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There have been promises of an overhaul to Ubuntu’s default theme for quite some time. Ubuntu 9.10, set to be released at the end of this month, will begin delivering on those promises. Below, we take a look at the new system theme and artwork that will debut in Karmic Koala. Here it is.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Digital Memo Blog, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brinn came off as smug, arrogant and cavalier, and those were the good points.

The Linux kernel has several different IO schedulers. This article provides an introduction to the concept of schedulers and what options exist for Linux.

Lately, a lot of talk has been coming out of Europe. The talk I am referring to concerns an anti-trust case against Microsoft for bundling a web browser they make with an operating system they make. The claim is that Microsoft has made competition in the web browser market difficult because Internet Explorer is included with Microsoft's Windows (a computer operating system).

This year's Open World Forum 2009, held in Paris, brought together the company heads of open source companies, public and government organisations and customers who use open source, for an exchange of views and an opportunity to map out the future of open source. The theme this year was "Free, Libre and Open Source Software: At the heart of the Digital Recovery" and among the numerous strands were presentations, Q&As and round tables with such notables as Jacques Attali, Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation, Roger Burkhardt of Ingres, Michael Tiemann of Red Hat, Mark Taylor of Sirius and Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth.

Sun Microsystems’ xVM server virtualization hypervisor has not yet seen the light of day as a commercial product, but the company is continuing to enhance the management tool. Now, the latest version of Ops Center has arrived featuring enhancements for running Solaris-based virtualization.

Hate is a strong word … especially when you’re in love. Consider the situation between Red Hat and Microsoft. During the Red Hat Summit in September, the open source company warned customers and channel partners not to get locked into Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud strategy. Fast forward to the present, and Red Hat and Microsoft are locked in a virtual hug. Here’s the scoop.

Small and home businesses (SOHO) can benefit greatly from using open-source software applications. Cynthia Harveys offers a tasty buffet of 50 to get you started.

If you want to share your music with your family , freinds or neighbours .. then GNUMP3d can do this job for you with one click. GNUMP3d is a streaming server for MP3s/, OGG vorbis files, movies and other media formats. In this tutorial we will try to setup a GNUMP3d server for mp3/media streaming.

Rikki Kite interviews Alex Spehr about her work on BugSquad and promoting KDE.

When it comes to selling a commercial open source product, how different is it really from selling a proprietary product? In the end, if it's a good product, the fact it's open source is probably a minor factor for buyers.

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Fedora 11 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

The Dutch police are going for an open source solution. Today, Red Hat, the leader in open source solutions, announced that the Dutch Police cooperation “voorziening tot samenwerking Politie Nederland” (vtsPN) has selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) and Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite Server to manage the rollout of the Linux based systems, to make it easier, faster and more scalable.

Good news, openoffice 3.2 will have new chart features, the Chart module was exchanged completely on the way to OpenOffice.org 2.3 . Here are a list of new chart features in openoffice 3.2.

I've been looking in on Tanner Helland's Ubuntu-rich blog for some time, and today I found a virtual motherlode of well-researched and -reasoned opinion on where Ubuntu should be headed. Helland hits it right on the head: While there's a whole lot right with open-source software, specifically the Linux operating system and the wildly popular (in an obscure, cultish kind of way) Ubuntu distribution, there's quite a bit that's not so right and needs both minor and major improvement before a free, open-source, Unix-based operating environment can really challenge Windows and Macintosh for significant share on the desktops of non-geeks and geeks alike.

Keith Bergelt, CEO of the Open Invention Network (OIN), described the circumstances which led the company to recently purchase 22 Microsoft patents, as part of a talk at the first LinuxCon. While the circumstances surrounding that purchase were quite interesting—and indicative of Microsoft's patent strategy—he also described the mission of OIN as a protector of Linux from patent trolls. Because patents are likely to be a threat to Linux for a long time to come, organizations like OIN are needed to allow Linux development to continue with as few patent impediments as possible.

I finally experienced my first "phantom" update notification in Ubuntu 9.04. In previous versions of the system, a little icon on the upper panel would notify me that updates were available. I could either click the icon and open the Update Manager, then do the update. But in this new system (I've been running 9.04 about a week), the icon is gone. At some interval that I don't understand, the Update Manager just opens, minimized. I brought the window up and did the updates.

Yesterday I took part in an interesting event organised by BT called "Accelerating Enterprise adoption of Open Source Software" (disclaimer: filthy lucre was involved.) One topic that elicited much comment was why the public sector has singularly failed to deploy open source. As well as political issues (Tony Blair was and presumably still is manifestly in awe of (Sir) Bill Gates), there's another important issue to do with a fear of failure.

... On that Friday, with no warning, the little netbook failed to boot up. I couldn't even get to the BIOS. For the third time a Sylvania netbook I owned had suffered a premature hardware failure. The netbook had a one year warranty and it was only seven months old so I expected to send it in for repair at no charge.

Arora is a free, cross-platform web browser built on WebKit (the engine that powers Safari and Chrome) that we've mentioned once before, but its latest release includes some interesting new features by default, including built-in support for ad blocking.