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A fast-booting, cloud-oriented, "Peppermint OS" Ubuntu variant has been downloaded 25,000 times in its first week. Meanwhile, Red Hat clone CentOS has been released in version 5.5, adding features including enhanced KVM virtualization and improved WiFi support, and pioneering Linux distro-maker Mandriva is up for sale.

While the release schedules for Ubuntu Linux aren't exactly a close secret -- new releases generally coming in April and October with the version scheme being YY.MM such as Ubuntu 11.04 for the April 2011 release -- Canonical's Robbie Williamson has laid out tentative release schedules for Ubuntu 11.04, Ubuntu 11.10, and even Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

The 5 things I hope Google unveils in Android 2.2. The folks at Apple have made an art form out of annual conferences with big announcements. In recent years we’ve seen the iPhone, MacBook Air, and more recently the iPad unveiled to much fanfare. Not to be outdone by Apple, Google has been making some Waves as well with their annual spring conference dubbed Google I/O.

Samsung likes to play the tart when it comes to a mobile OS, but the Bada Developer Challenge for its in-house environment shows where its affections really lie, with a top prize of $300,000. That compares with the £2,000 that Samsung was prepared to give to the best Android application while promoting its Galaxy handset. The two grand is just for the idea and is UK only, but the comparison still shows how much more important Bada is and how much Samsung is prepared to spend ensuring it succeeds.

It's doubtful that anyone really likes having to upgrade, but at some point it has to be done. For those particularly adverse to the upgrade — like enterprise users, with good reason — there are extra-long windows, but eventually even those windows close. Last week, Red Hat announced that the oldest of its supported platforms has officially entered the homestretch.

eXo has announced the release of eXo Social 1.0, an enterprise social networking package which supports OpenSocial, under an AGPL licence. eXo Social is bundled with eXo's GateIn 3.0 and Tomcat 6.0 to allow users to configure a social network "out of the box". eXo Social is aimed at enterprises who want to integrate social networking concepts into their existing infrastructure.

LXer Feature: 17-May-2010

In this week's LXWR we have Jim Zemlin commenting on Linux fragmentation, making the Linux desktop look better, Chrome usage rises and copiers have hard drives? Enjoy!

With Valve's Steam client and Source Engine coming to Linux in the coming months, we decided to check with Epic Games to see how Unreal Tournament 3 for Linux is coming along. After all, the game was released in November of 2007 and nearly three years later the client is still missing with few words having come from Epic Games or Ryan Gordon (a.k.a. "Icculus"), the well known Linux game porter that was contracted to port UT3 to Linux and has done previous Unreal Engine projects.

Back in Linux's early days, Linuxcare emerged as the first important Linux support company. In 1998, the company made headlines not just in the technology press but in mainstream business publications like the Wall Street Journal as the company that would help businesses switch over to Linux. It was not to last. Poor top management decisions led Linuxcare to lose first its way, and, then, years later, to quietly vanish. Now, one of its founders, Arthur F. Tyde III, has brought Linuxcare back from the grave and made it ready for the 21st century.

OpenOffice.org (OOo for short) is a powerful open source and multi-platform office suite, and is even comparable to Microsoft Office. However, there's always room-to-grow, features to improve, and things to customize. Luckily, the open source community provides a great repository of extensions and add-ons. Today, we'll look at six of them. Now let's get started!

In about 6 weeks the biggest yearly gathering of the KDE community starts in Tampere. To give you all a little taste of Akademy 2010, Guillermo Amaral interviewed Aaron Seigo and asked him about his keynote.

A content management system (CMS) is a software used to simplify the management and publication of HTML content such as documents and images. It provides authoring and other tools designed to allow users with little technical knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content with relative ease. Most web CMS use a database to store content, metadata, or artifacts that might be needed by the system. Content is commonly stored as XML, to facilitate, reuse, and enable flexible presentation options.

In his release email for Linux 2.6.34-rc7 last weekend, Linus Torvalds indicated that version 2.6.34 of the Linux kernel will be released soon. The following article describes the advancements in terms of drivers and their infrastructure and concludes our "Coming in 2.6.34" mini series about the most important new features of Linux 2.6.34. The most important changes in the areas of network support, file systems, storage subsystem, graphics hardware and architecture as well as virtualisation were discussed in parts one, two, three and four of the series, along with the drivers associated with these kernel areas.

Future Electronics and Nokia will host six full-day, hands-on workshops across the North America on using Linux and Nokia's Qt development framework to develop user interfaces (UIs) for Freescale's ARM-based i.MX system-on-chips (SoCs). Starting in Boston on May 18, the workshops will use the Freescale i.MX23 SoC as its sample platform.

The KDE and GNOME communities are looking for a host for the Desktop Summit 2011, the prime free desktop software event in 2011. The Desktop Summit is the joining of the annual conferences of KDE and GNOME, following up on the success of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. To give potential hosts some more time to prepare quality proposals, the boards have decided to extend the submission deadline to June 9th 2010.

More than 65,000 smartphones running Google's Android OS are being shipped each day, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said during an annual shareholders meeting May 13. ...Later this year, the company plans to begin shipping a new hardware architecture from its hardware partners. The architecture will bring together the Chrome browser, a Chrome operating system and an open-source program called Chromium. "In my opinion," said Schmidt, "it's likely to become a third platform of choice for both consumers and the enterprise."

Earlier this week we reported that Ubuntu has plans for the Btrfs file-system in 2011 and 2012 by providing support for installing Ubuntu Linux to a Btrfs file-system. This information was based upon documents coming out of the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Brussels, but it turns out that Canonical may actually deploy Btrfs this year. Not only to provide an installation option within the installer for Btrfs, but to make it the default file-system.

If you are into eye-candy and are always looking for ways to impress your non-geek friends with 3D graphical effects, here is another one to add to your collection. FoxTab is a Firefox extension that transforms Firefox into a 3D browser with Compiz-like graphical effects. The good thing about FoxTab is that it is cross platform compatible (works in Windows, Linux and Mac) and it doesn’t require a high end computer to run. I got it to work in my netbook and it runs without any lag.

Google and the Eclipse Foundation have announced the launch of Eclipse Labs, a Google hosted portal that will feature open source projects based on the Eclipse platform. Using the portal, developers can start and maintain their Eclipse-based open source projects.

Potentially big news in the world of open source software, friends. Apparently Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution, is considering dropping Firefox for Chrome. Well, maybe for Chrome, or maybe for Chromium, the open source project that Chrome is based upon. Therein lies the rub, I do believe. What’s going on is that Ubergizmo, a fine site, hears that Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) is considering adding Chrome (or Chromium—more on that in a second) to Ubuntu Linux Netbook Remix, the next big release of which is due this autumn. What a terribly constructed sentence. Exactly why they’d replace Firefox with Chrome or Chromium isn’t known, but presumably they feel that the new browser on the block performs better on the average netbook than Firefox.