After announcing its first event for “end users,” the Linux Foundation has begun to promote “individual memberships.” Available now for $50 a year, memberships include a T-shirt, quarterly newsletter, and the “ability to run for and vote for a Linux Foundation board seat,” says the organization.

Based on Mandriva Linux 2008, which was released last October, Mandriva Mini is designed to work on small format, low-cost netbooks, which typically have screens ranging from 7 to 10 inches. It is said to support key netbook platforms, such as products based on the Intel Atom processor.

Those of us who run Linux on our home machines have a harder time testing sites for Internet Explorer compatibility, or accessing sites that require proprietary IE features. IEs4Linux is a script that can help you set up three older versions of IE on any system running Wine. Unfortunately, the program is not as polished as it should be.

CEO Mark Hurd is not running Carly Fiorina’s Hewlett-Packard, but he’s not running Bill & Dave’s old shop either. He is trying to do to HP what Lou Gerstner did to IBM a decade ago, transform his company into a services powerhouse, growing through acquisitions and lay-offs.

CodeWeavers make a customized, commercial version of Wine called CrossOver Linux. and have been major contributors to Wine. (Wine allows Linux users to run Windows applications.) The company has successfully ported versions of Chromium–the open source core of Google’s Chrome browser–for Mac and Linux.

Inexpensive add-on applications that will provide audio codecs and a DVD player to expand the multimedia capabilities of the four-year-old Linux operating system are now available for purchase in the Ubuntu online store. Previously, users could run into compatibility troubles while trying to play DVD movies or some types of audio tracks.

In some tests the stock Eee Linux distribution was running quite slow and placing far behind Mandriva, Fedora, and Ubuntu, but when it came to the solid-state disk performance Xandros had the lead. Overall though, it appears that Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 4 had delivered the best performance on the Intel Atom architecture.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced Wednesday that his company, Canonical, will hire professional designers and interaction experts to improve the usability of the Linux desktop software ecosystem. They will work closely with upstream developers to bring a better experience to users of the open source operating system.

I think gOS 3 has some merits. Trying to free some of the Web applications from the browser sometimes makes sense. Adding WINE is also a plus for new Windows switchers. Having MP3 playback and Flash working out of the box is also helpful for newbies. Other than a few minor issues I didn’t have any problems running the system.

The Red Hat-supported Fedora Project has started issuing updates to its Linux distribution again, after a hiatus of several weeks caused by a hacker break-in. US-based Red Hat, which in Australia has customers such as the National Australia Bank, warned in mid-August that hackers had broken into some of its servers that were involved with both its Red Hat Linux Enterprise offering and the Fedora Project.