Taiwanese firm VIA Technologies, specializing in chipsets and the x86 platform, has gone into a cooperative agreement with the OpenChrome video driver project to help in their development effort.

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.

Chipmaker Intel has reworked its proprietary Linux compilers. The Intel C/C++ compiler version 11.0 now supports the mobile processor Atom. The same version of the Fortran compiler now supports the Fortran 2003 language standard.

Computer vendor Transtec has actualized its Calleo 330 server series on the new 45-nonometer Opterons from AMD. All Calleos now come with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10.

It might have been in an inconspicuous place on their Forums page where Creative Labs announced a new version of the Linux drivers for the Sound Blaster X-Fi and X-Fi Titanium series, but for owners of these sound cards, this news created somewhat of a sensation. The source code is not only readily available, but it's licensed under GPL v2.

The computer manufacturer Dell has announced a further recall of potentially dangerous notebook batteries. The recall of the Sony built batteries began in 2006.

HP is now entering the second round of the Netbook match. As advertized, Atom instead of VIA, slimmer, more affordable and most importantly, available with Linux.

Aimed at small to mid-sized businesses, the Systems z10 Business Class (BC mainframe is IBM's leaner, cheaper version of the high-end mainframe released in February.