FIRST TIER Taiwanese motherboard vendor Asus confirmed Wednesday that it will extend inclusion of Splashtop Linux from just a few of its most expensive models to more products and eventually throughout its entire product range.

Express Gate, as Asus brands its version of Splashtop Linux, is stored in flash memory, so it loads virtually instantly each time the PC system is powered on.

Debian Linux got a bit of a black eye Tuesday with the announcement that a nasty cryptographic vulnerability exists in its version of the OpenSSL package.

Debian, especially its stable branch, is widely regarded as perhaps the most bulletproof Linux distribution. Legend has it that wizened European Debian gnomes painstakingly fit together each version using well polished hand tools inherited from their watchmaking and marquetry woodcrafting forefathers.

Last August, the nail was poised over SCO's coffin when Judge Dale Kimball ruled that Novell never relinquished the copyrights to UNIX, but nobody really knew when it would be driven home. The decision meant that SCO could be on the hook for as much as $20 million in unpaid royalties. Not long afterwards, SCO filed for bankruptcy, but that Chapter 11 filing was only able to delay the inevitable trial to determine how much Novell was owed. That long-awaited trial began this week, and Ars was on hand to report.

Dell, HP and Lenovo have promised to push chipset vendors to make open-source drivers for Linux.

Representatives from Dell, HP and Lenovo made the commitment at a Linux Foundation conference last week, promising to include wording in their hardware procurement processes to "strongly encourage" the delivery of open-source drivers for integration into the Linux kernel.

Red Hat, best known for its open-source Linux operating system, has nixed plans to develop software for consumer desktops to rival Microsoft's Windows operating system. The announcement came as part of an update titled "What's going on with Red Hat desktop system? An update" posted on the company's official blog.

Via Technologies has laid out a new initiative to improve support for the open source development community.

The chip maker will launch an official Via Linux website this month as a first step in the programme.

At the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the University of Texas Supercomputing Center April 8, Hewlett-Packard announced the release of its first Linux-powered computer to be sold in the United States, the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 Service Pack 1.

Mandriva, has announced the release of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring.

The latest release of Mandriva includes features like full support for the Asus Eee, has synchronization with Windows Mobile 5, Blackberry and Nokia handsets, a program called Codeina for automatically installing necessary media codecs, PulseAudio and quite a bit more.

PC vendor Everex and gOS (Good OS), the Linux distribution based around Google applications, is taking the next step in online-based computing by introducing a limited edition MySpace PC.

The companies hope that the white-cased, two-pound MyMiniPC will attract what Everex officials claim is some of the more than 100 million MySpace users. As such, it's the first PC, using any operating system, designed expressly to use with a social network.

Red Hat and Novell will soon face more competition from a small rival, Ubuntu Linux, in the market for open-source software programs that run server computers.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux, said on Wednesday that Sun would soon certify that his software is compatible with some Sun products.