The world's second largest Linux distributor Novell may have its rights to sell new versions of Linux stripped by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) because of Novell's distribution deal with Microsoft, according to a Reuters report. FSF is the primary sponsor of the open source GNU project and holds intellectual property rights to parts of Linux.

Japan's Turbolinux will begin selling its Wizpy Linux-based multimedia player in February. As a bonus, the device can also be used to boot a PC into the Linux OS, allowing users to access their files in their own working environment on almost any PC.

The Wizpy will be available first to customers in Japan via the company's home page on Feb. 23 and then in shops in March. It will come in two models: a 2GB version will cost ¥29,800 ($245) and a 4GB version will cost ¥33,800.

A call for participation was announced this week for "Ubuntu Live," billed by organizers as the first "official" conference dedicated to Ubuntu Linux. The event, set for July 22-24 in Portland, Ore., aims to give participants the knowledge needed to use Ubuntu to best advantage, organizers said.

The last piece of the openSUSE 10.2 distribution got released on Friday.

The Live DVD image has a size of 1.7 GB and can be used on every x86 compatible system with at least 512 MB of memory.

Zi Corp. will offer its text input software "pre-integrated" with Access's embedded Linux stack for phones and other mobile devices. Access appears to have licensed Zi's eZiText predictive text input software and Decuma handwriting recognition software packages for Access stack, currently codenamed "ALP" (Access Linux Platform).

The Ubuntu developers are moving very quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source Community has to offer. The Feisty Fawn Herd 2 is the second alpha release of Ubuntu 7.04, and with this new alpha release comes a whole host of excellent new features.

Pan Pantziarka writes "I can still remember the wow factor when first seeing a copy of Knoppix booting up on a Windows machine. It was many moons again and the idea of a bootable Linux CD seemed strangely miraculous."

Red Hat's engineer and Fedora Project board member, Bill Nottingham, announced on the Fedora developer's list on Jan. 4 that, "There will be no more releases of Fedora Core or Fedora Extras." Instead, Core and Extras will be merged together.

The final release of version 2.13 has been uploaded. The live-CD iso file is 'puppy-2.13-seamonkey-fulldrivers.iso' and is 84.5MB. This build has the complete suite of kernel drivers. More compact builds with a subset of the full driver suite and different selections of applications will follow soon.

Red Hat plans to ship the next version of its premium Linux product on February 28, debuting major virtualization technology but missing an earlier deadline by about two months.

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