Linux.conf.au came to a close Friday after dozens of excellent talks, great social events, and the unexpected shaving of Bdale Garbee for the Tasmanian Devil.

In an effort to reduce costs, municipal authorities in the Veneto region around the Italian city of Venice, will change to open source.

The remote package update manager program apt-dater is now available in version 0.7. It performs software updates on a mass of remote hosts.

Since November 2008 it's been popular knowledge that Ubuntu has been working on a version of its operating system for the mobile ARMv7 architecture, especially for Cortex A8/A9 processors. Now it seems that Ubuntu mobile might drop Gnome Mobile Hildon framework in favor of Qt.

Sony has brought a new mini-notebook to the market that is small, light, stylish and with Windows Vista, although its instant-on feature is Linux-powered.

Red Hat has released its version 5.3 of Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Among its new features are support for Intel's Microarchitecture (Nehalem) processor and for larger systems. It also includes the Java SE6-compliant OpenJDK.

Developer Stefan Dirsch is responsible for maintaining the openSUSE build scripts of the fglrx driver. In a message on the openSUSE developer mailing list, he appeals for a successor to take over the maintenance.

The Ubuntu Developer Week, which began yesterday and runs until Friday, is a perfect opportunity to look over the shoulders of the Ubuntu developers.

Canonical has released its third alpha version of Ubuntu 9.04. It brings a few new features to test, including notification settings in the user interface and the much publicized ext4 filesystem support.

The latest stable release of the GNU Restricted User Shell (Rush), version 1.5, includes new configuration offerings and a notification feature.