When deer hunting season begins in Mississippi, or its time for the alligator lottery to start down in Florida, sportsmen flock to the Internet to order their licenses through companies like Automated License Systems (ALS). To keep its servers running reliably, ALS's Infrastructure Manager Rich Edwards uses Red Hat Linux and servers from Levanta, no questions asked.

The ReactOS team is proud to announce the release of ReactOS 0.3.11. This release has been delayed by quite some time due to various blocker bugs which manifested each time we tried to release. A lot of time has gone into hunting down these bugs and various steps have been taken to try to ensure we don't hit this problem again.

Finding bugs in your code can be quite nasty—especially if you don’t know where to look. However, finding bugs automatically does not require astronaut training. I think it’s time to leave that “pleasure” to free (as in freedom) automatic static code review tools like the ones reviewed in this series of articles.

The first alpha release of Mageia 2 has been made available for download and testing. As you might expect, this is not a review-quality release, so if you have the time and resources, time to start hunting for bugs – and reporting them, if any, to Mageia Bugzilla. Installation and Live CD and DVD ISO images for 32- and 64-bit platforms are available for download here.

It’s that time again. Time to plan for a new release of Ubuntu, I mean. There are some rather large things in this list and so I doubt all of them will be implemented in time but it is always better to dream big and get as much done as possible. Otherwise we’ll have everything done in a month and be left with nothing else to do (except fix bugs, of course).

So what's new with Linux at CES this year? That's our question. If you have the answers, let's have 'em. Because we'll be there on a Linux Hunt, just like we are every year. The difference this time is that we'd like to make this a Team Thing.

Time to spice up your Gnome desktop with a fresh new theme and start of a new year is a perfect time for that. Below is a small list of fresh new themes. This time it looks like they’re all on the darker side – purely by coincidence.

Greg sent me this article at the New York Times,"Silicon Valley Start-Ups Awash in Dollars, Again" and Stacy says (via Matt ) Ballmer is hunting for Open Source Start-Ups.

I wrote last year at this time that "probably this time next year we will have a version that we can recommend to our grandmothers". My perfect skills at prognosticating have again been validated. The coming 4.2 release will be ready for grandmothers everywhere.