Data security independence from hardware is the promise from backup specialist Arkeia for its upcoming Network Backup version 8.0. But it's not the only enhancement from the company with its French roots.

Developer Chris Ball has patched the Vino Virtual Network Computing (VNC) server to display multiple simultaneous mouse and keyboard events. The result could be an end to the battle over mouse and keyboard control among local and remote users in a VNC environment.

The remote package update manager program apt-dater is now available in version 0.7. It performs software updates on a mass of remote hosts.

Opera Software has filed a complaint against Microsoft's practice of tying Internet Explorer to Windows. The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has offered its backing of Opera's complaint.

Since November 2008 it's been popular knowledge that Ubuntu has been working on a version of its operating system for the mobile ARMv7 architecture, especially for Cortex A8/A9 processors. Now it seems that Ubuntu mobile might drop Gnome Mobile Hildon framework in favor of Qt.

Developer Stefan Dirsch is responsible for maintaining the openSUSE build scripts of the fglrx driver. In a message on the openSUSE developer mailing list, he appeals for a successor to take over the maintenance.

Canonical has released its third alpha version of Ubuntu 9.04. It brings a few new features to test, including notification settings in the user interface and the much publicized ext4 filesystem support.

Taiwan-based hardware manufacturer Shuttle has released a series of mini-desktops running Linux. The next generation will have power-efficient VIA Nano processors.