Google revealed a list of over 900 accepted Summer of Code projects. Ubuntu, as one of the mentoring organizations, lists 20 projects. I found a few that could really make a difference - Georgy Berdyshev's firewall configuration, Petter Remen's device & driver manager, Krzysztof Lichota's automatic boot and application start file prefetching, Tomé Vardasca's bootloader manager, Anders Petersson's desktop synchronization, Gerd Kohlberger mouse gesture recognition for the desktop, Soren Hansen's easy business server. Kubuntu users will enjoy Martin Böhm's KDE frontend for gdebi (deb installer written in GTK).

140 open source organizations participate in this year's SoC. I've been reading project descriptions and found quite a few interesting ones. Most of you probably want to check out what Debian, KDE and
Gnome guys are planning. My personal favorite? Tough choice, but I think it would be Maxim Khitrov's implementation of Jabber/XMPP communications interface for Drupal.