No one — well, very few, anyway — who uses Linux lacks the experience of Linux being the last major platform to gain native support for proprietary applications. Whether it's being held at arms length by rabid legal teams or just being overlooked as an important market, we all know the pain of finding out our shiny new gizmo is useless on our Linux systems. Wednesday, however, marked the end of one such experience, as Adobe released the latest version of its Flash Player — with full Linux support out of the box.

An excited — and apparently somewhat overwhelmed — OpenOffice community released the next major version of the office suite — OpenOffice.org 3.0 — into the wild yesterday, sparking a near-instant rush to be the first on ones block to have the much-anticipated application.

Mandriva Linux — the seventh most-popular Linux distribution1 — has just provided as good a reason as any for a popularity-push, with the unveiling of their latest release, Mandriva Linux 2009.

It's commonplace, perhaps even de rigueur, for company executives to say their goodbyes when someone snatches up their firm mdash indeed, if we sold our share for eleventy-billion dollars, we'd probably be inclined to take a long vacation too. This wasn't so, however, for MySQL, where the company execs kept right on going post-sale — at least until recently.

The annual LinuxWorld conference is always a blast and a half for those who attend, especially the crew here at Linux Journal. Sadly, those halcyon days are over, as the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo is no more. Weep not, however, as in its place has appeared a new event, the freshly-christened OpenSource World.

As many readers will likely know, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — for whom we're sure we could find many a fitting and unflattering nickname, if it wouldn't land us a all-expenses-paid visit to Gitmo — recently released guidelines for the U.S. Customs Service giving agents carte blanche to search and seize travelers' laptops without probable cause, including U.S. citizens, who once upon a time were protected from such things by the Fourth Amendment. After much — well-deserved — outrage, someone is finally doing something about it, in the persons of Senators Russ Feingold & Maria Cantwell, who introduced legislation last week to put the brakes on DHS's searchmobile.

It was just days ago that we learned that a UCLA sysadmin has discovered the largest known prime number — we'll spare a visual, as it's 13 million digits long — and possibly won $100,000 being offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). Now today comes the release of version 2.6 of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) — the follow-up to the 2.4 series, first released last October.

There are plenty of Linux & Open Source conferences each year for the enthused enthusiast to choose from — LinuxWorld, OSCON, Linux.conf.au to name just a few — but curiously, nothing open to the average user from the bastion of Linux advocacy, the Linux Foundation. That is until now, as the LF has recently announced it will be sponsoring an open-attendance conference of it's own starting next year.

Blogging is nothing new these days — it seems as if everyone and their grandma has a blog and is sharing whatever it is that winds them up with the world.

If you thought the Linux Foundation was just about spreading Linux Love and giving Linus a place to hack, fasten your seatbelt, because the gloves have come off and they're sharing just what they think.

It's that time again — yes, indeed the development cycle is up, and the good people behind the GNOME Desktop have just released a fresh version into the wild.

If you've ever thought about becoming a member of the Linux Foundation — the not-for-profit organization responsible, among other things, for keeping Lead Penguin Linux Torvalds a'coding — then you might know it's been a bit of an expensive proposition in the past. The door has been opened a bit wider for individuals, however, as the Foundation is now offering an individual affiliate membership for the low, low price of just one easy payment of $49 per year.

Cisco — rulers of all things network — have set their sights on something new, and they've gone out and gotten it. The it in this particular case is Jabber, Inc., the company responsible for building an enterprise offering around XMPP — the "Jabber" protocol — and the go out and getting happened yesterday, as Cisco announced that it intends to buy the 54-employee company before the end of next summer.

The mobile phone industry is nothing if not cutthroat, with each manufacturer — not to mention provider — doing everything they can to show up and stomp out its competition. What isn't usually seen, though, is an old-fashioned public call-out.

Breaking News has just learned that Wikileaks — the website utilized to post materials obtained from Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin's personal Yahoo mail account — is, for undisclosed reasons, no longer available online.

It must be Hacker Day here at Breaking News — as though the Large Hadron Collider being hacked wasn't enough, it has now been revealed that the group known as Anonymous has successfully hacked into the Yahoo email account of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin and released at least some of its contents into the wild.

If there weren't already enough problems at the European Organization for Nuclear Research — angry calls & letters, protests, panic, even death threats — surrounding the Large Hadron Collider — in addition, that is, to the chief problem of making the device work — there certainly are now, as a new and particularly frightening problem has arisen: hackers.

The brouhaha is nothing new to Open Source software projects. In fact, if there is ever a day when someone, somewhere is not screaming about bad decisions or better ways, then that's a day when progress isn't being made. The news that users were storming the gates at Canonical and Mozilla HQ, though, caught us a little by surprise.

UAL Corp. had a nasty surprise on Monday when its stock price fell nearly 75% after a computerized chain-reaction caused outdated information to hit the trading floor hard — and UAL's financials even harder.