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.

The workforce reduction is intended to “streamline the combined company’s services businesses”, and once complete is expected to “result in annual cost savings of approximately $US1.8 billion ($A2.2 billion),” Hewlett-Packard said in a statement. About 7.5 per cent of the combined workforce would be affected, HP said.

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.

Hewlett-Packard, the world’s No. 1 PC maker, has quietly assembled a group of engineers to develop software that will let customers bypass certain features of Vista, the latest version of Windows. Employees on a separate skunk works team are even angling to replace Windows with an HP-assembled operating system.

The MPro110 is pretty basic looking on the outside—just a grey box. But it gets the job down. A VGA input lets you plug in a laptop; and the composite video jack will take output from a digital camera, PSP, iPod, iPhone, or most any handheld device (though video-out is still pretty rare on cellphones).

Company managers also contrasted IE8 Beta 2’s “Suggested Sites” feature with the “Suggest” feature used by rival Google Inc. in its Chrome browser, saying that Microsoft’s browser requires the user’s explicit permission before it’s used. They did, however, acknowledge a bug that prevents the request from reappearing during reinstalls.

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.