An alliance is forming between virtualization providers Novell and VMware with a strategy for teamwork. At the same time Novell is providing a glimpse of its upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) version 11.

Scheduled for release in October, Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala will come with server cloud computing and a new desktop design.

The idea of an industry-wide common cryptography standard is certainly welcome. But self-interest usually precedes usability, so two industry consortiums are now vying over which standards to adopt, one on the side of Sun and the other leaning toward IBM/HP. Then there is an additional player in the Trusted Computing Group.

A presentation at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona revealed that HTC and Vodafone are releasing a G2 phone (a.k.a. HTC Magic) as the successor to HTC and T-Mobile's G1 Android phone. Vodafone claims "exclusive deal" for G2. Where goeth the G3?

Under the auspices of the Open Screen Project, mobile vendor Nokia and software maker Adobe are providing a $10 million fund to help developers create mobile Flash applications. The underlying software will become free at least to some extent, according to Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch.

A new version of Wine, the program loader that lets Windows run on Linux, has been released.

Big Blue is now providing images for Amazon's cloud. A cloud software-as-service (SaaS) for SUSE Linux, among other products, is to follow.

Over a year ago Microsoft bought the software company Danger, popular in the U.S. for its Sidekick mobile phone. A new model is coming out, this time running on NetBSD.