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Linaro project sets about to promote Linux on mobile devices. Although Linux is widely used in mobile phones, particularly smartphones, efforts to make the open source operating system more mobile-friendly have, until recently, been largely dispersed.

Some iPhone fans should really dismount from their iHorse. This is an argument I had to forgo having in favour of discussing the pros and cons of the BlackBerry Torch, iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy S with someone else trying to decide which phone to buy. “Everybody just copied the iPhone,” is the sweeping, unsupported statement that makes me see red.

It's been a while in the coming but now Novell is finally being sold off. The company is to be bought by Attachmate for US$2.2 billion. For many the move is unsurprising: Novell has been on the back foot for some time now and its flirtation with Linux served only to delay its final end. Once a company at the centre of the networking world, Novell has gradually lost influence and struggled to evolve into the company it needed to be.

The next big thing in consumer computing is the cloud-based operating system. The most anticipated of these is Google's Chrome OS, a Linux-based OS meant to be ideal for netbooks and tablet-like devices.

Gingerbread, the latest update for Google's Android smartphone operating system, is now just weeks, or perhaps even days away from release. The Android 2.3 release was rumoured for November 11 but Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, speaking at the Web 2.0 summit earlier this week, said Gingerbread would only ship "in the next few weeks."

Ubuntu will drop the Gnome interface, replacing it with its own Unity interface. Naturally not everyone is happy. Apparently frustrated by the delays in creating a new desktop interface, Ubuntu has decided to run with its own desktop interface instead of Gnome's shell. The underlying desktop for Ubuntu 11.04 will still be based on Gnome but the actual interface that users will interact with will be Ubuntu's own Unity interface.

Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system is now in widespread use and more than a year old. Microsoft has already started work on its successor - Windows 8. The new Windows 8 operating system is expected to be released in late 2012 according to recent reports. One report in particular, from the Dutch arm of Microsoft, suggests that October 2012 could be the target date for a Windows 8 launch.

Despite growing anticipation for Firefox 4, developers have delayed its release until next year. In a move that will both disappoint fans and potentially undermine its claim on the browser market, the Mozilla Foundation has said it will delay the release of Firefox 4 until 2011.

Firefox, the second most popular web browser, just upped the stakes significantly for its competitors with the release of a beta version of its browser for Android.

Mark Shuttleworth's Ubuntu Linux operating system is quickly moving from being a niche player in the market to an environment which caters for a broad range of users.

There was a lot of excitement when Intel and Nokia joined forces earlier this year to create MeeGo, a Linux-based operating system for mobile devices. The blending of Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin operating systems had all the signs of being a big player in the mobile market, not only because of the backing of two industry heavyweights but also because the open nature of the OS opened up opportunities.

When Google first announced Chrome OS, a cloud-focused operating system back in July last year, it all seemed a little too vague. Everyone knew that Google could do exactly this, if it wanted to, but the question was why they would want to. The company also said it was aiming to release Chrome OS by the end of 2010.

The decision to split off LibreOffice has been widely welcomed by the open source community with the likes of Ubuntu, Red Hat and Novell committing to include it in their future releases instead of OpenOffice.org.

October traditionally kicks off the year-end release festival for Linux users. Almost all of the major distributions have a new version in its final stages of development and ready to be launched into public. Among these are Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuse.

Ubuntu developer Canonical is experimenting with new hardware sensors as it looks at computing beyond the keyboard and mouse. All computer users are used to controlling their desktop with a mouse and keyboard. But how about controlling your PC without using your hands at all and just using your body?

Ubuntu's focus on improving the desktop experience for users is starting to take hold. Clearly nothing happens overnight. More than two years ago, Ubuntu chief Mark Shuttleworth went out on a limb and said that his ambition was to make the Ubuntu desktop better than Apple's famously good-looking desktop.

Get on your tuxedo’s - MyGaming pays respect to our oft-forgotten PC gaming brother, the Linux user. MyGaming thought it was high time to do another Linux compatible gaming round-up. A lot of these games support multiple platforms, and not just Linux, because Linux programmers are cool like that.