The Cross-Desktop Metadata track at this year's Gran Canaria Summit highlighted developer activity targeting central storage of contact data, email and other personal information.

On the second day of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, Gnome and KDE developers have been focused on topics surrounding meta data, community, and infrastructure. Concerning multimedia, audio support for the open source desktop has proved to be a hot topic.

Nokia will be using the Qt toolkit for its Maemo user interface in the future, according to an announcement the firm made at this year's Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.

On the first day of the joint developer conference on Gran Canaryia, representatives of the desktop projects Gnome and KDE formulated common goals for their future development.

At the start of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit on the Canary Islands, Richard Stallman, Robert Lefkowitz and Walter Bender rallied open source developers in their common tasks.

In a response to Richard Stallman's open letter warning about introducing Mono into Linux, Debian made it clear that no plans are indeed forthcoming to adopt Mono-based programs into the default installation of its free Linux platform.

The portable version of the OpenOffice suite is now available in version 3.1.

VirtualBox 3.0, with its improved 3D support, can ensure that some users won't need to boot Windows even when gaming.