Intel and Nokia are reviving the spirit of Second Life with plans for 3D interfaces on mobile devices running their MeeGo Linux distro. The companies have announced their first joint innovation center at Finland's Oulu University, and it will specialize in the development of 3D interfaces and environments for MeeGo.

Trinity Audio Group announced an upgrade to its Linux-based "audio operating system," with an improved user interface, the real-time kernel 2.6.31, and a player that lets users change the speed of a song without altering pitch. "Transmission 4.0" is available as a download, on a USB stick, or preloaded on a netbook or ultra-mobile PC (UMPC), the company says.

Sometimes there are ideas that won’t go away. The other day, the Linux Magazine publisher asked me about a “cluster of smart phones.” As the processors in cell phones continue to get more powerful, the question is actually worth asking because many smart phones only need to be smart part of the time. Cluster HPC mavens are always looking for latent CPU cycles, why not check your pocket.

You may have already seen our list of awesome Conky scripts or configurations, and perhaps applied or used some of them on your own Linux desktop. Since that collection was quiet popular, I decided to scour the web once again to gather more Conky scripts that I could share with all of you.

The Miranda IM project has released version 0.9.0 of its open source instant messaging client, adding a number of new features, many of which focus on improving unicode support and on overall protocol improvements

InfoWorld's Test Center picks the top open source platforms, middleware, applications, and application development tools

Allison Randal, known for her work as an architect of the Parrot virtual machine, has been appointed Technical Architect of Ubuntu at Canonical by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth.

One last response to the provocation from Microsoft (charm offensive), which IDG's fauxpen source blog is still spinning (third time now)