Jem Matzan has written a detailed < http://www.thejemreport.com/mambo/content/view/293/ overview > of the ongoing struggle to provide support for network hardware with proprietary firmware in open source operating systems.

Jono Bacon has written a < http://www.jonobacon.org/?p=851 tutorial > that explains how to use the Gnonlin library, which facilitates development of non-linear audio/video editing software.

The < http://www.gnusolaris.org/gswiki Nexenta > project is dedicated to bringing the power of Ubuntu and APT to the Solaris platform.

Developers at the GNOME summit < http://live.gnome.org/Boston2006/Gimmie discussed > Gimmie and the future of the task-oriented desktop.

The Telepathy project has < http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/telepathy/2006-October/000328.html announced > the release of Gabble 0.4.0, a connection manager for Jabber. The Telepathy project was < http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/GnomeSummit2006 discussed > extensively at the recent GNOME summit.

Sebastian Pölsterl has < http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2006-October/msg00061.html decided > to make < http://www.k-d-w.org/clipboard/NewStuffManager/ NewStuffManager > an independent project, and has encouraged GNOME developers to provide input. Originally designed to facilitate automatic installation of Deskbar plug-ins, the NewStuffManager could eventually become a generic content installer like KDE's < http://www.kstuff.org/ KStuff > framework.

The Mountain View Ubuntu summit is coming up, and participants are < https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2006-October/000207.html invited > to submit topics for discussion. Summit attendees will primarily focus on planning for Ubuntu 7.04.

The Ubuntu < https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopEffectsTeam Desktop Effects team > has posted the < https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MeetingLogs/DesktopEffects-2006-9-29 log > of their first IRC meeting.

A nice < http://www.gnomejournal.org/article/49/tinymail-evolution-and-intelligent-design article > in the GNOME Journal introduces < http://tinymail.org/ Tinymail >, a compact framework developed by < http://pvanhoof.be/ Philip Van Hoof > for making e-mail applications for mobile platforms. I've been reading Philip's blog entries on Plant GNOME to keep up with the development process, but the article at GNOME Journal is a good overview for those that aren't familiar with it yet. Nokia and the OLPC project have both expressed in interest in the framework, and it looks like it has a lot of potential.

Boudewijn Rempt (author of the < http://www.valdyas.org/python/book.html PyQt book >) has written a helpful little < http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi/software/image_libraries.html?seemore=y comparison > of open source graphics libraries.