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New versions of Ubuntu Linux are released every six months and most of these are incremental steps forward as Ubuntu tries to evolve into a mainstream desktop operating system. Some have been more exciting than others but on the whole these six-monthly releases are more evolutionary than revolutionary.

While the big box stores and shopping malls run black Friday sales, and in recent years many of the online retailers have began to have black Monday sales. Leave it up to the wacky folks at Codeweavers to have a 30% off Winter Solstice Sales on CrossOver Mac and Linux.

Many of us are hoping for an eBook reader under the tree. A Kindle, a Nook, or perhaps just an Android device that runs eBook software. But if you don't get the gadget of your choice, or if you want to create content to fill one, you'll find plenty of eBook software for Linux as well as open source software to publish your own. The best of the lot? Calibre, a one stop solution for all your e-book needs.

Alien Arena 7.50 (a.k.a. Alien Arena 2011) was released yesterday and it comes with several new notable features regarding the physics engine, as well as two new maps, updated player and skins models, new music for various maps, revamped in-game IRC client, as well as several bug fixes and improvements.

Numerous changes to the network and storage code are to increase processing speed and improve the system's hardware support. Among the new additions are a PPTP stack, various drivers for Wi-Fi hardware by Atheros, Broadcom and Realtek, and code for hard disks with a logical sector size of 4 Kbytes.

I have received a mail regarding the early development of the OpenBSD IPSEC stack. It is alleged that some ex-developers (and the company they worked for) accepted US government money to put backdoors into our network stack, in particular the IPSEC stack. Around 2000-2001.

I've been doing a lot of shell scripting lately with Dash and Bash. Complicated scripts with lots of text handling make debugging difficult, especially when they are being used in sub-shells which obfuscate line numbers in error messages. One of my more common mistakes is an unmatched quote. These can be rather difficult to find so I wrote quote-count, a simple analysis tool that counts quotes in lines.

Two nights ago after many complaints, complements, bug reports, and themes myself and the Bodhi Linux Team pushed out our forth alpha release of the minimalistic, enlightenment using distribution. This release includes a few bug fixes, ELF Beta 3 packages, Firefox 4.0 B7, and a good deal of "polish around the edges" previous versions of the distro had lacked.

Canonical today announced Ubuntu Developer Day to take place in India on the 27th of January -- Ubuntu Developer Day will be the largest event in Bangalore next year

Opera 11 was released just a few hours earlier today, and it comes with several notable features, a new interface, and many other improvements. Written using the Qt toolkit and taking advantage of its own Presto engine, the Opera browser has been around for years, and it comes with unique features, which make it a popular browser even among the free software users on the Linux platform, with a respectable third position after Firefox and Google Chrome.

Screencasts have become a very popular way to make tutorials to explain how software or services work in recent years. Let’s look at how you can make them of your own cool project, or anything cool you’re doing with Linux…

Hulu Plus is the subscription based big brother to Hulu's free video streaming platform. It costs $7.99 a month, and really does open up the catalog of available titles. In fact, for subscribers, there are many shows that have the complete catalog of episodes from every season. (The Office, Family Guy, and many others)

Linux server admins are well-acquainted with its many sophisticated, secure remote administration tools. The Linux-based Android is the hot new mobile platform -- can it do remote server administration? Lugging a laptop around is preferable to commuting, but why not go even more portable with a smartphone or tablet? Can Android serve as a capable remote server administration platform? Android is based on Linux and is open source, so it seems it should be a natural for portable administration.

Like many so-called “power users”, the first thing I do after installing Linux is customize it. I set it to my preferred desktop settings, applications and configuration because I know what I like, and I normally go to great lengths to get it just right. Recently, after setting up a new Ubuntu Maverick install for my wife, I began to wonder what it would be like to run a system on the defaults. To try things their way – to use Ubuntu’s desktop settings, Ubuntu’s preferred applications and configuration. This meant I could not install any of my favorite applications (Chrome, VLC, Exaile…) if Ubuntu already provided an equivalent (Firefox, Totem, Rhythmbox…). How did it turn out? Frustrating, but with some surprising results. (Note: This is not your usual Ubuntu review, but my miscellaneous ramblings, and some praises. Read on for details.)

Yesterday I reviewed AssaultCube, a realistic shooter game based upon the Cube engine, so today it’s time to have a look at Sauerbraten, another game in the series of games based on this engine. The version which I’m going to talk about is the latest available at the moment, “Justice Edition”.

In this HowTo I will describe how to prepare a Fedora 14 server for OpenVZ. With OpenVZ you can create multiple Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on the same hardware, similar to Xen and the Linux Vserver project. OpenVZ is the open-source branch of Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization solution used by many providers that offer virtual servers. The OpenVZ kernel patch is licensed under the GPL license, and the user-level tools are under the QPL license.

Who doesn't like some eyecandy for their desktops, definitely not me. Compiz has enthralled Ubuntu users for years now. When GNOME officially ditched Compiz for Mutter for its next version, Ubuntu decided to stick with Compiz for its Unity Shell. Compiz is actively being developed now and we can expect a lot of surprises for next major Ubuntu release, Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal". Here is a collection of Compiz experimental plugins that does not come with the default package and which is definitely going to blow you away.

Google is to release as open source the developer tools WindowBuilder Pro and CodePro Profiler, both of which were acquired as part of its takeover of Instantiations. The code for the two tools is to be donated to the Eclipse Foundation. At the time of the takeover there was much speculation that the Eclipse-based tools could become Eclipse projects – this speculation has now proven to be correct. Other products which Google has made available free of charge since September, include GWT Designer, WindowTester Pro and CodePro AnalytiX, retain their proprietary status.

Is there a role for writers, illustrators, animators, musicians and voice-over artists to support FOSS mobile devices by the creation of collaboratively produced media -- donated for free preinstallation on those devices? There might be.

Now here's a special Christmas present for all of you Linux enthusiasts out there, as Mandriva announced the availability of its portable USB Mandriva Flash Drive. It is based on the KDE4 Edition of the Mandriva Linux 2010 distribution (released on July 8th, 2010) and it's available as an 8GB USB flash drive.