The Open Source Monitoring Conference (OSMC) 2009 in Nuremberg, Germany, on October 28-29 will be the fourth time the meeting, formerly the "Nagios Konferenz," will take place in that city.

While Microsoft was assembling a promotional booth to celebrate their Windows 7 launch directly opposite the Japan Linux Symposium in Tokyo, Microsoft's biggest competitor couldn't resist spontaneously recognizing the textbook exercise in irony.

The first and last release candidate for Ubuntu 9.10 is now available for download.

To follow up on the big success of CeBIT Open Source 2009, the theme focus will get an especially attractive location at the trade show site in Hanover, Germany in 2010. The conference organization and Linux Pro Magazine are now calling for open source projects to apply for free exhibit space at CeBIT Open Source 2010.

Future development of the netbook distro Eeebuntu will be based on Debian Unstable instead of the Ubuntu core that has been used until now.

To coincide with the Windows 7 launch, IBM issued a press release yesterday promoting its Ubuntu-based IBM Client for Smart Work solution.

Mozilla added Microsoft's .NET Framework Assistant to its add-ons blocklist over the weekend. The blocklist blocks programs with evident security vulnerabilities. Before the weekend was over, the app was stricken from the list again.

The Ubuntu community has a lot to celebrate this month: on October 16, 2004 the German ubuntuusers.de went online for the first time and October 20 of the same year saw the release of Ubuntu 4.10, alias Warty Warthog.

The Couturier Mono program merges multiple PDFs into a single file. It follows the old UNIX policy: one program for one task.

Even though Ubuntu 9.10 is officially completed, developers managed to slip in the new beta version of Apache CouchDB that stores addresses, notes and bookmarks.