Sony has brought a new mini-notebook to the market that is small, light, stylish and with Windows Vista, although its instant-on feature is Linux-powered.

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.

Red Hat has released its version 5.3 of Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Among its new features are support for Intel's Microarchitecture (Nehalem) processor and for larger systems. It also includes the Java SE6-compliant OpenJDK.

Core components of the Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 are now available as open source. Re-named Open Web Server 1.0, Sun Microsystems has released the server under the BSD license.

Novell kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has released statistics on his personal email activity.

Evgeniy Polyakov has released a patch to the kernel's out-of-memory (OOM) killer function, which was designed to prevent a system freeze in an OOM condition by sacrificing one or more processes. The patch "tames" the function by defining the specific process to kill.

The Conceptual domain-specific language generates programs that measure the performance and test the correctness of networks and their protocol layers. The newest version 1.0 of the product provides a graphical user interface (GUI) to facilitate generating these programs.

Advisory Check (advchk), a small tool for monitoring installed software security, is now available in version 2.20. It has extended its source feeds and is now supported on HP-UX.