An email appeal by Joey Schulze is calling for hardware donations to support two new Debian projects: snapshot and data archive.

In Mystic Mine you guide a trolley through an old gold mine, switching rails at the right moment with a designated keystroke. It's the only normal thing about this new skill game from Koonsolo Games.

Dag Wieers of Project Centos made a passionate plea for more private users to turn to the free Red Hat Enterprise clone, and stressed that commercial companies with non-critical machines could also benefit from Centos.

Over the weekend the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) took place in Brussels. In his keynote, Mozilla's Mark Surman hoped for Open Source's success and Debian key contributor Bdale Garbee supported its social contract. As an aside, Debian Lenny's target release date was reconfirmed.

Based on OpenStreetMap and other Open Geodata technology, the Open Route Service now covers the whole of Europe.

The KDevelop team released its first beta version of the development environment for KDE and Qt programs.

Network Backup vendor Arkeia has an infusion of cash, a new CEO and marketing chief, a move back to a former headquarters, and a new version with a virtualization client. Linux Magazine Online had the opportunity to interview Bill Evans, Arkeia's new CEO, and Frederic Renard, the new VP of marketing.

This first Beta brings developers another step closer to the scheduled release of Gnome version 2.26 in March.

Debian, Mandriva and Fedora developers call them Sid, Cooker and Rawhide. OpenSUSE calls them Factory and they are ringing the changes for the Factory development.

Michael "Monty" Widenius, long associated with MySQL, has decided to leave Sun Microsystems. His plan is to pursue open source software development again as an independent agent, and he also sees a future in gastronomy that should benefit all database developers.