In a blog entry posted yesterday, developer Kohei Yoshida expresses his frustration with Sun's excessively bureaucratic specification process and unwillingness to compromise and communicate with members of the community. Yoshida invested a tremendous amount of personal time developing a sophisticated optimization solver module for the OpenOffice.org Calc program.

Mandriva today announced that the Federal Service on Technical and Export Control (FSTEC) in Russia has agreed to authorise the certification of the Mandriva Linux OS for all safe and legal use in organizations dealing with confidential information. The certification process will be finished in 3 to 6 months.

UBER geek Linus Torvalds is on track to win this year's Dr Spinola cudmugeon of the year award after dubbing people who disagreed with him as "wanking around".

Gnash is an open source player for Adobe’s Flash format. It can be used as an alternative to Adobe’s proprietary player. The upcoming Ubuntu 7.10 release includes automatic installation of either Adobe Flash or Gnash. I decided to put this feature to the test in Ubuntu 7.10 Beta.

PCLinuxOS Magazine, October 2007 (Issue 14) is available to download. We apologize for the delay in this release; final touches on the new PCLinuxOS Magazine website helped prevent us from releasing yesterday. If you'd like to be informed immediately about our releases, please signup for the Magazine-Announce mailing list.

A decade ago, Intel was shipping the Pentium II processor and Linux was a fringe operating system used by a few Internet fanatics. No one at the time would ever have thought the two in combination would be a match for Sun's SPARC/Solaris combination, HP's PA-RISC/HP-UX, IBM's POWER/AIX or SGI's MIPS/IRIX.

Linux needs drivers more than Mars will ever need women. So, noted Linux kernel and Novell developer Greg Kroah-Hartman will be devoting all his time to helping create Linux drivers.