In February, the Swiss Federal Office for Construction and Logistics (Bundesamt für Bauten und Logistik, or BBL) sealed a deal with Microsoft for an estimated 35-million-dollars worth of licenses. Red Hat, along with 17 other Open Source enterprises, has filed an official complaint.

64-bit versions of one of the earliest Linux distros were previously available only from the Bluewhite64 or Slamd64 projects. Now Slackware Linux has finally come out with its own native version.

The first alpha release of the successor to Ubuntu 9.04 is available for download. Ubuntu 9.10, code-named Karmic Koala, includes Kernel 2.6.30 and GNOME 2.27.1.

With the release of its new online synchronization service Ubuntu One, Canonical seems to have made some enemies in the community.

The embedded Linux specialist MontaVista software promises more flexibility through processor-specific distributions in version 6 of the in-house Linux variant.

The cloud-based service Ubuntu One goes into the public beta phase. Using Ubuntu One, computers can be synchronized via online memory. So far, Canonical is withholding details.

As Debian developer and package manager Aurélien Jarno says in a recent blog, Debian will soon switch from the standard GNU C library to the slimmer EGLIBC.

The new version of the X2go terminal server, code-named Uthörn, is particularly Debian 5.0-compliant. Print requests result in files compressed to about 10% before being sent to the client, and the terminal server now supports a third sound architecture through PulseAudio.