Personal computers were supposed to make our lives easier. Instead, these beasts have turned us all into part-time IT administrators, our lives given over to downloading upgrades, installing patches and updates and drivers and antispyware, decrypting error messages and screaming at stalled applications. Enough! The folks at Zonbu, a tiny firm in Menlo Park, Calif., think they've produced the answer...

While Windows advocates may smirk and say here we go again, as 2007 draws to a close I get the strong feeling that we may look back upon this year and recognize it with hindsight as the year that the Linux desktop finally arrived. There are a number of events that point to 2007 as being the turning point for Linux and it all started in January with the release of Windows Vista.

"LONDON, May 23, 2007 – Ubuntu 7.04, commercially sponsored by Canonical Ltd., was honored by PC World with a 100 Best Products of 2007 Award. The article is available now on PCWorld.com, and will also be featured in the July 2007 issue of PC World, which hits newsstands June 12."

I recently read the discussion on the GCC development mailing list related to GCC's transition to GPLv3. Despite generating 172 emails, the transition was quite smooth actually.

There will be no updates after 31-Dec-2007 for PHP 4 version. According to the PHP development team ~ support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only

In this article I've selected what I consider to be some of the past year's outstanding achievements in the world of Linux music and sound software. It's not really a "Best Of 2007", it's just my personal choices for what I found most interesting and significant in the past year.

The world biggest Open Source contest, the Le Trophees Du Libre 2007, with over 60,000 Euro in prizes named the winners for each of the categories. The goal of the contest, which is sponsored by the Free SOftware Foundation, Cetril, the EU, IBM and numerous other sponsors, is to promote promising Free Open Source Software.

It is with great pride that the Joomla! community announces to the world the immediate availability of Joomla! 1.5 Stable [Khepri]. As a community of contributors, we have been through celebrations and tribulations. We have had fun, and we have worked hard. We have learned from and helped one another. What started two and a half years ago with a letter to the community has grown into a great opportunity for both the Joomla! project and community to benefit from these efforts and to consider our future.

Every year Google somehow finds a way to up its contributions to the open source community and 2008 looks to be no different. For Google Summer of Code (SoC) 2008, Google is paying for 1,125 student developers, which is an increase from the 900 students the program took in 2007.