Largely unnoticed by the public, the Mozilla Foundation is tinkering with its own programming language, Rust, which is intended to make writing reliable, fast, and concurrently running applications easier. For this purpose, the developers are borrowing generously from other languages.

Codethink announces version 1.1 (aka Secret Volcano) of its Baserock Embedded Linux software. Baserock is a Linux build system for the development of embedded, industrial or bare-metal, server-based Linux systems.

A choice of ultrasmall boards lets future developers learn how to create and program computers.

ActiveState announces the release of Komodo IDE 7.1, an award-winning multiplatform integrated development environment (IDE) for Python, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Perl, and web development.

The Fabric Python library makes it extremely easy to create repeatable scripts of commands over SSH to any number of servers.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2 offers major improvements in performance, security, and hardware support.

Canonical announces the Ubuntu App Showdown – a contest in which participants create an Ubuntu app from scratch in three weeks.

The days when administrators were forced to manage virtual machines at the console are gone. Competitors of VMware and Citrix now offer equally sophisticated GUIs. One promising alternative is Red Hat’s oVirt – a free Java interface for Libvirt.