To program an effective virus for Linux is fairly difficult. It's much easier to provide malware disguised as an add-on, however. The Amarok project now wants to protect against that.

Debian and Ubuntu developer Julian Andres Klode has reported in his blog about the progress of his APT2 software, an alternative implementation of the Debian Advanced Packaging Tool (APT).

Good news for anyone with a NVIDIA graphics card: the Nouveau driver goes into Kernel 2.6.33 and supports DRM.

Richard Stallman's strong position against proprietary applications is butting heads with some members of the GNOME Foundation. A call to split with Stallman's GNU Project is being considered.

Oracle is aiming for more transparency in the debate about the future of the databank MySQL and the pending investigation by the European Commission.

With the Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE), Red Hat has put one of the components of its desktop virtualization under GPL and BSD licensing.

Microsoft had lost the single Windows booting option in school computers in Spain some time ago. But now they are getting back: The Spanish Government announced in a surprising move that an agreement with Microsoft has been signed to give out laptops to primary schoolchildren next year.

Microsoft had released a tool in mid-November that generated bootable USB media or a DVD from the download version of Windows 7 and that conflicted with the GNU Public License. They now followed up by putting the tool under GPLv2.

The Web-based groupware suite Tine 2.0 is now available in version 2009/11, code-named August.

After saying farewell to the functionally replete Ubuntu 9.10, developers are working on the next version, 10.04, which should be particularly stable. The first alpha of its LTS version has now arrived.