Former president of Novell's EMEA operations Volker Smid has taken over as head of operations at HP in Germany. Javier Colado assumes Smid's old role at Novell.

Sun Microsystems has acquired Belgian company Q-Layer, which specializes in cloud computing.

Vietnamese ministry servers are to run exclusively on open source software in 2009 and the government is also urging dealers to install the free software.

The Android OS from Google is optimized for ARM processors and smaller displays, but, with some adjustment, can also run on netbooks.

Internet Explorer is losing increasing numbers of users to Firefox. Google has added another blow by announcing the end of official support for IE 6.

The free GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) greets the new year with bug fixes for its 2.6.x release.

The Compiz project, which makes a free compositing window manager, suffers from a lack of participants, direction and leadership, at least according to developer Kristian Lyngstol.

Close to year's end, U.S. chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has released the Linux code for its ATI R600 and R700 microprocessors.