As a director of the Linux Foundation and a Linux SCSI developer, James Bottomley opened the Linux-Kongress in Hamburg, Germany this week with a keynote investigating the commonalities and differences among the various Open Source operating systems. He describes Linux as the liveliest variant among them.

Information Appliance Associates have started a beta test program of a synchronization tool for Linux and Blackberry.

Version 9.5 of the free web browser Opera hasn’t been around that long, but developers have already released an update. Opera 9.6 comes with numerous improvements to the features in 9.5.

The Debian 5.0 release missed its intended deadline of September and the project has been silent as yet about any news of an update. The latest guess from developers' circles is that "Lenny" will not be ready until June of 2009.

The International Standards Organization (ISO) is up in arms over the fact that documentation for Microsoft's OOXML data format is now publicly available on the Internet. Meanwhile, ISO members are nervously watching IBM's behavior in the standardization process.

The Openmoko project has thrown down the gauntlet to developers, hackers and navigation experts at this years FSCONS in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Linux-Kongress is by far one of the most traditional Linux conferences, with a focus on development and cutting-edge topics. If you're not able to join the program in Hamburg, Germany, in person, you can watch the keynotes from James Bottomley and Jason Corbet for free on Linux Magazine Online.

A few days ago Finnish kernel developer and Linux founder Linus Torvalds started his own blog on Blogger.com.

IDG World Expo announced the launch of OpenSource World Conference & Expo, an event that will include features of LinuxWorld with an emphasis on open source technology.

For quite a while Ubuntu had been including example-content packages with its releases that contained the same content: some audio and video data to test the playback, including a video of Nelson Mandela.