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We donâ??t normally start tracking the Ubuntu releases until they hit about the Alpha 3 stage; after all the big software updates have made it in, any theme work is mostly done and the final release is starting to take shape. Well, that happened yesterday: Ubuntu 8.10 â??Intrepid Ibexâ?? Alpha 3 was released. The first thing you notice looking at the Ubuntu desktop is the new themeâ?¦ itâ??s trendy, dark, refined and overall a pretty different look for the desktop and just desktops in general.

Email is arguably one of the most popular and useful functions of a Linux system. Fortunately, there is a wide selection of free email software available on the Linux platform which is stable, feature laden, and ideal for personal and business environments. Send and receive emails, run a mail server, filter spam, administer a mailing list are just some of the options explored in this article.

Microsoft has quietly released to manufacturing a tweaked version of Windows XP to run on the One Laptop Per Child XO computer. Microsoft's marketing and communications wonk James Utzschneider offered some detail about its forthcoming release in a blog post late last week.

This tutorial series will take you through some tips and tricks on migrating from MS Office to OpenOffice.org 2.4. You'll see how to replicate some of the functionality and features that are lacking in OpenOffice.org. Soon you'll be more comfortable using OpenOffice.org for just about all your desktop publishing needs.

When LinuxWorld Expo kicks off August 4 in San Francisco, The VAR Guy will be tracking four key trends related to Canonical and Ubuntu Linux. Here's a look.

Day 3 of this year's Ottawa Linux Symposium featured a number of sessions, most notably a keynote address by Ubuntu founder and space tourist Mark Shuttleworth, who called for the greater Linux community to start thinking about discussing syncronicity, his term for having major software releases synchronised. The conference wrapped up on Saturday with some final interesting sessions and statistics.

It appears as though Propeller.com has fallen victim of a bad practice most early web designers have experienced early in their careers.

When AMD had unveiled the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and ATI Radeon HD 4870 last month, NVIDIA was left in an awkward position. The Radeon HD 4850 had sharply outperformed the (more expensive, at the time) GeForce 9800GTX, which led NVIDIA to immediately begin slashing prices and introducing a slightly faster GeForce 9800GTX+ that ramped up the memory and core frequencies. ATI's flagship Radeon HD 4870 also had no problems competing with the more-expensive GeForce GTX 260 / 280. Many of NVIDIA's partners as a result have slashed their prices on their earlier GeForce 8 and 9 products. One of the NVIDIA products that was previously considered a good budget graphics card was the GeForce 8800GT, but now how does it stand up against the latest from ATI and NVIDIA? In this article we are looking at the ECS GeForce 8800GT. What is particularly special about this card and some of the other newer models shipping the GeForce 8800GT GPU is a BIOS revision that should yield a performance increase.

During OSCON last week, I met with Canonical's Pete Goodall to discuss the company's strategy for Ubuntu in the mobile market. Although he could not tell me any specifics regarding plans for upcoming Ubuntu-based subnotebook products, the word is that good stuff is coming soon. He seemed very enthusiastic about emerging opportunities for Ubuntu in the mobile space. Goodall demonstrated the Ubuntu Netbook Remix on an Atom-based subnotebook that he had brought with him to the event.

Xataface is a framework for the LAMP stack designed to allow non-technical users to edit the contents of MySQL databases through a Web interface. While phpMyAdmin is a great tool for database administrators and those who are familiar with SQL and database design, Xataface aims at allowing less technical people to modify the database.

Canonical, the company behind the Linux distro Ubuntu, has collaborated with software distributor ValuSoft to sell a boxed version of Ubuntu 8.04 into Best Buy retail stores. Is $19.99 a better price point for Ubuntu than $0? Now, on the face of it that sounds like a good deal, and on the whole it is, but I can't help but feel that targeting the kind of people who might be looking for an OS for $20 at Best Buy might not be the best thing that Canonical could be doing.

Well, last week started out with a bang thanks to Monday's announcement of the new, Debian-powered CherryPal PC. That the low-power machine runs Linux is, of course, good news. The twist is that users won't even see it, because the entire user interface is presented through Firefox. Slashdot and LXer immediately picked up the news, and most bloggers seemed to be skeptical. Generating far more heated discussion on the blogs, meanwhile, was a recent post from ZDNet's Jeremy Allison arguing that Linux needs more "haters." In his article, Allison points to the Linux Hater's Blog, which asserts, "We hate Linux. And you should too."

Open source software and open standards were high on the agenda at the opening of the GovTech 2008 conference in Durban this morning. During her keynote address, minister of public service and administration Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi highlighted open source software and open standards as key components of efficient IT in government.

The Kira 100 was a decent Eee PC knockoff, but at just north of $475, there was literally no purpose in picking it over the genuine product. The Jointech JL7100, however, really makes ASUS' darling look mighty unnecessary. Okay, so maybe the fact that this thing relies on WinCE 5.0 rather than, you know, a bona fide laptop operating system is a bit disappointing, but there are sacrifices to be expected here.

[The FOSS angle? A Dutch news site states that this "laptop" will also be available with some unspecified Linux OS - Sander]

This how-to refers to the installation and configuration of Clamav 0.93.3 (from sources) on a Linux server runing CentOS 5.2 and sendmail. We assume the fact you've installed sendmail from the rpm packages of your distribution.

We got a nice helping of slides dropped on our virtual doorstep this evening, fleshing out Dell's upcoming netbook -- which they seem to be calling the "Dell E." Um, Eeenteresting name choice, but that doesn't seem set in stone, and there's plenty else going on here to ponder over. Dell's breaking the Dell E into two device types, a 8.9-inch model clearly meant to take on the Eee 900, and the 12.1-inch "E Slim" which actually looks positioned to take on the MacBook Air and X300. Perhaps most interesting is that all of these run Linux and Windows XP, and while it's not clear if there's a full-featured Linux OS onboard, there does seem to be an instant-on, Foleo-esque Linux included on all of them called BlackTop.

Don't complain about your situation, do something about it. That's the gist of what Danese Cooper, senior director of open source strategies at Intel, said in her keynote at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention here. Cooper said her talk, entitled "Why Whinging Doesn't Work," was initially written for women, and she gave a version of it at a women's conference recently. Cooper said she came up with the idea for the talk after receiving an email from Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical Ltd., saying 'Can you girls please stop whinging about this?'"

Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service. BecauseCuil analyzes Web pages and not click-throughs, we don't need to know your search history and habits. So our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookie. Your search history is your business, not ours. We don't need to keep logs of our users' search activity, so we don't. - Cuil

[And to top it off, it's actually a pretty nifty search engine too - Sander]

WordPress, one of the most popular blog applications, suffers the same fate as many other open source projects: Users often delay upgrades despite a steady release cycle. That's because upgrading WordPress carries the risk of losing your virtual personality in the case of a botched upgrade. The WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin (WPAU) makes the upgrade process much simpler, quicker, and safer by taking care of all the intricate steps.

Results of a recent poll show that the stagnant economy may be leading more and more organizations to adopt open source software to save on licensing fees. - In the first annual survey of its membership and other open source software and services companies, the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) found that the stagnant economy may be helping to push the growth in open source adoption. In a survey of more than 100 of its member organizations, the OSA found that 83 percent said that expect to see a year-over-year increase in revenue in 2008 from open source related software and services.