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There's three important announcements coming out of Intel's Developer Forum today as it relates to their Moblin Linux distribution that launched two years ago: Moblin 2.0 final has been released, Moblin 2.1 is under development, and Moblin Garage and the Moblin Application Installer have been introduced.

I have just finished up three days at LinuxCon in Portland, put on by the Linux Foundation. As you might expect from such an event, there were discussions on a wide range of topics, some to get you thinking, some to excite you and some to challenge your notions. The levels of presentation varied by presenter and, overall, I would say it was a great success. One topic that was discussed quite a bit was the Linux Desktop - the state of the desktop, the future of the desktop and the direction the desktop is taking. It was so popular a topic that it was mentioned in no less than three keynotes, and not always positively.

GNOME 2.28 is released now, just a week after the release of the release candidate. This release includes several bugfixes & enhancements for included components.

The Ubuntu Software Store debuted last month in the latest alpha release of Ubuntu 9.10. Since its announcement, however, there has been more than a little debate over the application’s name, if not the concept behind it, with many commentators questioning the implication of the word “store.”

IBM and Microsoft have added their backing to a plan by developer tools specialist Zend Technologies to create an open source application-programming interface that would make it easier for organizations to switch cloud providers.

IBM is claiming a series of competitive wins against Microsoft. Big name companies are said to be choosing Lotus products over Microsoft's collaboration software.

O'Reilly Media has published the sixth edition of Linux in a Nutshell, by Ellen Siever, Stephen Figgins, Aaron Weber, Robert Love, and Arnold Robbins. The sixth edition of the reference book boosts coverage of Linux system essentials and newer technologies like virtualization and wireless, says O'Reilly.

There have been many claims over the purchase of 22 patents by the Open Invention Network. Some have lauded the cunning of OIN in snatching the patents away from patent trolls. Others suggest the OIN have acquired useful defensive patents. The trouble is that the process of acquiring the patents is relatively opaque. The H decided to talk to the organisation in the middle of the deal, Allied Security Trust, and its CEO, Daniel McCurdy and to the OIN's CEO, Keith Bergelt, to find out exactly what happened, and what it means in practice for open source.

There are a lot of reasons to customize your own Linux kernel: better performance, bugfixes, try out new features, and earn valuable geekcreds. In this new series Akkana Peck introduces us to the fundamental steps of building a Linux kernel.

Quickly is a new utility to simplify Linux application development by bootstrapping repetitive project setup, user interface, packaging, and release chores. It targets both new application developers and those who simply want to speed up recurring tasks. Quickly is a product of the Ubuntu project, but is flexible enough to be used in other distributions and for other types of tasks — the real power of Quickly lies in the templates that automate different aspects of project configuration and maintenance.

Lucas Rocha, on the behalf of all GNOME developers worldwide, has just announced the release of GNOME 2.28.0. GNOME 2.28 is the last release prior to GNOME 3.0 that is due out next March, with some of the improvements in this version being a GNOME Bluetooth module, the Empathy instant messaging client has picked up more features, the Epiphany web-browser has finally switched to the WebKit rendering engine over Gecko as the default choice, improved audio settings support, and much more.

The recession is proving to be an opportune time for Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) as it continues to grow revenues and earnings. According to Red Hat executives, the growth is coming at the expense of rivals and as a result of customer confidence in the abilities of Linux and Red Hat's JBoss middleware platform. The growth of Red Hat's business is not however a sign of bloat. During Red Hat's second quarter earnings investor call on Wednesday, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst responded to an analyst question about Linux founder Linus Torvalds' comment earlier this week that Linux was bloated. "As Linux has continued to grow and its applicability continues to expand, there's just more feature functionality that people are looking for to be built into the operating system," Whitehurst said. "I don't think of that as bloat."

Lawyers for Texas Instruments are taking aim at a group of calculator enthusiasts who posted the cryptographic keys used to modify the devices so they run custom-designed software. Over the past few weeks, TI has sent webmasters letters invoking the DMCA, or US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (PDF), and demanding they remove the keys published in blog postings. The private keys are needed to sign operating systems before they work on a wide variety of calculator models designed by the Dallas-based electronics manufacturer.

Ubuntu's next release will be called Lucid Lynx, a name that reflects the determination of the developers, says Mark Shuttleworth

Carla Schroder of Linux Today published an essay recently dealing with the low level of female participation in open-source projects. Although the article doesn’t deal with Ubuntu in particular, it nonetheless prompted some thoughts about the role of women in the world’s most popular Linux distribution. Take a look.

The Eye-Fi card is a nifty solution for adding wireless capabilities to virtually any digital camera, but it does have one serious drawback: the card relies on proprietary software that runs only on Windows and Mac OS X. Fortunately, the standalone Eye-Fi server written in Python will happily run on Linux, courtesy of the enterprising hacker Jeff Tchang.

The release of Google Chrome Frame, a new open source plugin that injects Chrome's renderer and JavaScript engine into Microsoft's browser, earlier this week had many web developers happily dancing long through the night. Finally, someone had found a way to get Internet Explorer users up to speed on the Web. Microsoft, on the other hand, is warning IE users that it does not recommend installing the plugin. What does the company have against the plugin? It makes Internet Explorer less secure.

Actually, I've written this post before (quite a few months ago) but then deleted it because it didn't work. In the mean time, I found out why, so I decided to post it again. I find pressing Control + Alt + Delete to open up System Monitor to be very useful, especially for Windows users who are used to it and may actually press this quite a few times before realizing it doesn't do anything or what it does in Windows.

The code analysis tools vendor, Coverity, has released the 2009 edition of the Coverity Scan Open Source ReportPDF. The survey, which was originally initiated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2006, examines the integrity and quality of open source software. The results are based on an analysis of 11 billion lines of code from 280 open source projects including Firefox, Linux, PHP, Ruby and Samba over three years. The analysis was carried out using Coverity's Scan service.

IBM is not interested in standalone computer desktops, but selling software as a service. Or cloud, or hosted services, or whatever you want to call it, it's all the same thing: keeping control of customer's software and data, and feeding them like little baby birds, only little baby birds who pay for the privilege. And that is what all the big vendors are chasing now. They're not interested in OEM desktop Linux and never will be. And just like Google and Amazon and other huge consumers of Linux, they'll have a built-in GPL dodge and share only whatever code they feel like sharing.