Linux Magazine contributor Neil J. Gunther (October, 2007 "Stretch!" article among others) has recently been honored with the prestigious A. A. Michelson Award at the Computer Measurement Group (CMG) Conference in Las Vegas.

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.

Slackware is widely regarded as the oldest active Linux distributions. Right on time for Christmas, the distro, which once served as a basis for (open) SUSE, is available in a new version.

Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst sees opportunities for open source firms that might be putting undue burden on their dwindling IT departments because of the current economic downturn. Whitehurst offered his views in a press conference in Munich. His conclusion: "When people look at alternatives, often Open Source wins."

The feud between Minix inventor and operating system czar Andrew W. Tanenbaum and Linux Torvalds is legendary in the OS world. Before Linux there was Minix. Torvalds used to be a Minix user who set up his first Linux version in 1991 on Professor Tanenbaum’s operating system. Mr. Tanenbaum has now agreed to write a guest editorial for Linux Magazine. His opinion has not changed over the years: Linux (and Windows) are “unreliable.”

Mandriva's financial situation appears to be none too rosy. At the end of the year, the distributor will terminate the employment of two of its freelance workers, Adam Williams, effectively the Community Manager, and Package Manager Oden Eriksson.

MySQL founder Michael "Monty" Widenius warns in his blog against putting the current version 5.1 of the popular database package into production. He's critical of the release policy and fears that the product's quality may suffer.