, announced the Free Software Foundation Europe, which runs the FTF project.

As part of the KDE 4.0 release event, Trolltech CEO, Haavard Nord, announced that the Qt library would be released under GPLv3. Qt is an important framework for the KDE Linux desktop system.

In a keynote given at the world-wide release party, streamed online, Project Lead Aaron Seigo introduced the new version of KDE.

Lenovo has announced that it will sell its T61 and R61 Thinkpads with Linux preinstalled from February 2008.

Oracle recently announced two acquisitions on the same day, with software vendor Bea Systems and document digitization specialists Captovation soon joining the database specialists.