Mageia has long been what you might call a “best-kept secret” of the Linux world, consistently residing among the top five distributions in DistroWatch's page-hit rankings despite minimal marketing and hoopla.

The distro has only been around since it was forked from Mandriva Linux back in 2010, of course, but after several weeks' delay  the Mageia project on Sunday finally launched the third major version of the free and open source operating system.

Mageia Linux 2 made its debut just about a year ago. Now, Mageia 3 is here, “all grown up and ready to go dancing,” as it was put in the project's weekend announcement.

Mageia 3 is dedicated to the late “Eugeni Dodonov, our friend, our colleague and a great inspiration,” the team added.

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Devices built around Apple's iOS operating system have been approved by the U.S. Department of Defense for use on its networks, as the department moves to support multivendor mobile devices and operating systems.

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), which certifies commercial technology for defense use, said Friday it had approved the Apple iOS 6 Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG).

"Approval of the STIG means that government-issued iOS 6 mobile devices are approved for use when connecting to DOD networks within current mobility pilots or the future mobile device management framework," the agency said in a statement.

The department earlier this month cleared BlackBerry 10 smartphones and PlayBook tablets with its enterprise mobility management platform BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 to be used on its networks. It also approved Samsung Electronics' Knox, a new Android-based platform designed by the company to enhance security of the current open source Android.

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Bitcoin is growing up.

The virtual currency that caught the public's attention last month when its value zoomed briefly past $200 kicked off its first Silicon Valley conference Friday evening and shows no sign of losing momentum.

The event is small by Silicon Valley standards, with about 1000 attendees expected and 19 exhibitors, but it's bustling with startups launching new exchanges, software developers looking to strengthen the Bitcoin network, and venture capitalists seeking places to invest.

There's now $45 million a day being traded on the Bitcoin network, or $16 billion a year, according to Peter Vessenes, chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, who talked at the start of the event in San Jose.

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A strong stock market could open the floodgates for more tech IPOs in the wake of Friday’s solid debut of Marketo and Tableau, but not all segments of IT may be able to ride the wave.

Marketo, which sells cloud-based marketing software, jumped 78 percent to close at US$23.10, up $10.10 from its opening on the Nasdaq. Tableau, a business intelligence and data visualization company trading under the eye-catching ticker “DATA”, rose 64 percent to close at $50.75, up $19.75 from its opening on the New York Stock Exchange.

Tableau originally was set to offer 7.2 million shares but added another million shares thanks to an institutional investor that underwrote more of the float at the last moment. As a result, the company raised $254 million, rather than the $150 million it originally sought.

The promising debuts came as major markets and indexes rose for the fourth straight week, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Standard and Poor’s 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq exchange all closing up for the week. The Dow and the S&P have both hit nominal (not adjusted for inflation) record highs recently, having surpassed the milestone round figures of 15,000 and 1,600, respectively, three weeks ago.

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An appeals court in Mexico has overturned an approximately US$2.7 billion judgment against Yahoo and Yahoo Mexico in a breach-of-contract suit concerning online directories.

Yahoo announced on Thursday it had won its appeal of the case in the Superior Court of Justice for the Federal District. The court reversed a November 2012 non-final ruling by the 49th Civil Court of Mexico, overturning all monetary awards against Yahoo and cutting down the award against Yahoo Mexico to $172,500. The plaintiffs, World Wide Directories and Ideas Interactivas, may appeal the decision.

The plaintiffs sued Yahoo in 2011, alleging breach of contract, breach of promise and lost profits in connection with a listing service.

Data-center and wireless sales led growth at Cisco Systems in its fiscal third quarter, as it saw customers spending more in the U.S. and developing countries but reported continuing weakness in Southern Europe.

Cisco is aiming to become the leading overall IT player, breaking out of its role as primarily a network vendor. Sales of its UCS (Unified Computing System) servers and key data-center switches, which grew 77 percent, are being driven by Cisco’s overall architecture pitch, according to Chairman and CEO John Chambers. UCS and the Nexus data-center switch line now represent an annual $5.5 billion business, he said.

Overall, Cisco’s revenue grew just 5 percent from last year’s third quarter, to $12.2 billion. Switching revenue as a whole fell 2 percent, and the company also brought in less money for its security products and Telepresence high-end videoconferencing platforms.

Profit in the quarter, which ended April 27, grew at a faster pace. Net income was $2.5 billion, or $0.46 per share, up from $2.2 billion, or $0.40 per share, a year earlier.

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PC shipments in Western Europe declined by 20.5 percent during the first quarter: The only vendors to see shipments grow were Lenovo and Apple, which returned to the top five.

Shipments during the quarter dropped to 12.3 million, compared to 15.5 million units in the first quarter of 2012, according to market research company Gartner. That is the worst quarterly decline the company has seen since it started tracking PC shipments in the region.

The wide availability of Windows 8-based PCs was again unable to boost consumer PC purchases. Users still wonder about its suitability for traditional PCs, according to Gartner analyst Meike Escherich.

All market segments were affected by the first quarter drop: Mobile and desktop shipments fell by 24.6 percent and 13.8 percent respectively. Shipments in the professional PC market declined by 17.2 percent, while those to consumers decreased by 23.7 percent.

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Foxconn’s Hon Hai Precision Industry posted a 19.2 percent year-over-year decline in revenue for the first quarter, with sales likely affected by weak demand for Apple’s iPhone 5, according to an analyst.

The Taiwanese contract manufacturer said on Wednesday its revenue for the quarter was NT$809 billion (US$27 billion), although net profit was up 8.4 percent year-over-year, reaching NT$16.4 billion.

Hon Hai Precision Industry is the main manufacturing arm of Foxconn Technology Group, which is best known as a supplier to U.S. tech giant Apple. The partnership between the two companies has helped fuel Foxconn’s rapid growth in recent years, especially in China where it has over 1.2 million employees.

But in this year’s first quarter, sales of Apple’s iPhone 5 have been in decline, which was the main reason for the drop in Hon Hai’s revenue, said Arthur Liao, an analyst with Fubon Securities Investment Services Co. In addition, consumers are buying up Apple’s lower-cost iPad mini over the more profitable iPad, he said.

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The U.S. tech industry added 67,400 jobs in 2012, a 1.1 percent increase from a year earlier, according to a new report from the TechAmerica Foundation.

The tech industry’s growth slightly outpaced the overall private sector in the U.S., which grew by 1 percent, TechAmerica said Tuesday. U.S tech employment totalled 5.95 million in 2012, said the foundation, the research arm of trade group TechAmerica.

Three of four tech industry sectors defined by the foundation saw growth in 2012, said the foundation’s Cyberstates 2013 report. Software services drove the vast majority of growth during the year, adding a net 63,900 jobs, compared to 11,300 jobs added in engineering and tech services and 1,800 added in Internet and telecommunication services. 

Tech manufacturing had a net decline in employment, dropping by 9,500 jobs.

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Google has to remove search suggestions from autocomplete in Germany if the results are offensive, the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe ruled Tuesday.

The court upheld a complaint by the founder and CEO of a company that sells nutritional supplements and cosmetics on the Internet, who was only identified as R.S. in a news release.

In 2010, the complainant noted that when he searched for his full name on Google.de the autocomplete functionality suggested search terms where his full name was combined with "Scientology" and with the German word for fraud, the court said. By showing these results, the plaintiff felt his personal rights and business reputation were violated because he is not in any way related to Scientology and the search accuses him of fraud, while no connection between the plaintiff and Scientology or fraud can be seen, the court said.

Therefore, Google should stop using the two terms as suggestions in the autocomplete results, the plaintiff demanded.

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Japan's Sharp booked another huge loss on Tuesday, and unveiled its latest turnaround plan, which includes relying on partnerships with Samsung Electronics and Foxconn Technology Group for business, sacking top management, and expanding into new fields such as robotics.

Osaka-based Sharp, one of the world's largest LCD screen makers but struggling under massive debt and unused capacity, said its losses for the year ended March 31 reached ¥545 billion ($5.4 billion), the largest in the company's history. Sharp promised its ongoing restructuring, involving thousands of job cuts and factory closings, will finally bear fruit this year in the form of a modest ¥5 billion profit.

The company said it will rebuild its tattered finances on products like laptop screens with the industry's highest pixel density at up to 262 pixels per inch, which it is to mass produce from June. The company has already found a customer for the screens in Samsung, according to local media reports. In March, Sharp secured a $110 million investment from Samsung and locked in the South Korean company as a long-term client.

Sharp said its turnaround will also include increasing income in its core LCD screen business to over $1 trillion in the year through March 2016. The company owns some of the largest factories in the world but has struggled with price falls and generating enough business to operate its lines. A deal signed with Foxconn last year gave that firm half control of one of Sharp's main LCD factories in return for a cash infusion and a steady stream of business.

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A plan proposed by Carl Icahn and Southeastern Asset Management last week as an alternative to Michael Dell's proposal to take his namesake company private would leave it short of cash, Dell's board warned the bidders on Monday.

It wants to know more about the proposal—including who the bidders plan to put in charge of the company—before it can formally evaluate it, the board told the investors in a letter made public Monday.

The company is already considering a proposal from founder Michael Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake to take the company private, and under the terms of that deal cannot formally consider any new bid unless it appears to be a superior proposal.

Serious bid or plan B?

It's not clear whether Icahn's plan is intended as an actual acquisition proposal that the Board could evaluate and potentially endorse or accept, or as an alternative it could consider if the pending sale to Silver Lake and Michael Dell fell through, the Special Committee of the Board of Directors wrote in the letter to Icahn and Southeastern.

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Yahoo has acquired a mobile gaming company, Loki Studios, taking its total acquisitions this month to four.

The company said over the weekend it welcomed Loki, Astrid, GoPollGo and MileWise to its growing mobile team. "We recently added 22 entrepreneurs to our growing mobile team," the company said in a Twitter message in a possible reference to some of the people from the four companies who have moved to Yahoo.

Loki's flagship application is its location-aware game, Geomon. "We are thrilled to be joining the exceptional folks at Yahoo!. We believe fully in their commitment to creating outstanding mobile products," the Loki team said on their website.

Earlier in the week, Yahoo also acquired GoPollGo, a social polling tool. The company's founder and team said they were moving to Yahoo, and would no longer be supporting their offerings.

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Microsoft last week said it will issue ten security updates next week, two of them rated "critical," to patch 34 vulnerabilities, including the zero-day bug that has been used by cyber criminals to poison "watering hole" websites in attacks aimed at U.S. government workers.

"IE is always critical, and we expected at least one update this month," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at Tripwire's nCircle Security, in an interview. "What was surprising was the IE8 fix."

The remaining eight updates, called "bulletins" by Microsoft, were pegged as "important" on the firm's threat scale, and will provide patches for Windows, several applications in the Office family and for multiple communications products, including Lync, Microsoft's enterprise-grade instant messaging platform.

Three of the Windows security updates will affect Windows 8 and Windows RT, Microsoft's newest operating systems; one of the trio will patch only those two editions.

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Increasing confidence in the economy and a rising stock market could lay the groundwork for a revival in tech-sector mergers and acquisitions as companies embrace cloud technology and pursue game-changing software, particularly for the mobile market.

On Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Standard and Poor's 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq exchange all closed up for the week, marking three straight weeks of gains. Last week the Dow and the S&P broke through to milestone levels -- 15,000 points for the Dow and 1,600 for the S&P.

Meanwhile the Nasdaq closed up 27.41 at 3463.58 Friday, its highest point since 2000, right after the dot-com boom started to go bust.

"Ultimately higher market values should result in higher valuations for sellers and thus result in more deals," said Rob Fisher, PricewaterhouseCooper's U.S. technology industry deals leader, in an email. "To the extent the rising markets are driven by confidence in long term fundamentals that also tends to increase the appetite of buyers who tend to shy away from deals when they have uncertainty about their existing prospects."

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Investor Carl Icahn and Southeastern Asset Management have countered Dell's plan to go private with an offer that would give shareholders a large payout and still keep the computer company publicly traded.

In a letter Thursday to Dell's board, the two large shareholders in the company offered to give shareholders the option to continue holding shares in the company, and take an additional $12 a share in cash or stock.

[Now read: Why Dell's private future will mirror its public present]

Financing for the new proposal is to come from existing cash in Dell and $5.2 billion in new debt, making it similar to a "leveraged recapitalization" proposal Icahn and related entities made in March. In a leveraged recapitalization, a company typically takes on debt in order to pay a dividend to shareholders or repurchase its own shares.

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Intel has acquired two software companies as it continues to build its burgeoning portfolio to include more tools to write and manage programs and interfaces.

The company on Thursday announced the acquisition of Belfast-based Aepona and San Francisco-based Mashery, which offer software to help manage APIs (application programming interfaces) so partners can monetize services based on customer context.

For example, Aepona’s API management tools can track location, device type, and other features tied to a mobile connection, which can act as a basis for communication service providers to enable transactions such as one-time payments for services. Mashery also provides software to help partners manage API tools that have been deployed.

Intel was not immediately available for comment regarding terms of the acquisitions.

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SAP's Sapphire conference kicks off next week in Orlando, setting the stage for the company to sell customers on its visions for cloud-based applications, in-memory computing and mobility.

The conference also provides SAP with an occasion to make major announcements and provide updates on how previously announced initiatives are going. Here's a look at some key themes and questions SAP may address during Sapphire's keynotes and sessions.

HANA in the cloud: This week, SAP decided to release some big news prior to Sapphire, announcing a HANA-powered cloud service where customers will be able to run their business applications, including SAP ERP (enterprise resource planning).

SAP has developed next-generation data centers around the world, as well as new management and provisioning software for the HANA Enterprise Cloud. SAP is going to let its hosting partners in on the action as well, but has decided to wait until Sapphire before releasing details of how that will work.

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Adobe has warned users of its ColdFusion application server platform of a critical vulnerability that could give unauthorized users access to sensitive files stored on their servers.

The vulnerability is identified as CVE-2013-3336 and affects ColdFusion 10, 9.0.2, 9.0.1, 9.0 and earlier versions for Windows, Mac, and Unix, Adobe said in an advisory published Wednesday.

The company credited Marcin Siedlarz of Symantec’s Security Response team with reporting the issue. “There are reports that an exploit for this vulnerability is publicly available,” Adobe said.

The company is working on a fix and expects to release it publicly on May 14. Until then, customers are advised to restrict public access to certain sensitive directories like CFIDE/administrator, CFIDE/adminapi and CFIDE/gettingstarted.

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More than a year ago, Microsoft invested $300 million in Barnes & Noble’s plan to spin-off its Nook business. At the time, the deal promised a few tablet-centric possibilities. Would Nook tablets dump Android in favor of Windows? Would the Nook catalog be part of an entertainment-centric device like the still-mythical Xbox Surface?

Twelve months later, all Microsoft has to show for its Nook investment is a Windows 8 modern UI app—an app that probably would have landed in the Windows Store anyway. But new reports suggest that hasn't soured Steve Ballmer and co.'s taste for the Barnes & Noble spin-off. In fact, Microsoft may have even bigger plans for Nook.

TechCrunch recently got its hands on internal documents that show Microsoft is pondering an outright acquisition of Nook Media LLC for a cool $1 billion.

But what use would Microsoft have for a struggling e-book business? For $1 billion, this has to be more than just a strategic acquisition to keep Nook out of the hands of competitors like Google or Amazon.

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Sony made good on a promise to return to profitability after offloading a number of valuable assets last year, but its core electronics business is still losing money.

The Tokyo-based company said Thursday it booked a profit of ¥43 billion ($440 million) for its fiscal year through March, a year after it posted a ¥457 billion loss, the largest since its founding. The company also increased revenue by 5 percent to ¥6.8 trillion.

The return to profit, a key promise under new CEO Kazuo Hirai, was expected after the company sold off billions of dollars worth of assets during the fiscal period, including its U.S. headquarters, a large Tokyo office complex and share holdings. A lingering worry is the company's failure to generate profit on its consumer electronics.

For the current fiscal year, the company promised a similarly modest profit of ¥50 billion, less than one percent of its projected sales of ¥7.5 trillion.

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Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon and Princess Mette-Marit tried touchless gesturing systems and other technologies developed by Norwegian startups at a tech incubator in Palo Alto on Wednesday afternoon .

The royal couple stopped at Innovation House and met Norwegian startups trying to make it big in Silicon Valley as part of their tour of the region, which winds up on Thursday.

Martyn Williams

The facility, in the heart of downtown Palo Alto, is run by government trade promotion unit Innovation Norway and is intended to provide an easy way for Norwegian companies to enter the U.S. market, allowing them to avoid all the hassles related to setting up an office, and immediately get down to business. The center also tries to facilitate business for them.

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A lawsuit against Google's customer service practices in Germany is looming after the company declined to sign a document promising German consumer organizations to start answering customer emails individually.

Last month, Google received an ultimatum from the Federation of German Consumer Organizations (VZBV). The group said Google should declare by Monday, May 6 that it would provide customer service by responding individually to users' questions sent by email instead of sending automatic replies.

Google declined to sign the document on Monday because the company thinks it adheres to German law, said Carola Elbrecht, the VZBV's project manager for consumer rights in the digital world, on Wednesday.

Last month, the VZBV said that it would sue Google if the company did not sign the document before Monday. However, the group has not yet sued Google, Elbrecht said. "We are now examining our options," she said, adding that the VZBV still was in the process of discussing possible next steps with its lawyer. This might take some time because of public holidays in Germany, she added.

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NetSuite is beefing up its cloud-based ERP software's order-processing features by acquiring OrderMotion, a move that could strengthen its appeal to customers in retailing. Terms of the deal, announced Wednesday, were not disclosed.

OrderMotion's technology is aimed at companies that ship products directly to consumers. This is a business that has become more complex of late, thanks to ship-to-store programs, where a customer orders a product online and heads to a retail location to pick it up.

In addition, companies are increasingly looking to use their retail locations as regional distribution centers in order to save time and money compared to using a massive, centralized warehouse operation, said Andy Lloyd, general manager of commerce products at NetSuite.

OrderMotion's software is used in conjunction with e-commerce applications such as Demandware, as well as NetSuite's own SuiteCommerce software. NetSuite won't necessarily attempt to push OrderMotion customers toward its own offering, however, according to Lloyd. "Generally when we do acquisitions, the directive we get from [CEO Zach Nelson] is 'don't break it,'" he said. Still, "when a company is operating on a single system and has one view of the data, systems work best and companies run best," he added.

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Microsoft has extended a search revenue guarantee agreement with Yahoo for one more year, amid reports that the Internet company is trying to break its 10-year agreement with Microsoft.

The Redmond, Washington, software company, has agreed to extend the guarantee for an additional 12 months starting April 1, 2013, but only in the U.S., Yahoo said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday. Microsoft had in 2011 agreed to extend the guarantee in the U.S. and Canada through March 2013.

Under a 2009 search agreement for which implementation began in February 2010, Microsoft guaranteed Yahoo's revenue per search on its properties for 18 months after the transition of its paid search services to Microsoft's platform in each market, to protect Yahoo from the impact of the transition. It was part of a broader deal by which Yahoo moved its search backend to Microsoft's Bing and its paid search services to Microsoft's platform.

The so-called RPS Guarantee was calculated based on the difference in revenue per search between the pre-transition and post-transition periods and certain other factors, as Yahoo transitioned its paid search to Microsoft platforms. "To date, there has been a gap in revenue per search between pre-transition and post-transition periods in most markets and Microsoft has been making payments under the RPS Guarantee to compensate for the difference," Yahoo said in the filing.

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Acer said its net profit for the first quarter grew 55 percent year-over-year, but its revenue continued to decline amid struggling PC sales.

The Taiwanese PC maker’s net profit reached NT$515 million (US$17.4 million), an increase from NT$331 million a year earlier, the company said on Tuesday. But the net profit came from a number of non-operating income items during the period, including “foreign exchange and stock disposal gains.”

Revenue in the quarter was at NT$92 billion, down by 19 percent year-over-year from NT$113 billion.

Acer is trying to revive its product sales as demand for PCs remains sluggish. In the first quarter, worldwide PC shipments fell by 13.9 percent, according to research firm IDC. During that period, Acer saw a 31.3 percent year-over-year decline in its PC shipments.

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As part of Microsoft's loan of $2 billion to a group trying to buy PC maker Dell, the two companies must modify the payment terms of Dell's current agreements with Microsoft, a document filed with U.S. regulators said.

CEO and founder Michael Dell and private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners have proposed to buy Dell for $24.4 billion, a move they said would allow the then-private firm to accelerate its transformation from PC seller to a vendor pushing higher-margin software and services to enterprises.

But the $2 billion from the Redmond, Wash. developer apparently comes with some strings.

Prior to the buyout's conclusion, Microsoft and Dell must "negotiate in good faith and enter into, as soon as reasonably practical" one or more agreements "to modify, alter or amend ... the standard terms for payment under the existing commercial agreements between [Microsoft and Dell]," the securities purchase agreement filed March 29 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) stated.

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McAfee plans to acquire Stonesoft, a Helsinki-based maker of firewalls, for $389 million in cash, the companies said Monday.

The Intel subsidiary said firewalls are one of the fastest growing products in network security, which it plans to grow, according to a news release. Stonesoft's products will be integrated with McAfee's products, and its technology will stand alongside McAfee's IPS Network Security Platform and Firewall Enterprise products.

Stonesoft, which has 6,500 customers, also make evasion prevention systems and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) VPN software. The company additionally does research into what it terms "advanced evasion techniques," or methods used by hackers to prevent their intrusions from being detected.

Government and companies are increasingly under pressure from hackers who seek to infiltrate networks and steal intellectual property. Detecting sophisticated attacks suspected to be sponsored by nation states are posing an increasing challenge.

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On the back end of an earnings season that by many accounts could have been worse, tech investors appeared to be in the mood to celebrate on Friday, sending shares of IT companies higher as key stock-market indexes hit milestone highs.

Both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Standard and Poor’s 500 index hit never-before-reached round numbers. The Dow hit 15,000 points before closing slightly lower for the day. The S&P gained 1.05 percent to close at 1614.42.

All five of the Dow’s tech stocks rose: Hewlett-Packard by $0.18 to close at $20.63; Intel by $0.70 to close at $23.92; IBM by $2.12 to close at $204.51; Microsoft by $0.33 to close at $33.49; and Cisco by $0.10 to close at $20.83.

The Nasdaq Computer Index joined in the general exuberance, rising 0.92 percent to close at 1646.61.

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