A few weeks ago, Breaking News brought LinuxJournal.com readers an unusual story, entitled "The Blue Screen of Megadeath," which we described as "scar[ing] the living daylights out of us." The story revealed that, in an effort to cut costs, all submarines of the UK's Royal Navy — including her four Vanguard-class subs armed with some 4,800 kilotons of nuclear weapons each — had been fitted with a stripped-down version of Windows XP. Now, just weeks later, fresh news out of the Admiralty suggests we were more on target — no pun intended — than even we knew.

This time last year, the big news from the-company-formerly-known-as-Trolltech — now Qt Software — was a takeover bid from mobile-phone giant Nokia, which closed successfully in June for an estimated €104 million. Once again January brings Trolltech/Qt news from Nokia, this time announcing that beginning with the upcoming 4.5 release, the Qt framework will be licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Ongoing for nearly three months now, the Fedora Project's election season appears to have finally come to a close. Beginning in November with nominations for the Fedora Project Board and various project committees, and continuing through an election and appointment cycle that stretched into early January, only the election to determine the project's next release name remained. That was until this past Saturday, when it was revealed that Fedora 11 will bear the appellation Leonidas.

Open Source in the public sector seemed to be all the rage in 2008, with government agencies all over Europe — not to mention agencies of the EU itself — adopting, and in many cases, mandating Open Source software and standards. Of course, Europe was not the only continent cozying up with a copy of the source code — governments in Africa, Asia, North & South America, and all over the South Pacific were exploring and implementing Open Source in 2008. Now, one of those governments has revealed the savings-side of OSS, and the numbers they're tossing around are pretty nice.

If you've been hacking, coding, or just generally IT-ing for more than ten minutes, you've likely run into a stereotype or two about geeks — and there's always a grain of truth, however tiny, behind a stereotype. At least that seems to be the prevailing wisdom at Germany's Potsdam University, where the IT faculty are gearing up to turn their masters students into master suitors.

By many of the accounts we've seen, the star of last week's Consumer Electronics Show was Palm's new Pre smartphone, a Linux-based offering with all the features we've come to expect from post-iPhone devices and a few innovations of it's own.

Adobe releases AIR 1.5 for Linux today, December 18, 2008. This is great news for Linux users that have been stuck with 1.1 Beta. AIR applications that have been unable to install should install and run without problems.