The FreeBSD project has released its 8.0 version of the free UNIX operating system, thereby starting a new stable branch.

Bryce Harrington is agonizing over the nontrivial task of delivering a working X server for Ubuntu. On the Ubuntu desktop mailing list he speaks of a flood of bug reports and appeals to improving the situation.

The Apache Foundation had its big conference November 2-6 in Portland OR and Linux Pro Magazine was there with its camera. To celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the foundation, some highlights from the comprehensive program of talks are available for free in our video archives now.

Joachim Breitner wanted to know how much time he was spending on his system, so he wrote Automatic Rule-Based Time Tracker, or Arbtt. The program is now installable from the Debian unstable archive.

Defenders of the somewhat unwieldy vi editor say, "Sure vi is user-friendly; it's just peculiar about who it makes friends with." Joe Brockmeier of openSUSE fame has now come out with a beginner's guide to Vim and what it does.

Korean electronics giant Samsung is helping the Linux-David Enlightenment with development ressources. It's possible that the lightweight and robust window manager might be the basis for Samsung's upcoming Bada mobile phone platform.

The European Union has virtually placed "Building Grids for Europe" on its banner. The XtreemOS project promoted by the EU has assembled version 2.0 of its grid operating system and made it available to the general public.

The Petaflop pioneer Roadrunner has been relegated to second place after the 225,000 processor cores of the Jaguar XT5. Europe's largest supercomputer, Bluegene/P, has meanwhile slipped in the ranks.