Up to Novell's takeover of the Suse Linux AG, KDE was without doubt the preferred default for the German distribution. Now openSUSE users are increasingly demanding the return of KDE as default desktop.

Even though reiserfs belongs to the veterans of journaling filesystems and established ext3 and ext4 as standard Linux filesystems, a new patch serves to markedly improve it.

Microsoft had to report a 30% slump in sales for the last quarter. Their report to the U.S. SEC includes a rundown of their risk and competition factors. Among their concerns are Linux and open source untertakings, but also their own partners HP and Intel.

The new version 2.0 of the virtual desktop solution Verde now comes with offline access. Manufacturer Virtual Bridges, together with IBM and Canonical, want to market the software as Open Virtual Client.

Yahoo and Microsoft yesterday announced plans of a joint venture to challenge the search engine giant Google. The plans include Yahoo search running on Microsoft's "Bing" technology. In return, Yahoo will handle service support for both companies' premium customers.

At its iForum conference in Singapore on July 28, the Xen owner Citrix announced that its Citrix Receiver software for virtulized Windows systems would be extended to the Android platform. Until now it was available only in iPhone mobile devices.

The Free Software Foundation started an online campaign in the Amazon forum to free the Kindle code. Supporters already number more than 650.

Google developers are giving out about 40,000 lines of Java code for two components of the Google Wave browser software.