A fairly long list of projects will take part in this year's Google Summer of Code, the fifth since 2005. Students will be working in grand style to improve products from these popular open source projects.

At the last KDE developer's Akademy conference, the Plasma team had assembled some ideas for KDE 4 on netbooks. These ideas will now become reality.

Debian developer Ana Guerrero, as spokesperson for the KDE team, has announced that KDE4 will appear during the first week of April 2009.

The Fedora project has released the first beta test version of Fedora 11 after an announced delay from its original milestone.

Finnish software developer Jerry Jalava uses Linux on a USB stick, although in a rather unusual way: the USB is part of his prosthetic finger.

The free OpenSolaris UNIX derivative from Sun has not exactly been known for its multimedia capabilities. This should soon change.

After a several-month-long development period, Gnome 2.26 has been released. The Linux multi-platform desktop environment includes improvements to multimedia features and focuses on the stabilization and debugging of issues that plagued the software before the release of this version.

By Canonical's Bryce Harrington's account, AMD has delivered an ATI driver that should be compatible with the X Server 1.6 found in, among other places, Ubuntu 9.04.