Apple may open up its iPhone and iPod touch devices to third-party apps next month, but the chances that Linux users will get invited to the party are slim at best.

I’m, first of all, a passionate for music. My passion for music before I can recall it, and grew with the fact that I had the luck to have older brother and sisters whose music collection was wide enough to feed my music interests. Also since a little kid I was interested in technology, and started programming at the age of four. Being nowadays a music lover and also a musician, and at the same time graduated and working as a Computer Science Engineer, I feel myself lucky to have some ground bases to analyse the state of music business.

M-Audio has supplied hardware and software to computer-based musicians for 20 years. Its new "make-music-now" line of products, aimed at musicians just getting into computers or PC users with an interest in music, includes a microphone, speakers, drum machine, and DJ mixer deck. Unfortunately, its bundled software, called Session, is for Windows only. Our challenge was to try out this hardware -- specifically the KeyStudio MIDI keyboard and Fast Track audio interface -- with Linux applications. We were half successful.

A research paper BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance delivered at a conference in Singapore this week, highlights Microsoft Asia Research's alternative to Google's PageRank algorithm, BrowserRank - "The more visits of the page made by the users and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important.

"Hey everybody. Now that Miro has reached the big 1.0, we need to make the documentation better for our users. That’s why I’m asking everybody to please, take a look at the documentation at http://getmiro.com/documentation and lend us a hand..."

For a lot of programmers, writing an application is fun, but writing its manual is not. Adding new features, refining the product, and responding to users' input are all more rewarding than writing instructions on how to use the software. However, good documentation is necessary to have happy, informed users who can contribute meaningfully to future development.

InstallationWiki.org is a new website designed to provide users with comprehensive, free guides to installing software. The website will largely be driven and populated by content supplied and edited by experts, and hopes to bridge the gap between software experts and software users.

If you think that Linux is only "for the boys", then think again. Did you know that there are women-oriented Linux communities that are created to provide both technical and social support for women Linux users? The most well known among them is called LinuxChix, and I’m not kidding. To know more about LinuxChix, I have collected some interesting facts about them so read on.

A community website devoted to sharing information about Linux-based NAS (network attached storage) servers has added a "GPL" page to collect vendor distributions of GPL-licensed source code. In the process of assembling the page, NAS-central.org ran across one alleged violator, says site co-founder Markus Toth.