Phonon in KDE 4.4 now supports PulseAudio. Ubuntu 9.10 users can install a new version of the sound server via Launchpad PPA.

Bryce Harrington is agonizing over the nontrivial task of delivering a working X server for Ubuntu. On the Ubuntu desktop mailing list he speaks of a flood of bug reports and appeals to improving the situation.

Joachim Breitner wanted to know how much time he was spending on his system, so he wrote Automatic Rule-Based Time Tracker, or Arbtt. The program is now installable from the Debian unstable archive.

The openSUSE project has decided to set up an open Git repository for its kernel instead of the daily kernel snapshot.

Defenders of the somewhat unwieldy vi editor say, "Sure vi is user-friendly; it's just peculiar about who it makes friends with." Joe Brockmeier of openSUSE fame has now come out with a beginner's guide to Vim and what it does.

Dan Williams, Red Hat collaborator and NetworkManager developer, might be upset but doesn't let it get to him. In the GNOME blog, he advises "just say no" to WiFi drivers in the linux-staging tree and recommends changes.

The Chrome OS announcement caused speculation from many sides as to what effect the Google platform would have on other Linux distros. At least Canonical could benefit from it.

A new feature in Fedora 12 was that users could install RPM packages from signed repositories without a root password. "Not good," said many users, so the project decided to reverse the policy.