After a year as its head, Jim Whitehurst has issued a financial assessment of the Red Hat Linux distro and spoke of its future plans. He sees the company braced for success, with an advantage over its proprietary competitors, thanks to Open Source.

The GroundWork Open Source company out of San Francisco CA has released its Nagios-based monitoring software in a new version 5.3, including a free Community Edition.

Network Backup vendor Arkeia has an infusion of cash, a new CEO and marketing chief, a move back to a former headquarters, and a new version with a virtualization client. Linux Magazine Online had the opportunity to interview Bill Evans, Arkeia's new CEO, and Frederic Renard, the new VP of marketing.

Parted Magic, the live distribution with Gparted and other tools to create, modify and secure hard drive partitions is now available in version 3.5. And thanks to the Linux 2.6.28.2 kernel, the new version comes with support for ext4 file systems.

Apache Ivy version 2.0, a dependency manager that works together with the Apache Ant Java build system, is the first major release in two years.

In an effort to reduce costs, municipal authorities in the Veneto region around the Italian city of Venice, will change to open source.

For FOSS fans, there's no better place to be this week than Hobart, state capitol of the Australian state Tasmania. That's where Linux.conf.au 2009 is being held through Saturday, January 24.