End of last week ARM Ltd and Canonical Ltd announced that they would port Linux to the ARMv7 processor architecture. If all goes well, the two collaborating firms should provide further hardware manufacturers with the basis to develop new, energy-efficient mobile devices, especially for the popular netbooks and so-called hybrid computers.

The first community-driven version of OpenSolaris burst onto the distribution scene. In other news, Linux is now available on a modular system the vendors describe as an open hardware platform.

Split-ups, disputes, and flame wars repeatedly ripple through the open source community. So far, forks have benefitted the community, as illustrated by the reunion of Compiz and Beryl in the Compiz Fusion project.

Californian Ben Kevan, server administrator for Linux and VMware, ponders the future of YaST in his blog.

At the 6th Annual OpenOffice.org Convention in Peking November 5-7, the project could celebrate a new milestone in their 3.0 release: downloads of their office package have reached 10 million.

Sun Microsystems and IBM have kicked off an open source community project dealing with conversion of documents into OpenDocument Format (ODF).

The Enterprise Security API (ESAPI), a set of documentation focusing on application software security, has released a new version 1.4. Javadocs were updated and old interfaces were replaced.

The Gnome Foundation welcomes Google and Motorola as sponsors and new members of its advisory board.