After a several-month-long development period, Gnome 2.26 has been released. The Linux multi-platform desktop environment includes improvements to multimedia features and focuses on the stabilization and debugging of issues that plagued the software before the release of this version.

After years of development, version 1.0 of the Parrot virtual machine has arrived for Perl, Python and other dynamic languages. Whether the Parrot will take a firm foothold in software development is still up in the air.

Linus Torvalds announced at the Australian Linux.conf.au that he wants to make the conference mascot, the Tasmanian Devil (considering that the conference took place in Hobart, Tasmania) the new logo for Linux Kernel 2.6.29.

By Canonical's Bryce Harrington's account, AMD has delivered an ATI driver that should be compatible with the X Server 1.6 found in, among other places, Ubuntu 9.04.

As planned, on March 10 the Fedora project hit a feature freeze for version 11. There are still a few test days left before the first beta appears next week.

In July this year, the KDE community conference (Akademy) and the Gnome Users and Developers' Conference (GUADEC) will for the first time be co-located on the Spanish Canary Islands. Registration for the event has already opened and KDE is calling for presentation submissions.

The Songbird music player is now out as version 1.1. Next to some normalization enhancements, the free software includes a watch folders feature and optimized album cover downloads.

SourceForge, the popular host of countless Open Source projects, is extending its repertoire of source code management systems, among them Git.