The chip manufacturer Via Technologies has introduced a new notebook class intended to run via Linux OS. The Via chips-equipped Netnotes will initially only be available in China.

After a year's development, a new, stable version 3.0 of Google's open source Chrome browser is now available. Developers promise "significant speed improvements," although current beneficiaries are Windows Vista and XP users only.

Electronics manufacturer Archos has introduced its new ARM-based multimedia player including Linux platform Android in collaboration with Google. An additional DVR docking station allows the device to morph into a video recorder.

The Linux Foundation has reinforcements from the hardware camp. CPU manufacturer ARM joined the Foundation on Monday.

The GNOME Foundation wants to issue regular quarterly reports to document the work on the free desktop. A Q2 2009 report is a good start.

The Open PC Project wants to construct a fair priced PC for Linux users. The results of a first survey have now been published.

Whoever thought that Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora consist solely of free software would be wrong. The new list compiled by the Free Software Foundation showing truly free distributions has a mere nine entries.

Up-to-date Linux users will probably have the latest Firefox versions via package manager already installed on their PCs: 3.0.14 and 3.5.3 fix security vulnerability and scrutinize Flash plug-ins.