OStatic

The K Desktop Environment (KDE) Project has released the first beta of KDE 4.1, which is targeted to fully replace KDE 3, when it goes final in July. Like other desktop open source projects focused on Linux and open source users, including GNOME and OpenOffice.org, KDE presents a graphical desktop interface designed for usability. The new version has many improvements to the desktop shell and is much more configurable than version 3, as described in the release notes. The KDE Personal Information Management suite is also now ported to the new version, along with quite a few other applications. Here's a look under the hood.

Novell has delivered its Q2 financial results. The company reported $30 million of product revenue from Open Platform Solutions of which $29 million was from Linux Platform Products--up a very healthy 31 percent year-over-year. As Matt Asay notes Novell still lags Red Hat, but enterprise Linux is a two-horse race again.....

Source Labs' Self-Support Suite now supports the open source Eclipse development environment.....

Can Rubinius, a Ruby virtual machine written in Ruby bring back excitement to the open source scripting language?.....

Recently, I got the opportunity to pose a few questions to key people involved with open source efforts at Microsoft, including Sam Ramji (the recently promoted head of Microsoft's open source and Linux efforts), Ori Amiga (Microsoft Group Product Manager, Live Developer Platform), and Susan Hauser (General Manager of Strategic Partnerships and Licensing). They offered up some thought-provoking input on what open source needs, Novell, China, Live Mesh, and other topics. I thank them for taking the time, and please read on for their comments.

As Google's I/O conference continues, developers are in the spotlight. Two new APIs have been released: an image manipulation API, and (more interesting to web app hosting in general), the memcache API. As our sister site GigaOm notes, with Yahoo in limbo and Microsoft missing in action on the Internet, Google is making a huge play for developer mindshare. In today's Google I/O recap on GigaOm, you'll find some good thoughts on Google Gears, HTML5, Javascript, AJAX. Android and Ruby on Rails. Take a gander.

If you're regularly saddled with repetitive computing tasks and you use the Firefox browser, one of the most useful of all Firefox extensions you can add to your arsenal is IMacros from iOpus. The download is free, and it shows up as a button on your Firefox toolbar for easy availability. This extension allows you to automate numerous tasks in Firefox, from mundane ones like visiting the same sites every day, filling out forms, and remembering passwords, to automation of complex web development tasks. Here's how it works.

Check in with Chris DiBona, Google's open source chief, on how committed Google is to OSS, and more.....

Google announces OpenSocial 0.8.....

Bill Gates discussed Windows 7 at the D conference. It has a multi-touch interface--video and photos found here.....

Ruby on Rails upgrade may arrive this weekend.....

Eighteen universities say they are turning to Groundwork Open Source's network management software.....

Funambol, maker of open source messaging software, has a new version of its BlackBerry push e-mail and PIM sync app.....

Hyperic, an open source web infrastructure management software provider, has been in the news lately. The company?s flagship product, Hyperic HQ, was a finalist in the 23rd Annual CODiE Awards. Hyperic HQ specializes in monitoring applications for IT departments, and the company recently announced test results showing Hyperic HQ doing very large scale monitoring in conjunction with Sun's MySQL database. OStatic checked in with Stacey Schneider, Senior Director of Marketing for Hyperic, for thoughts on how open source software can play a part in highly scalable monitoring deployments.