Beginning of the week saw the emergence of two Firefox browser releases. They should be a win for stability and security.

Webconverger, a Linux distro to drive web kiosk systems, is now available in version 4.7. Some updates improve its security.

Speaking at the RSA security conference in San Francisco 2009, chief security officer of F-Secure, Mikko Hypponen, advised against the use of Adobe's Acrobat and recommended users switch to an open source PDF reader.

The Qt Software division of Nokia has fixed problems in Qt 4.5.1 and is releasing an improved Qt Creator 1.1. Also new is a plugin to integrate Qt with Microsoft's Visual Studio.

Debian developer Robert Millan is offering an alternative kernel for Debian's Lenny free Linux distro. Unlike the standard Lenny kernel, it contains no proprietary firmware.

Heralded as a leap into the new era, vSphere 4.0, which was introduced April 21 as the successor to VMware's Virtual Infrastructure 3.x, is at least a logical step in the right direction upon a more sober assessment: through consolidation and automation based on an infrastructure of virtual components, a solution to satisfy turnkey IT services.