Ubuntu is working on the next but one release, 8.10, codenamed Intrepid Ibex. Ubuntu promoter and Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth launched the next round of development in the traditional way by naming the product.

Google uses Wine to provide Linux support for Picasa; now the search engine giant has commissioned the specialists from Codeweavers to improve Wine support for Adobe Photoshop CS and CS2 .

The makers of the free enterprise Linux, Centos, have released version 5.1, the latest version of their distribution on a Live CD.

The update Debian 4.0 alias Etch to 4.03r sees the free project mainly add security patches and remove the Adobe Flash plugin from the official repository.

Sun Microsystems has been on another spending spree: Sun’s latest acquisition is said to be Innotek, the manufacturer of the Virtualbox Open Source virtualization solution.

The EU Commission is looking to investigate whether Microsoft illegally attempted to influence the standardization process for its own OOXML document format.

Version 1.0 of Nexenta, a free operating system with an OpenSolaris kernel and all other software from Debian/Ubuntu, has just been released.

Thanks to an agreement with the Ubuntu company, Canonical, Parallels can now distribute its commercial virtualization product, Parallels Workstation, via the Ubuntu package management system.