Mark Shuttleworth is appealing to community members to send him screenshots of their standard 1024x768 desktops. His aim is to collect ideas that will improve the desktop experience.

Splashtop manufacturer DeviceVM and the Taiwanese Firmware and BIOS producer Insyde have entered into a joint developer partnership.

The openSUSE Project has released version 11.1 of its Community Linux today. Besides undergoing comprehensive maintenance, the release brings vast improvements to the KDE 4 Desktop.

The free virtualization product VirtualBox has released a new version 2.1 that not only supports 3D graphics, but the full VMDK and VHD formats from VMware and Microsoft.

The Mozilla project has moved both branches of its Firefox browser to versions 2.0.0.19 and 3.0.5. The updates deal primarily with security issues.

Free Linux distro Debian has been working steadily on its next version 5.0 of the OS, known as Lenny. Now developers have been called in for a vote to determine the course of its general release.

The nonprofit LinuxFund.org is providing financial support for Gnash, the Flash alternative, to accelerate development of the Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP).

Hewlett-Packard has partnered with Novell in developing a new, secure Linux desktop product. At the same time, HP has joined up with Mozilla to promote a desktop virtualization project for small business customers.